LAURIE SPIEGEL: GRASSROOTS TECHNOLOGISTBy Frank J. Oteri on November 1, 2014

A conversation in Spiegels Lower Manhattan loftSeptember 9, 20143:00 p.m.Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra GardnerTranscription by Julia Lu

People often speak about computers and technology as though these things arecompletely antithetical to nature and tradition, though this is largely a falsedichotomy. Electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel began her musical life as a folkguitar player and has never abandoned that music. But she fell in love with machinesthe first time she saw a mainframe tape-operated computer at Purdue University on afield trip there with her high school physics class and has been finding ways tohumanize them in her own musical compositions and software development eversince. She sees a lot of common ground between the seemingly oppositionalaesthetics of folk traditions and the digital realm. In fact, when we met up with herlast month in her Lower Manhattan loft crammed full of computers, musicalinstruments, and toys of all sorts, she frequently spoke about how in her world viewthe computer is actually a folk instrument.

The electronic model is very similar to the folk model, she insists. People will comeup with new lyrics for the same melody, or theyll change it from a ballad to a dance

piece. Nobody can remember what the origin is. There is no single creator. In theway that electronic sounds go aroundpeople sample things, they do remixes orsampling, they borrow snatches of sound from each others piecesthe concept of afinite fixed-form piece with an identifiable creator that is property and a medium ofexchange or the embodiment of economic value really disappears in similar ways. Prior to electronic instruments, you had to go through the bottleneck of writtennotation. So electronic music did for getting things from the imagination to the earsof an audience what the internet later did for everybody being able to self-publish,democratizing it in ways that obviously have pros and cons.

A realist as well as an idealist, Spiegel is well aware of the cons as well as the pros ofour present digitally saturated society. [W]hen I was young, she recalls, You had agreat deal of time to focus on what was happening in your mind and informationcould proliferate, amplify itself, and take form in your imagination without that muchinterruption from outside. Our culture is at this point full of people who are focusedoutward and are processing incoming material all the time. Would somebody feel adesire to hear a certain kind of thing and go looking for it? Would they hearsomething inside their head and want to hear it in sound? It seems that people arefending off a great deal now. The dominant process is overload compensation: howcan I rule out things that I dont want to focus on so that I can ingest a manageableamount of information and really be involved in it. Information used to be the scarcecommodity. Attention is now the scarce commodity.

The imagination is very important to Spiegel. It is what has fueled her pioneeringsonic experiments such as her haunting microtonal Voices Within: A Requiem from1979 or her landmark 1974 Appalachian Grove created at Bell Labs soon after shereturned from the mountains in western North Carolina where she traveled with mybanjo over one shoulder and my so-called portable reel-to-reel tape recorder overthe other shoulder, listening to and enjoying older music and the culture that comesfrom early music. It is also why she created the Music Mouse computer software, atool that transformed early personal computers such as the Mac, Atari, andCommodore Amiga into fully functional musical instruments and idea generators formusical compositions. It also led her to create a realization of Johannes KeplersMusic of the Spheres, the 17th-century German astronomers conversion ofplanetary motion into harmonic ratios; this electronic score and a song by Chuck

Berry is the only music by living composers that was sent into outer space on the twoVoyager spacecrafts. (Although Spiegel insists that her realization, which wasincluded as part of Sounds of the Earth rather than Music of the Earth, is not hermusical composition.)

But perhaps even more important to Spiegel than the imagination is emotionalengagement. I always wanted to make music that was beautiful and emotionallymeaningful, she explained. The emotional level is the level at which I am primarilymotivated and always have been. Im still the teenage girl who, after a fight with myfather, would take my guitar out on the porch and just play to make myself feel better.Thats who I am musically. I kind of knew what I liked as a listener, and what I likedwas music that would express emotions that I didnt have a way of expressing, wheresomebody understood me and expressed in their music what I was feeling in waysthat I couldnt express myself. So, to some degree, I think I see the role of thecomposer as giving vicarious self-expression to people, although at this point, withthe technology we have, theres no reason for anybody who wants to make music notto be able to.

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Laurie Spiegels equipment in 1980. Photo by Carlo Carnivali, courtesy LaurieSpiegel.

Frank J. Oteri: The meta-narrative of electronic music, and technologicaldevelopments overall, is that we went from big anti-personal mainframe computersthat took up entire buildings to home computers to handhelds and even smaller.

Laurie Spiegel: And I went that whole journey. I started using punch cards andpaper tape. The first computer I ever saw was at Purdue University in Lafayette,Indiana, when I was in high school. I went down there for a weekend and they had atape-operated computer on which I attempted to do an assignment for my high schoolphysics class. In this class there was me and just one other girl. All of the others wereguys, and the teacher really thought we didnt belong there. It was just so weird. But Ialways loved science.

FJO: But before you got involved with making music with electronics, you were aguitar player and the acoustic guitar is one of the smallest, most intimate instrumentsthat one can play by oneself and have a full sound, all alone. So it seemed to me liketheres a connection between that and how electronic music came to be made onsmaller and smaller devices.

LS: Personal and private are important aspects of music to me. When I was little, Istarted with a plastic ukulele which was even smaller. Then my grandmother, whowas from Lithuania, played mandolin, and she gave me a mandolin when I was maybenine years old or so. That had the advantage that I could keep it under my bed andtake it out at night and play it quietly with nobody hearing me playing it. I had thetotal freedom to just improvise and make stuff up. I dont think I even told anybodywhen she gave it to me. It was like my secret instrument, my private means ofexpression whereas the piano in the living room was this large, sacred object whereeverybody in the house heard you and didnt necessarily want to hear kids practicing.The guitar was similarly private, and I could play it in my room. The freedom of notbeing heard, for a person whos basically somewhat self-conscious, is reallyimportant, and so is the portability.

Despite having computers and other electronic musical instruments from half acentury scattered throughout her loft, Laurie Spiegel still loves to play the guitar.

