GoKawiilProviding context: In conversation with Suzanne Ciani
Tell us about the context in which you wrote the Cookbook. Were you documenting for yourself, for a community, or for posterity? What does it mean to you today that it still functions as a reference for Buchla practitioners, fifty years later?
As a “starving artist,” I would apply for grants and this paper was written to satisfy a composer grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. I didn’t think anyone would ever understand it, but I needed to describe my compositional practice.
Tell us about what drew you to the 248 in the first place. It was a piece of gear unknown to the world, and you may have been among the first users, with the Cookbook written before the release of the official 1977 manual. When did you acquire it? Did you have a working relationship with Don Buchla while developing your approach on the MARF? Did you consider it as a means to realize your musical ideas, or did those ideas emerge from the practice of the instrument?
At the time, I was totally focused on the Buchla. I had come to New York City to give a live performance in the Bonino Gallery for a sculptor friend of mine, Ron Mallory. I wanted to make a career as a Buchla performer. From photographs from this period, I notice that my Buchla system was constantly modifying…the consoles that held it, the road cases that transported it, the ever-increasing number of modules. I imagine that Don would have told me about the MARF, and I always wanted to get the first one of anything that came out. I did have a working relationship with Don, but our thoughts about the MARF were quite different. I adored it and couldn’t live without it. He once said to me that it was a “failed” concept. I think we had very different ideas about what it was.
The Cookbook references serialism, acousmatic space, and cybernetic self-playing systems, which were all important matters in 1970s avant-garde music. How did you position yourself in relation to the dominant musical ideologies of the time, and has that positioning changed?
I think that as an artist, I lived in my own world to a great extent. I had studied composition and basically rebelled against the systems I encountered, like serialism. I thought music should come from an emotional starting point. However, I have to admit that my work with the Buchla does reference some “systems” approach to composition. I once wrote a paper on Boulez and his use of musical note modules. In some ways, those ideas were better manifested by machines than note scribes.
Clearly conscious of these ideas, you may have been the only avant-garde composer making diatonic music with a Buchla 200 in the mid-1970s, and yet that music could not have been performed on a more tonally oriented system such as a Moog or ARP. Did you feel isolated in that practice?
Yes, it was very lonely to speak a language that no one else was speaking. It was because of that musical loneliness that my first album, Seven Waves, was not a pure Buchla album, but a synthesis of my electronic language with my classical root system.
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