{"id":102836,"date":"2016-09-19T19:44:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T23:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=102836"},"modified":"2016-09-20T13:10:15","modified_gmt":"2016-09-20T17:10:15","slug":"a-new-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/19\/a-new-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Don Buchla with one of his instruments.<\/p><\/div>\n

Don Buchla invented some of the first electronic instruments\u2014not synthesizers, he insisted, but electronic instruments. To him, the word synthesizer <\/em>implied some attempt at emulation, as if these new machines could do nothing more than imitate preexisting sounds. Buchla believed that his\u00a0inventions offered an aural palette every bit as distinct as a trumpet\u2019s or a clarinet\u2019s. It was only marketing that made listeners hear something derivative in them.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn instrument has to exist long before performance techniques can be developed and a repertoire arises<\/a>,\u201d he told Keyboard Magazine<\/em> in the eighties, explaining why there are so few new sounds in the world:<\/p>\n

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Because of this, the market for the instrument doesn\u2019t exist for many years after the R&D that goes into developing a truly new instrument. With short-term profits a primary motive, the big corporations are simply not interested \u2026 When you open up those other possibilities, you’ll alienate the people who are coming from a rock-band orientation and want instant gratification. They don\u2019t want to have to figure out some other relationship between their actions and the instrument\u2019s response.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Buchla died last week at age seventy-nine. In the early sixties, he invented\u2014independently, but at roughly the same moment as Robert Moog\u2014the voltage-controlled modular synthesizer. You have seen these instruments: they\u2019re hulking contraptions with a seemingly excessive number of wires and knobs, often encountered in the homes of audiophiles, Germans with pencil-thin mustaches, and that one quiet\u00a0pale kid from your freshman hall.<\/p>\n

The difference between Buchla and the more famous Moog was as much conceptual as it was technical. Jon Pareles\u2019s remembrance in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a> gets at a key distinction by way of nomenclature:<\/p>\n

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While the modules of Moog synthesizers had straightforward names out of electrical engineering\u2014oscillators to generate tones, filters to modify them\u2014Mr. Buchla\u2019s instruments had modules with more colorful names, like Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, Quad Dynamics Manager and, for his random-voltage noise generator, Source of Uncertainty.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Buchla\u2019s design philosophy encouraged uncertainty: he wanted his instruments to help us shed our musical preconceptions. In a great interview<\/a> with Polyphony Magazine<\/em>, he said, \u201cWe\u2019re tradition bound \u2026 Music as we know it is rooted in a great deal of tradition, and is resistant to change on many levels: the instrumental, the performance, and the listening levels \u2026 I\u2019d like to investigate the sonic experience in a very general way.\u201d<\/p>\n

His friend Morton Subotnick, an avant-garde musician who commissioned the first Buchla machine, conducted exactly those sorts of investigations. And investigations <\/em>feels like the only apt word; it explains why\u00a0compositions like \u201cThe Wild Bull\u201d still have the\u00a0dangerous, bumptious air of the frontier about them, decades later:<\/p>\n