I used to take the guitar with me everywhere I went during high school, college, youngadulthood, up until I hit classical music circles and discovered that a lot of the peoplewho were studying music, and were the best at it, didnt seem to do it for personalenjoyment. They were so serious about it. In the folk music-type circles andimprovising circles, people would bring their instruments with them and peoplejammed all the time. But once I hit Juilliard, I didnt find that people really did thatkind of stuff. They didnt improvise. They were seriously working on their trills. Andthey were seriously working on their performance pieces. It wasnt integrated intotheir lives the same way as for amateurs who really love music. I guess I still regardmyself somewhat as an amateur, just doing it for the love of it really, which is thetechnical definition of that word. Ive always been an improviser too, which electronicinstruments were perfect for because you were actually interacting live with the soundin electronic music; whereas, when I write music on paper, for instruments, I dontget to hear it, or not for a long time, or not while Im working on it. Of course, thatsno longer true because all the notation software now lets you hear stuff while youreworking on it, and you know that a rhythm isnt what you meant right away. But inthe old days, when I was learning notated composing, it was in your head.

FJO: Its interesting that that came much later for you though, long after you wereplaying music.

LS: I was playing music, I was improvising, I was making stuff up, and at a certainpoint I wanted to learn to write things down so I wouldnt forget them. So I startedtrying to teach myself to write stuff down. One of my roommates in the house that Ilived in pointed out to me that they call that composing. You make things up andwrite them down. I was living in England and studying philosophy and history, doinga social sciences degree basically. I said, No, Im not composing. Im just writingthings down so that I dont forget them. Im not a composer. But eventually itbecame undeniable, and composing took over.

FJO: And so the social sciences became less of a concern for you once music tookover?

LS: No, it never really went away. Im still very interested in politics, sociology,economics, statistics, anthropology, psychology, all that stuff, and animals. Im acomplete sucker for animals.

FJO: But it was still a transition. You were at Oxford and then you were studyingwith John Duarte.

LS: In London, during the second year that I was over there. He was probably theperfect teacher for me. He had a partly classical, partly folk, and partly jazzbackground. He taught me counterpoint and theory and a bit about composing, aswell as classical guitar. Once a week I would take the train into London for theweekend and spend a whole day in his house. And we stayed in touch. Much later,when he was in his 80s, he started to learn to use personal computers and begandoing his composing directly into the computer. It was amazing. He was an Englishcomposer not obsessed with avant-gardism, firmly rooted in some kind of folkfolk isnot a general enough word, but a grassroots sense of musical meaningfulness, ormaybe it is more accurate to say he was connected to tradition very organically andnaturally in his music, like quite a few other British composers. I identify with that.

Laurie Spiegel in the early 1970s. Photo by Louis Forsdale, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: So thats a very different experience from then enrolling in a compositionprogram at Juilliard, of all places.

LS: Yeah, well, I was completely not expecting the dominance of the post-Webernite,serialist, atonal, blip and bleep school of music. I wasnt interested in that. I mean, Iknew what I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn harmony, structure, form, process,history, and repertoire, lots of stuff. But it wasnt really considered cool to beinterested in learning to write tonal music. I remember a teacherwho shall remainnamelesswho, when I brought in a piece in E minor for guitar, said, Hmm, keysignature. Doesnt mean for sure that you dont have any musical imagination, but itsnot a good sign.

It was so much more uptight then. I was in a way intellectually prepared for it becauseat Oxford there was a comparable phenomenon going on. The logical positivists werein charge talking about how many definitions can dance on the head of a whatever.I was more interested in phenomenologists and Asian philosophy, and all kinds ofstuff that was about the opposite of the dominant philosophers at Oxford at the time.Logical positivism is divorced from gut feelings, which were my personal link tomusic. As a teenager, when I was miserable I would take my guitar out on the porch

and play and express my emotions. And when I heard great classical repertoire, itcould vicariously express emotion for me. And so music was really about emotion. Itwas also about structure, because I love structure. Thats the computer programmerin me. So the things that I was most attracted to in music were slightly at odds withthe music that was in with the dominant power structure when I went to Juilliard.

Then there were also all these child prodigies wandering around. I already hadfinished a degree in the social sciences. I was older, which made me immediatelysuspect because its a highly child prodigy-oriented atmosphere; if you werentdiscovered by 12, you were a has-been. But there were a number of things that savedme from giving up and going crazy. One was that through electronic music I was ableto create music people could hear and I became active in the Downtown scene while Iwas still up there. And people liked my work. I played music in other peoplesensembles, played guitar or banjo or whatever for Tom Johnson and with RhysChatham. I would do these filigree patterns, and Rhys would do these long drone-likelines against the stuff. That balanced it. Also I was making a living. I got a job with asmall company that did educational films and filmstrip soundtracks. I composed all oftheir soundtracks for, I think, three and a half years or about that, and it paiddecently. And again, when you do soundtracks, all that really matters is emotionalcontent, and to a lesser degree the style. Its the opposite of the aesthetic that wasdominant uptown with Boulez, Wuorinen, and Milton Babbitt, although I likedMilton and a lot of these people. I was friendly with and hung out with the SpeculumMusicae people, but our musical tastes were just in contrast to each other.

FJO: But your primary teacher at Juilliard was Jacob Druckman, who was really allover the map aesthetically.

LS: Yeah, boy, Jake was amazing. I was also his assistant and spent a lot of time inhis house up in Washington Heights. I proofread the parts for Windows. He let meuse his extra studio time when he wasnt using it at the Columbia Princeton Studios,so I got to know Vladimir [Ussachevsky] and Otto Luening pretty well, and of courseAlice [Shields] and Pril [Smiley]. I have a reel of pieces I recorded up there that atsome point Ill transfer and see what they sound like.

FJO: Id love to hear those!

LS: I also studied with Vincent Persichetti, who was a wonderful teacher. He reallydid his best to try to help each of his students find themselves individually and learnto make the music that they personally wanted to make. He didnt push you in anydirection. He didnt want to create a clone of himself, unlike some of the teachersthere, and he was great. And I also had some lessons with Hall Overton, whoappreciated that I was one of the very few students there who could improvise andenjoy it. But at the same time, I was going downtown to meet Mort Subotnick andvisit his studio when it was still upstairs from the Bleecker Street Cinema. I fell in lovewith the Buchla, so I was doing that too. I was doing all of these different kinds ofmusic at once. Unlike most people who might be immersed in the atmosphere ofJuilliard, it was one of the places that I was active musically, but it wasnt the place. Itdidnt dominate me.

