Nurturing Young Composers: Morton Subotnick’s Late-1960s Studio in New York City

Founding of the NYU Studio

During the 1960s and 1970s, the best-known site in New York City for the development of new work by electronic composers was the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, founded in 1959 (Chadabe 1997; Gluck 2007a, 2007b; Holmes 2008). The well-deserved prominence of this center, however, obscures a second, highly non-institutional studio loosely affiliated with New York University’s (NYU’s) School of the Arts (later named the Tisch School of the Arts). The studio was established as composer Morton Subotnick’s (b. 1933) personal workspace, but, through his generosity and his practice of utilizing studio assistants, it provided a nurturing environment for a cadre of important young composers. Their work continued in a successor studio at NYU, following Subotnick’s departure to the newly founded California School of the Arts (CalArts). Little documentation about this studio exists, and few recordings have survived. Thus, I have conducted interviews, collecting firsthand accounts, reminiscences, and photographs, with the intention of beginning to craft a missing part of the history of electronic music in New York City.

Morton Subotnick’s New York City studio was established during a transitional period in the history of electronic music (Chadabe 1997; Holmes 2008). To offer the broadest overview, the composition of tape music, originating in the late 1940s and early 1950s, continued in studios throughout the world. Computer music, initiated in the mid 1950s, was a growing field. One of the new horizons in the early and mid 1960s was live electronic music, as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others began to explore what had been largely a discipline rooted in studio composition. Tape music and live multimedia performance were the dual specialty areas of the San Francisco Tape Music Studio, where Morton Subotnick was a founding figure. Another emerging area was the development of voltage-controlled analog synthesizers, such as those designed by Robert Moog and Donald Buchla (b. 1937). Buchla’s Electronic Music Box was designed in response to Subotnick’s and Tape Music Center colleague Ramon Sender’s (b. 1934) desire for a compositional instrument that generated electronic sounds, and sequences of sounds, without the use of magnetic tape.

The founding of Subotnick’s studio in New York was the result of unanticipated events. He had moved from San Francisco in 1966 to serve as Music Director for Herbert Blau’s Lincoln Center Repertory Theater at Vivian Beaumont Theater. The company was based at the newly opened arts complex, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Subotnick’s need for additional income resulted in his decision to accept a supplementary position as one of two Artists in Residence at NYU. The arrangement was quite informal and offered him tremendous freedom to compose as he wished in a studio of his own design. Among the fruits of this new arrangement would be Subotnick’s two compositions commissioned by Nonesuch Records, Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and The Wild Bull (1968; Subotnick 1994). Subotnick recalls the circumstances of the studio’s founding:

I met with [School of the Arts Dean] Robert Corrigan at Knickerbockers for dinner, and I told him what my conditions would be. He brought along the Ertegun Brothers from Atlantic Records. Corrigan was supposed to bring my contract to read, but what he brought was a blank piece of paper on NYU stationary with his signature at the bottom and he said: “You write it, include whatever you want to do.”

Figure 1.

Morton Subotnick in his NYU studio on Bleecker Street. (Photograph from the collection of Morton Subotnick.)

NYU agreed to locate the studio off campus: “I didn’t want to be on campus or part of a university, so the idea was that they would give us each [there were two resident artists] a studio above the Bleecker Street Cinema, on the corner of LaGuardia Place, across from The Bitter End” (see Figure 1). The main space was just under 600 square feet in size, 24 × 24 feet. Among its furnishings were two Ampex tape recorders (initially...