Morton Subotnick

[2][3][4] Subotnick has worked extensively with interactive electronics and multi-media, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender, often collaborating with his wife Joan La Barbara.

Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre.

In the early 1960s, Subotnick taught at Mills College and with Ramon Sender, he co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

In the late 1960s, a time when much United States' academic "avant-gardist" electronic music was highly abstract, (largely concerned with pitch and timbre, where (metric) rhythm might be an afterthought or of no consequence, and simple patterned structures were largely avoided), Subotnick broke with this direction by including sections with metric rhythms – those based on pulses and beats.

Both Silver Apples of the Moon and 1968's The Wild Bull (another Nonesuch-commissioned work for tape; they have since been combined on a Wergo CD[7]) have been choreographed by dance companies around the world.

In addition to music in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, theater and multimedia productions.

His "staged tone poem” The Double Life of Amphibians, a collaboration with director Lee Breuer and visual artist Irving Petlin, utilizing live interaction between singers, instrumentalists and computer, was premiered at the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

The concert version of Jacob’s Room, a mono drama commissioned by Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet and singer Joan La Barbara, received its premiere in San Francisco in 1985.

A string quartet with CDROM, Echoes from the Silent Call of Girona (1998), was premiered in Los Angeles by Southwest Chamber Music.