Laurie Spiegel with various synthesizers and reel-to-reel tape recorders in the 1970s.Photo by Louis Forsdale, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: You played piano, but it wasnt your major instrument.

LS: No, I had to kind of begin to learn piano because it was useful for theory,harmony, and composing and studying. And I love the repertoire, but it wasnt like

anything with strings on it, which attracted me like a magnet. But pianosI mean, Ilove them, but they came later.

FJO: But in terms of compositional paradigms, a keyboard configuration creates acertain kind of mindset. I want to discuss this more when we talk about the MusicMouse software you developed and your algorithmic compositions. If you think interms of a seven-five keyboard, whether youre improvising on it or even composingin your head and coming from a keyboard-oriented background, certain patterns aregoing to emerge. And if your frame of reference is a guitar fret board, other kinds ofthings are going to happen.

LS: If philosophically youre a determinist, you could say that absolutely everything isalgorithmic, but we do have a sense of free will and we do have the perception thatwere making decisions. But yeah, you could argue that if everything is deterministic,including the workings of the mind, then all music is algorithmic.

That seven-five pattern you see on the keyboard is only visible there because its thestructure of the diatonic scales that we hear. Its a pattern within the musical modelour culture is dominated by. Its not that pattern, but how it fits the hands, and thehabits of the hands that become actual reflexes, that can be limiting. They can becomeso ingrained that they keep the imagination from roaming. That happens with theguitar fretboard too, though with different patterns, and with an instrument such asMusic Mouse too, I suppose. Each instrument somehow biases our music in its ownunique direction. Some composers manage to transcend those kinds of habits, somecompose away from any instrument, others invent new instruments. But thephysiological interface is sort of an algorithmic constraint all on its own, and I wouldthink there are also similar cognitive constraints.

Some of the analog synthesizers in Laurie Spiegels loft.

FJO: You were telling me when we spoke the other day that there was a musiccomposition teacher who was so upset with you because if his students used MusicMouse he wouldnt know if they were coming up with their own music. So when youmentioned falling in love with the Buchla, I remembered that when we did our talkwith Morton Subotnick he said that he was very determined to avoid the standardpiano interface, that it was very important for him not for it to have that interface inorder to free peoples creativity, that you would have to deal with the instrument in acompletely new way. Otherwise the paradigm would force you into familiar patterns.

LS: I believe that was some of Schoenbergs rationale for coming up with the 12-tonesystem, too. It breaks you out of all of your customary habits and the patterns that areingrained. Every time I pick up the guitar, my hands tend to fall into patterns ofthings that Ive played before, which can be good. But you are looking for somethingnew when youre composing, unlike when youre just performing. Yeah, that was oneof the wonderful things about the Buchla versus the Moog and Arp and other earlyelectronic instruments. It was modular and there was no keyboard, and so you reallyworked with timbre and texture and sonic shapes and architectures, as opposed tofalling into melody and harmony.

FJO: You came to these various pieces of equipment and youve done new thingswith them, but you also wrote music that was instantly beautiful. But beauty is alsosomething that is in part acculturated.

LS: I always wanted to make music that was beautiful and emotionally meaningful. Itwas out of fashion to do that. A lot of people were simply trying to avoid doing that atthe time, whereas I was willing to go for it. Newness was being pursued for its ownsake.

FJO: You even composed a short piano piece that addresses the whole history ofmusic and shows a way out of that.

LS: Oh, The History of Music in One Movement.

FJO: I love the program note you included in the score and how even though themusic is inspired by all these periods in history, every note of it is yours. There aremoments that almost get into sort of a modernist place, but it doesnt end there.Writing something like that when modernism was acknowledged as the final phase inmusics evolution was very brave.

LS: That piece was one of the most fun composing experiences and one of the mostinteresting that Ive ever had. At every point when I was writing something evocativeof a certain period, I had to sort of try to feel through what it would feel like to need togo on to break through into what happened in the next period. I had to want thefreedoms that the next musical era took. There are many transitions in there. Thehardest part of writing that was that horrible little place where I did an actual pair ofserial rows that retrograde and invert against each other and that sound so ugly andharsh to me. For historical accuracy, I thought I really had to put that in. And at thatpoint in the piece, it says Oh my God, we cant do this, and it retrogrades back and ittakes a different direction and kind of goes off into a sort of Impressionist-tingedblues, and then into minimalism, texture, pure sonic fabric. But of course, when wewrote that, we hadnt yet gotten to post-minimalism, whatever that means.

Two excerpts from the score of Laurie Spiegels The History of Music in OneMovement showing her version of medieval music and high modernism. Copyright 1981 by Laurie Spiegel, Laurie Spiegel Publishing (ASCAP) International CopyrightSecured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

FJO: Musicologists point to the late 50s and early 60s as the beginnings ofminimalism, but the 70s were really when it had its greatest impact with audiences.In fact, its full flowering seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the suddenavailability of electronic instruments. This is also true for other kinds of music thatwere evolving at that time, like prog rock.

LS: Electronic instruments gave people the freedom to create works and sound on anunprecedented scale. Prior to electronic instruments, you had to go through thebottleneck of written notation. You had to go through the bottleneck of a limitednumber of orchestras with very conservative tendencies, because they had theirsubscribers to please. Electronic instruments were a great democratizing force. Thatsone of the reasons why you began to see so many more women composers becauseyou could go from an idea for a piece to the point where you could actually play it foranother human being. I mean that had been true all along if you limited yourself towriting only for the instruments you played yourself. But when it came to writingthings on an orchestral scale of sonority, to be able to realize something and then playit for other people all on your own was a brand new phenomenon. So electronic musicdid for getting things from the imagination to the ears of an audience what theinternet later did for everybody being able to self-publish, democratizing it in waysthat obviously have pros and cons. The economic models of these various ways ofgetting something from the inside of my mind to the inside of someone elses mind,for whom it would be meaningful, have been completely upset and will have to settledown differently. Analog electronics were revolutionary, and now the digital ones arealso. Its amazing how quickly so many changes have taken place and theyre verydisorienting to a lot of people, understandably.

