Touch

Morton Subotnick - Touch

released on LP

Created by Morton Subotnick on the Buchla Electronic Music System

This is the stereo version.

Liner notes include letters to Morton Subotnick from Mel Powell, director of the Yale University Electronic Music Studio at the time of the album's release.

Sherman Oaks, Calif.
Tuesday

Dear Mort,

Many many thanks for the tape. I look forward to hearing the new piece, and according to present calculations ought to have the chance to do that by late tomorrow or the following day. There's an acre of dreary tasks at hand; as soon as all that's covered, straight to the tape deck.

In the meantime I'll try to shake out of my head the after-images of some dreadful tape pieces a couple of red-eyed tyros insisted on playing for me the other day. You know the kind of thing I mean: the old bromides, dopey sound, imbecilic composition, and even the archetypal program note about "infinite possibilities." That last item I thought had certainly had its day by now, and I mentioned to one of the culprits that the deep charm of electronic-music composition is its perilously limited array of options, so tightly restricted, so intractable, so unfriendly to humbug and ineptness, testing the ear, experience, knowledge, taste, skill of a composer in a way that allows camouflage about as generously as does, say, writing madrigals for unaccompanied voices.

But so much for that. As I said, in a day or so I'll have a host of melancholy chores behind me and I'll be able to sit still and listen. I'm betting it's going to be a treat.

Best,
Mel

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Sherman Oaks, Calif.
Friday

Dear Mort,

That was an easy bet to win. "Touch" is a treat, a great big lovely piece. I've heard it once and want to listen again. Sullen soul that I am, that's something I hardly ever find worth doing nowadays with any composition, very rarely with a recent composition, and almost never with an electronic-music composition.

Well then, I start by liking it very very much. And even so fastidious an artist as Henry James agreed that to say "I like it" (or the opposite) is to accomplish at once all the intricate tasks of analysis so far as art is concerned. But who today would let it go at that? Not me. These few things I have to mention at once:

- Three minutes from the opening you've uncorked a surreal amalgam of what in "real life" would have been mettalo- and xylophones, marimbas, mallet percussion of all sorts (running at this point for 30-40 seconds), and it's a model of sensitive synthesis: wonderfully clean hubbub, a prize voltage-controlled gamelan, delicious.

- I think the first extended lento music (starting at about the 5-minute point) is especially strong and right; no child's play - need I tell you? - to get that much fine solemnity paced that precisely.

- Maybe I've begun to view the whole of life as downright sinusoidal; or maybe I can't beat off a private eccentricity that propels me quickly past the acknowledgement of ad hoc dissimilarities into the perception of generic identities; whatever the case may be, the over-all contour of "Touch" fixes itself in my mind, at least for the moment, as a classic diarchy, hence a shuttling of "two musics," hence a husky rondo.

Words, words, words. And still more later. In the meantime, warn the family that I'll soon visit, expecting extraordinary viands and libations, and insisting that I hear "Touch" quadrophonically.

As ever,
Mel

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Touch (beginning) {14:26}

Side 2

1. Touch (conclusion) {15:04}

(1)