Morton Subotnick

"The most important thing about these (Buchla's) instruments is that there is a kind of neutrality about the way things are designed and laid out, so that a composer can impose his or her own personality on the mechanism."

Composer of electronic music and multi-media, Morton Subotnick co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center and contributed to the invention of the Buchla synthesizer. He was the first composer to be commissioned for a recording and the first to produce a musical composition in the form of a multimedia CD-ROM. His music has explored computer-instrument interaction and electronic opera

He has received commissions from several major orchestras and the Kronos Quartet. Collaborators have included theater director Lee Breuer, visual artist Irving Petlin and singer Joan La Barbara. His work has been performed at the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles, Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Minnesota Opera, Aspen Music Festival, and Griffith Observatory Planetarium in Los Angeles.

Subotnick lives in New York and California, teaches at New York University and the California Institute of the Arts, and travels widely and often, presenting his music.