Laurie Spiegel at the McLeyvier Music System, an early digital synthesizer with acomputer terminal, in the early 1980s. Photo by Rob Onadera, courtesy LaurieSpiegel.

About what you asked, minimalism and electronic instruments, it was liberating forus players of plucked instruments and pianos to work with sustained tones. Instead ofcomposing additively, but writing down one tiny sound at a time, we could start witha rich fabric of sound and subtractively sculpt form into it, or we could set up aprocess and let it just slowly evolve on its own.

FJO: The other big change happened with how those electronics were situated. In theearly stages you had to be attached to some kind of university system or, if you got

lucky, you could afford a Moog or a Buchla.

LS: One the things that I think made the 70s a really special period was thatelectronic instruments were too expensive for most people to own one. Sure therewere people who had their ownMort had one, Suzanne Ciani had one, a lot of rockgroups could between them get one. But for a lot of us, the way to get access toelectronic instruments was through shared studios. There was PASSthe PublicAccess Synthesizer Studiowhich later evolved into Harvestworks. There was theNYU Composers Workshop. There was WNETs Experimental TV Lab where I was avideo artist in residence for a while, though I ended up really not doing much videobut doing sound tracks for everybody elses videos. There was Morts little studio, andits community of people upstairs from the Bleecker Street Studio. The Kitchen wasanother one. The Kitchen started as a center for video and then expanded into music.So there was community. There were interactions between people. People would meeteach other and they would get ideas and bounce ideas off each other and worktogether in ways that I would think must be much more difficult to achieve now thateveryone has an extremely powerful studiobeyond our wildest dreams back thenin their bedroom or sitting on their desk. To be working in the studio and, okay, Imcoming in and Eliane Radigue is just finishing up, and she shows me what shesdoing. Then she watches me put up what Im doing, and then when Im done, RhysChatham comes in and hes like, Oh, you could do this and this, and by the way, youknow, were trying this; do you want to come and play with us?I mean, things justhappened between people and I think that made the 70s a really special period, thefact that there were so many shared studios where people worked together, interactedwith each other, commented on each others work, and helped each other with theirwork, as opposed to everybody sitting by themselves in their rooms with theircomputers.

Spiegel at work in the era of mainframe synthesizers. Photo by Emmanuel Ghent,courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

Robert Moog, Laurie Spiegeland Max Matthews. Photocourtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: Even some companies, like Bell Labs, became hotbeds of activity for composersat that time.

LS: Well, there was no place like Bell Labs. You cant really even consider it acompany. Bell Labs was pure research with a level of autonomy given to each personworking there that probably no longer exists anywhere. There was no need to doanything with any commercial buy in. You could do whatever you were interested in,everyone was brilliant, and everyone was interested in stuff. You didnt last that longor do that well at Bell Labs if you werent self-motivated and a self-starter. You wereexpected to have your own ideas and be able to realize them. Im still in very closetouch with my friends from that lab. We email all the time and toss ideas around. Ijust dont know if there is any other place quite like that, although I think places likeApple and Google like to think they have the level of freedom that they had at the lab.Ive never really been around them on a work-a-day basis to find out.

FJO: I love that they would just let artists come and do their thing.

LS: Well, they did and they didnt. The arts were a little onthe hushed side because of their regulated monopolystatus, and moving into the 70s, they began to be underattack by the various powers that wanted to divide MaBell into a number of small, separate, competingcompanies, which ultimately did happen and was a greatloss in my opinion. They were under a certain mandate;there were a number of considerations. One was thateverything they did should be oriented to communicationsresearch. So when they came up with Unix and the C language, they just gave themaway for free. Another was that they were not really supposed to be doing digitalcommunications so much, I think, as improving existing analog telephone service. Imnot really that sure. I wasnt in the managerial level of the lab. Max Matthews was,though; he was a fairly high-up person. He ran twelve sub-departments that did allkinds of amazing stuff: acoustic research, speech synthesis and analysis, non-verbalcommunications, various cognitive studies like studies of the characteristics of long-term versus short-term human memory and stereopsis, and in vision the study ofeiditic memory. You would just walk around or ask whoever happened to be at the

coffee machine when you were getting a cup of coffee: What do you do? and theywould tell you something absolutely fantastically fascinating that they were verymuch into. It was an amazing place.

FJO: In addition to music, you were also doing video work at Bell Labs. I love thename of the program you worked on there.

LS: VAMPIRE! (Video And Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration.) Itwas a system that could only be used at night. That was the mandate. We artist typescould use the computers during the hours during which they were not in use forlegitimate Bell Telephone research.

FJO: I think my favorite work of yours from that period though is that gorgeousAppalachian Grove.

LS: Yeah? At that point I had a graduate research fellowship starting in I think 73 atthe Institute for Studies in American Music with Wiley Hitchcock, whom I greatlyadmired. Anybody who hasnt read his book, Music in the United States: AnHistorical Introduction, should read it. He put me back in touch with and made mefeel better about my banjo playing and the folk level, which had been basically kind ofridiculed in some of the other circles Id been in during that era.

Laurie Spiegel playing the banjo in October 1962. Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

I had just been down in the mountains in western North Carolinawith my banjoover one shoulder and my so-called portable reel-to-reel tape recorder over theother shoulderlistening to and enjoying older music and the culture that comesfrom early music. I mean, music from Europe went into those hills before the Baroqueera and evolved on its own there, amazing music. I had just come back from therewhen I did Appalachian Grove and wanted to capture some of the feeling of beingdown there.

