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doh-influential:

Question: As I’ve grown up in a world in which synthesizers have become just as natural as a violin, it is hard to understand that people thought it strange at the time that you should first be playing the guitar or other “folk” instruments and then turn towards electronic instruments. How unusual was it when you started out? How did the transition feel to you?

Laurie Spiegel: At the time electronics in general, and computers more specifically, were thought of as dehumanizing, anti-intuitive and in general counter to how music was conceptualized qualitatively. They inherited in people’s minds the qualities attributed to those who possessed and controlled such technology. Who had computers? Banks, the government and the biggest of businesses. For most people the idea of computers represented distance, powerlessness, frustration, bureaucracy, clinicality, emotionlessness. The college I went to did not have, and would not probably have wanted, any kind of computer. To a lesser degree than computers all electronics had that kind of vibe in most peoples’ minds.

Only a very few people had even thought of the idea of using electronic technology to make music, or if they thought of it at all they wrote off the idea as undesirable. I certainly never heard of the theremin or ondes martineau or others of the few electronic instruments that already existed until I was in my 20s, let alone having access to any. For most people you mentioned it to, using electronics for music was a completely new and foreign concept that required extensive explanation.

The first time I saw a synth (side note - we didn’t like that word then because of “synthetic” implying false or artificial instead of real music made on real instruments), the first time I saw one, a Buchla modular in Mort Subotnick’s old studio over the Bleeker Street Cinema, it was a mind blow and I fell madly in love with it. After starting to work with it I began hearing everything differently, music, traffic noise… It was a revelation. Of course that was unlike most of today’s “synths”, not being based on a keyboard model or such concepts as notes. That was an instrument meant for working with the nature of sound itself. When I tried to communicate my excitement to others usually it fell flat.

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Laurie Spiegel (born September 20, 1945 in Chicago) is an American composer. She has worked at Bell Laboratories, in computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic-music compositionsand her algorithmic composition software Music Mouse. She also plays the guitar and lute.^[1]

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