The wonderful thing about being surrounded by scientists, and not being in acomputer music studio in a music department, is that a lot of scientists really lovemusic. They are unabashedly lovers of fine music thats meaningful in all the waysthat I find music meaningful. They go to classical concerts, and they play instrumentsthemselves. They love music the way ordinary people do. Whereas, somethinghappens when you put music into an academic context in which down the hall is ascience lab where everything has to be provable and rationalizable. You begin to get

pieces where every note needs to be able to be explained, a certain level of self-consciousness begins to be laid on a musical experience. Im not saying that alwayshappens, but it seemed to be a tendency in academia during that period which wasnot present at Bell Labs.

FJO: Whats nice about the re-issue of your first album, The Expanding Universe,that came out last year is that we can finally hear all of the compositions you createdat Bell Labs.

LS: Well, most of them. I did an awful lot of stuff. Two and a half hours, or a littlemore than that, was all we could fit on two CDs.

FJO: Only a tiny portion of that material was issued on the original LP, whichcuriously was released by the folk music label Philo.

LS: Another thing that I keep harping on is that the computer is a folk instrument.One of my favorite subjects in college had been anthropology. You have all thesevarious techniques of going into an alien society and trying to figure out whatsimportant. One of the techniques is to try to figure out the cultural premises, the rockbottom assumptions that members of that culture would make. So I took a look at anumber of different distribution media for music: classical concert venues; grassrootsorganizations like community sings; bands and church groups; parlor music, musicthat is done at home with people gathering around a piano singing or playing guitartogether; and electronic mediaphotography, radio, and electronic music. I looked atthe characteristics of the music that is disseminated by each of these methods andcertain patterns begin to fall out.

The classical model is a finite piece of music with a fixed form that is attributable toone creatorBeethoven, for example. But the electronic model is very similar to thefolk model. You have material that floats around and is transmitted from person toperson. Its in variable form; its constantly being transformed and modified to beuseful to whoever is working with it, the same way folk songs are. People will come upwith new lyrics for the same melody, or theyll change it from a ballad to a dancepiece. Nobody can remember what the origin is. There is no single creator. Theres noowner. The concept of ownership doesnt come in. In the way that electronic soundsgo aroundpeople sample things, they do remixes or sampling, they borrow snatches

of sound from each others piecesthe concept of a finite fixed-form piece with anidentifiable creator that is property and a medium of exchange or the embodiment ofeconomic value really disappears in both folk music and electronic and computermusic in similar ways.

FJO: But certainly in the earliest era of electronic music, there would be thesemusique concrte and studio-generated electronic music tape pieces that are evenmore fixed than a piece by Beethoven because not only is there one piece, theres onlyone interpretation of it because the interpretation is a fixed form.

Laurie Spiegel with her analog synthesizer and reel-to-reel tape recorders in 1971.Photo by Stan Bratman, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

LS: That was pretty much true back when electronic music could only bedisseminated on reel-to-reel up until cassettes were invented, since you had to

actually own two reel-to-reel machines to make a copy and very few people did. Youwould have tape concerts where you could play pieces for people or it might get on theradio or a record as a medium of dissemination. But once there were cassettes, youstarted to get people doing mixes and overdubs, excerpting things and choppingthings together. Not a lot of people did the kinds of techniques that had been used inclassic studio techniquelots of splicing and cuttingon cassette. To edit a cassettetape is pretty unusual. Then when you got digital recording, the first wave of digitalexcerpting was samplers before personal computers and the internet made other waysmore feasible. The business end of the music industry is trying very hard to makeeverything identifiable and institute royalty systems and stuff. But I think, eventhough Id benefit from receiving royalties, its to some degree a losing battle and asuperimposition of a model that no longer really fits. We dont have a new model yetthat provides economic support back, but maybe we dont need onebecause musicproduction is so much cheaper and faster.

FJO: I definitely want to talk more about these issues with you, but lets get back toPhilo. Its really unusual for them to have released an LP of electronic music. Thatrecord proves in a way that the divide between folk music and electronic music was afake war that was created in part by the media overblowing some peoples negativereactions to Dylan plugging in at 1963 Newport Folk Festival.

LS: Well, I was a folk person and a banjo person. The lowest, most grassrootstechnology and the most sophisticated electronic technology you would think wouldbe diametrical opposites, but the fact that you can make music independently athome, and make music locally with other people in an informal way without any ofthe traditional skills such as keyboard skills and music notation, thats a greatcommonality.

FJO: And some of the popular rock groups at that time were also doing some verysophisticated stuff with electronics.

LS: Pink Floyd.

FJO: Perhaps even more so some of the German groups like Tangerine Dream andKraftwerk, many of whose recordings were purely electronic music without vocals oranything else. There isnt that much of a sonic difference between some of their music

Laurie Spiegel playing the electric guitar at aNAMM showcase in Anaheim in the late1980s. Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

and some of the stuff on the Expanding Universe LP.

LS: Yeah, there is and there isnt. In a way, its almost closer to minimalism. Imthinking the earlier Terry Riley pieces like Poppy Nogood and In C, which are prettymuch open form. My pieces tend to actually be relatively short and have pretty clearforms and the processes in them tend more toward melodic evolution than repetition.

FJO: But in terms of the surface sound, I think the music on that LP could appeal toanybody whos a fan of Tangerine Dream, and having that recording appear on Philorather than one of the labels that was releasing electronic music that had been createdin university settings, like CRI, seems like a reaching out to this broader audience.

LS: I have been in multiple musical worldssimultaneously throughout most of my career.I havent lived in the classical world, although Istill totally love classical music, probably reallythe best. But none of those labels would havehad me. Philo were willing. And then Roundertook it and kept it right up until Unseen WorldsRecords put out the CD re-release. I mean,listen to Appalachian Grove and Patchworkand Drums. Theyre clearly closer to agrassroots, folk sensibility than they are to anyof the post-Webernite composers. But I did getit through personal connections that weremore in the folk world. I had a roommate forabout 14 months, Steve Rathe of Murray StreetProductions, who was at that point working forNPR. He decided to move to New York andstayed here for 2 weeks until he could find aplace, which turned into 14 months, which was actually great. I like him a lot. And heconnected me up with Philo. He went to them and said, You gotta hear this stuff.Thats how that really happened. He still invites bunches of people over to his loft tojust have an old fashioned country music evening with banjos and fiddles, and I playbanjo or fiddle or guitar at those.

FJO: Youve never gone over to one of these things and played with Music Mouse.

LS: No. Music Mouse doesnt work like that. I have jammed playing Music Mouse,but it doesnt lend itself well to playing with other people, because it tends to not begood for standard chord changes.

FJO: Now in terms of how worlds opened up, Im curious about how your musicwound up getting sent into outer space on Voyager.

The gold-plated Sounds of Earth Record containing Laurie Spiegels realization ofJohannes Keplers Harmonices Mundi and its gold-aluminum cover (left). Photo byNASA (Public Domain). A copy of this record was sent into outer space on both theVoyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts in 1977. The cover was designed to protect the recordfrom micrometeorite bombardment and also provides a potential extra-terrestrialfinder a key to playing the record. The explanatory diagram appears on both the innerand outer surfaces of the cover, as the outer diagram will be eroded in time.

LS: I was visiting friends up in Woodstock on a lovely summers afternoon, andsomehow a phone call got forwarded to me and they said, Were with NASA, and wewould like to use some of your work for the purpose of contacting extraterrestriallife. And I said, What kind of a crank call is this? If youre really from NASA, sendsomething to my address on NASA letterhead. Okay, goodbye. And they did, whichreally surprised me.

There are a number of algorithmic works. One type might start with a truly logical

progression that generates the information for a piece. Another kind is to use thepatterns we find in nature and translate those into the auditory modality, like theKepler piece [which is what was put on Voyager]. Kepler of course didnt have themeans to do that back in the 16th century. But we do.

FJO: And so you realized that.

LS: Yeah, yeah. Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, and Carl Sagan liked it for the openingcut on the Sounds from Earth record. There are two records on Voyager. One is Musicfrom Earth. Its not in the music part. Its in the Sounds from Earth.

FJO: Thats always bothered me.

LS: No. It really is simply a translation into sound of the angular velocities of theplanets. Its a transcription really. I dont think of it as a composition. Its anorchestration I did, and I think I did a good one, because I have listened to someother ones and they seem rather dry and academic sounding; whereas, I somehow,being me, managed to get some sense of feeling into the ways that I mixed it and thepace at which I let it unfold, and the decisions I made such as only including theplanets that were known during Keplers times instead of all of the planets we latercame to know.

FJO: There was an LP that came out of another realization of Keplers Harmony ofthe World in the late 70s, and in that realization the other three additional planetsdiscovered after Keplers lifetime were represented as percussion tracks. There issome similarity between that recording and what you did.

LS: Its the same solar system.

FJO: But still I hear your sensibility in your version somehow.

LS: But its not an original piece by me. If anybody composed it, it was Kepler whocreated this score, or as Kepler would have said, Its a composition by God renderedaudible to man, although I dont know if he really believed in God. His mother wasalmost burnt at the stake as a witch.

FJO: That leads us into this whole question of who can claim compositionalownership of algorithmic compositions.

LS: Well, if the piece is generated by a process then whoever creates the process youwould think composes the piece. It gets more complicated when its an interactivealgorithmic situation. I have never called Music Mouse an algorithmic musicgenerator. Its interactive. Its an intelligent instrument, an instrument with acertain amount of music intelligence embedded in it, mostly really by a model of whatI would call music space music theory, rhythmic structures, and orchestrationalparameters that one can interact with. If someone composes with that, to somedegree, its a remote collaboration because there is certain decision making I put intothat program that theyre stuck with. And the rest of it is up to them. So there isdecision making from both me and them, in that the computer is really almostpassive. I would say it only does what you tell it to in simple situations like MusicMouse. In complex situations such as the entire world internet system, things becomeso complex that things will happen that the system was not instructed to do. Butthats on a different scale from a program where you actually describe a process ofmusic generation, or a program such as Music Mouse, where if you do exactly thesame thing you will always get exactly the same result, as with other instruments.

Music Mouse running under the STEEM Atari STe Emulator on a Windows Vista PC.Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: Allow me to play devils advocate.

LS: Go for it.

FJO: Even if youre creating music on a piano, there are things that are built into thatpiano that sort of predetermine the kind of things you can do with it.

LS: Sure, each instrument really does have an aesthetic domain. You obviously cantdo the same music with a flute and with a harp. But you say that you could hear mysensibility in the Kepler. You probably hear a related sensibility when you listen to mypiano pieces or my orchestral writing.

FJO: Yes.

LS: So the medium interacts certainly with the individual person expressingthemselves through the medium. Its sort of a collaboration between a structure and aperson.

FJO: Well, the reason Im bringing this up is the story you told me last week about amusic composition teacher being upset with you because your software made itdifficult for him to know if his students were actually composing the music heassigned them to write.

LS: I wrote Music Mouse for my own use, and then I showed it to people and theywanted copies of it, and then they showed it to people, and it got to the point wheremore people wanted copies of it than I could sit down and explain how to use it to andso I wrote a manual. Then it kept snowballing, and it needed a publisher, so I gave itto Dave Oppenheim at OpCode to publish. And then a lot more people had it. At onepoint, later when Dr. Ts Music Software were publishing it, Music Mouse wasbundled with [Commodore] Amiga computers, and something like 10,000 copies of itshipped. A lot of people used that program.

So I began to get feedback back from all manner of people who I didnt know. Theprogram was in many contexts I had never dreamed it would be in. So I get asomewhat upset letter from a college music teacher telling me that because of myprogram, he doesnt know how to grade his students. He cant tell if they knowharmony, or theyre relying on my software for the harmony that theyre using in the

compositional exercises theyre submitting to him. What is he supposed to do aboutthat? How is he supposed to grade them? Music isnt really something thats supposedto be graded anyway. But yeah, a lot of unexpected and interesting things happenedas a result of that program going out in the world on such a large scale.

Floppy discs for two of Laurie Spiegels software programs, Music Mouse and MIDITerminal, as issued in the 1980s. Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: One of the things that I find fascinating about it is it can help you get out ofhabits that you had.

LS: I used to call it an idea generator. Youre certainly not going to be able to doanything you ever did on a keyboard or guitar, and you will be doing other kinds ofthings. And youll be focusing not on the level of the individual notes, but on theshapes of the phrases and the architecture of the musical gesture. It forces you toconceptualize on a larger scale. Music composing often really bogs down at the levelof the note, and people lose perspective and they muddle around. If its reallybeautifully done, you can be utterly fascinated and transfixed by whats happening onthe level of the notes. But you also find an awful lot of pieces that seem to just kind ofgo on and on and wander around because the person creating them has lostperspective in terms of an overall form. Music Mouse orients you to think on aslightly larger scale of the phrase or the gesture. Of course, you can still wanderaround, making a mess for a really long time. Weve all done that. But its an

improvising instrument and its a brainstorming instrument.

FJO: In terms of how it affected your own composition process, are there things inyour music that are different before Music Mouse and after Music Mouse?

LS: Music Mouse had things in common with the various FORTRAN IV and Cprograms I wrote at Bell Labs, but I cant begin to say how much the orchestration ofelectronic sounds that could be dealt with in real time changed in a single decade. Imean, you talk about 1975 when I was doing pieces like Patchwork at Bell Labs. In1985, I was doing pieces like Cavis Muris and the orchestration of real-time electronicsounds, real-time digital sounds, was just light years more advanced. Its amazingwhat happened orchestrationally in that decade with the development of real-timedigital audio.

FJO: I love the back story of Cavis Muris.

LS: Im very fond of mice actually. There was a little family of mice living in the loft atthat point. But the mouse of Music Mouse initially was the mouse input device of theearly Apple Macintosh. It occurred to me, when I got my first Mac. It was not the veryfirst one, the very limited 128k. By the 512k Mac, it became usable. So what would bethe most logical thing youd want to do with a mouse-controlled instrument? Youwould want to push sound around with the mouse. So, it was Music Mouse, and thenI just kept refining it and refining it. Thats how it got its name. Now, of course,nobody uses mice. Well, some people still use mice. And of course there are stillplenty of real mice.

FJO: I still use one, but I also still use a PalmPilot.

LS: I always used a trackball, which I guess I would have had to call it Music Rat,because it is definitely bigger than a mouse. I was thinking of doing a Rhythm Rat atone point, but I never got that far. There were too many other things going on. I mightdo a Counterpoint Chipmunk at some point. I dont know. I would love to get back tocoding. Its just been so busy and the technology changes under me faster than I canlearn to keep up with it in my spare time with so many other things always going on.

One of Laurie Spiegels current compositional work stations.

FJO: The constant change in technology raises other issues about the future ofmusicality. Being adept at something because youve mastered it over the course ofmany years is an alien concept to a lot of people nowadays. But in a society where thetechnology changes at the drop of a dime, its really difficult to become proficient inany specific thing.

LS: You are right. People used to learn a tool or technique and refine and developtheir use of it for the rest of their lives. Now we cant even run the software we usedmost just a few years ago. We are always beginners, over and over.

This constant transitioning fits with the attention span of the channel flipper or theweb browser. And process of facing the blank page until some creation takes form onit is now rare. More and more of todays digital tools come up with a menu ofselections, like GarageBand. Heres a library of instruments, pick onemultiplechoice initial templates. Do you want to make this kind of piece or that? Things startwith here are some options you can select among as opposed to starting withsomething in my mind which Im hearing in the silence in my imagination. Back inthe dark ages when I was young, you had a great deal of time to focus on what was

happening in your mind and information could proliferate, amplify itself, and takeform in your imagination without that much interruption from outside. You had yourmind to yourself. I dont think kids walk home from school anymore. I dont know. Allparents seem to be hell-bent on making sure theyre safe and picking them up. Andthey are constantly interacting, with people or with devices or with people via devices.

Our culture is at this point full of people who are focused outward and are processingincoming material all the time. So youve got musical forms which are mixes, mash-ups, remixes, collages, processed versions, and sampling, all kinds of making of newpieces out of pre-existing materials rather than starting with some sound that youbegin to hear in your imagination. Im a little concerned about this because theresjust nothing like the imaginationbeing able to focus inward and listen to what yourown auditory mechanism wants to hearlistening for what it wants to hear and whatit would generate on its own for itself. You can do processing of the stuff coming atyou til the cows come home, but are you going to get something thats really theexpression of your individuality and your sensibility the same way as listening to yourown inner ear? Are you going to come up with something original and authenticallyuniquely you?

FJO: But you were saying before that weve moved to this point where nobody owns asound and that reconnects us with much earlier folk music traditions.

LS: Well, people still do, but it seems to be very hard to enforce ownership of sounds.

FJO: I loved the story you told Simon Reynolds about wanting to listen to an LP youthought you had and when you were not able to find that recording, you made yourown music instead.

LS: Thats where the piece The Expanding Universe came from. I was looking backand forth through my LPs, and I wanted to hear something like thatnot a dronepiece, not a static piece, not like La Monte Young, and also not something that was asymphony. It just needed to be this organic, slowly growing thing, and I couldnt findit, sodo-it-yourselfer attitudeI made one.

FJO: So do you think its less likely that somebody would do that now?

LS: Would somebody feel a desire to hear a certain kind of thing and go looking for

it? Would they hear something inside their head and want to hear it in sound? Itseems that people are fending off a great deal now. The dominant process is overloadcompensation: how can I rule out things that I dont want to focus on so that I caningest a manageable amount of information and really be involved in it. Attention isnow the scarce commodity. Information used to be the scarce commodity,information including music of course.

Laurie Spiegels loft is an oasis of books, musical instruments, electronic equipment,and toys.

FJO: In terms of finding that original sound, theres a piece of yours that I certainlythink is one of the most original sounding pieces and its one of my favoritesVoicesWithin. Its also one of the only pieces that you did using alternative tunings.

LS: Wandering in Our Time is similar, although not as highly structured as VoicesWithin. Its easier to use tonality or modality. Microtonality is hard to deal with. Ididnt use any particular microtonal scale. It was really by feel.

FJO: But theres a real sense of it being another world.

LS: It was a very internal world. I keep using the word emotions, but emotionally,

subjectively, the kind of unformed sense of experience you cant even identify or labelor describe, but its something haunting you inside that you feel music is the way toexpress. Does that make any sense?

FJO: Yes, but the reason I bring it up is because of what you were saying aboutattention being so hard to come by these days. That piece really struck me because Ididnt have a framework for listening to it since it was so unlike anything else. Withtechnology today and where we are in terms of being offered all these possibilities andhaving to choose from a set of options rather than striking out on our own paths, Iwonder how possible it is for a piece like that to be created now.

LS: You wouldnt have come up with that piece on a keyboard-based synthesizer. Itneeded a synthesizer without a keyboard. To some degree, all of these computerprograms for music out there now are virtually keyboard synthesizers; they all giveyou a scale. You have to really work to get out of the scales, those normal diatonicscales that are in every software package on the market. There are a lot ofassumptions about the nature of music in most of the commercial software. Theyreperfectly fine for making music thats a lot like previous music, but not in terms offinding those places on the edge of what we know where were feeling for somethingthat is so subjective and so tenuously there that we cant begin to describe it. Thosekinds of aesthetic experiences in sound are not really what the software that mostmusic is done on today is optimized for. I suppose Im guilty of using existingsoftware by other people as much as anyone, but you do have to really work to getbeyond the assumptions inherent in most software tools for any of the creative artsthese days.

FJO: In terms of working within conventions, it was fascinating for me to discoverWaves and Hearing Things, your pieces for orchestra.

An excerpt from Laurie Spiegels Seeing Things for chamber orchestra. Copyright 1983 (revised 1985) by Laurie Spiegel, Laurie Spiegel Publishing (ASCAP)International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

LS: I can thank Jake Druckman for actually giving me an opportunity to, both ofthose opportunities actually. He agented both of those. Everybody just wants to hear

my electronic stuff, pretty much.

FJO: But those pieces are extraordinary, too. Theyre very interesting musical pathsthat might not have been intuitive had you not immersed yourself in electronic music.I hear the same kinds of transformations of timbresan instrument emerges out of acloud of sound the way that a timbre would emerge in electronic pieces from thattime. Yet its all done acoustically.

LS: But that happens in classical music, too. Much as I would have never admitted itto other kids at Juilliard, I absolutely love Rimsky-Korsakov and how he orchestrates.His orchestration is one of my great inspirations. And I love his orchestration book,too. Its just really about sound and feeling it, its not about instruments ranges or anykind of nuts-and-bolts level stuff. You could say that what he does in some of hisorchestrations is virtually electronic. Its so focused on the sounds that you practicallyforget that theyre instruments.

Orchestras are great because you have all these timbreswow! Then again, I lovewriting for solo instruments, too. Concerts are good, and Ive enjoyed many concerts,but to me the most important music was always the music that happened at homewhere I would just pick up my guitar and play it to feel better, or I would sit there andsight read at the keyboard, which I used to love to do a lot, but havent had much timefor in recent years. Or playing music for just one other person. Or playing music withone other person at home. Writing music that somebody can just put on the piano,trying to write things that are not that hard to play so that more people can play them.Im not interested in virtuosity. Im not interested in writing show pieces for concerthalls. Im interested in writing something that someone can sit down and play athome and enjoy the musical experience of playing it. Thats more important for me asa composer, so I tend to write pieces just for guitar or piano, the instruments that Ihave played the most.

FJO: Thats a beautiful statement because so many people talk about getting intoelectronic music so that they could write music that they werent able to get players toplay, creating a music that is even too hard for the virtuosos, music thats beyondhuman ability. Youre saying the exact opposite.

LS: Well, that too. Its not an either/or. Theyre both valid. Thats one of the reasons

to do Music Mouse. Its as close as you can come to playing an entire orchestra live inreal time. I have all this timbral control. Nine of the twelve tracks on my CD UnseenWorlds were created with just Music Mouse and it was like playing a pretty fullorchestra.

FJO: So if you somehow had the time to take those pieces and orchestrate them andhave them played by actual orchestras, would that be aesthetically satisfying you?

LS: That seems like an awful lot of time and work to do something that already exists,as opposed to doing something different if given the opportunity to do something fororchestra. But yeah, that would be interesting. They would be different pieces, Iwould think. But that would be a lot of work. Well, it might not be. Actually you couldautomate an awful lot more of the transcription than you used to be able to do.Writing notes down, God, its so much slower than playing. Thats partly why Ivealways been an improviser. Jack Duarte, my teacher in London, said composition isimprovisation slowed down with a chance to go back and fix the bad bits. Or badnotes, I think he may have said.

Laurie Spiegel playing the lute in 1991. Photo by Paul Colin, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: So weve talked about the composer and the interpreter, what about thelistener?

LS: Well, I think one of my advantages as a composer was that I didnt accept theidentity professionally until I had already grown up as a listener and a player. Theemotional level is the level at which I am primarily motivated and always have been.Im still the teenage girl who, after a fight with my father, would take my guitar out on

the porch and just play to make myself feel better. Thats who I am musically. I kindof knew what I liked as a listener, and what I liked was music that would expressemotions that I didnt have a way of expressing, where somebody understood me andexpressed in their music what I was feeling in ways that I couldnt express myself. So,to some degree, I think I see the role of the composer as giving vicarious self-expression to people, although at this point, with the technology we have, theres noreason for anybody who wants to make music not to be able to. But there really stillare levels of ability. Not everybodys going to be Beethoven or Bach. There still willalways be room for truly amazing artists of composition and sound who can do thingsthat other people cant. Its just that I really kind of rail against the old dichotomy ofthe small elite of highly skilled makers of music and this vast number of passivelisteners that have no way to actively express some thoughts in music. That seemsreally wrong to me, and that no longer needs to be the case. But thats not to say thatit isnt still worth listening, because there arent that many truly great works outthere, percentage-wise.

In addition to her musical compositions, computer software, and extensive writingsabout music, nature and many other topics, Laurie Spiegel is also a visual artist.These are two of her Xerographs.