Providing 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.

The four sequencer rows are designed to work melodically and harmonically. Tell us about your composition process and how these sequences came to be. Was there a moment you decided they should not change and follow you throughout your whole career?

Laughing out loud. In those days, I had a great big sequencer with 4 rows of 16 knobs, and I could design the sequences in situ, listening to them as I made them. Because of the National Endowment paper, those particular sequences got documented. Other than that paper, I never documented anything. So, oddly, when I came back to live performance, I referenced the paper and adopted those sequences. I call them “raw material.” They get transformed so much in a performance that I’ve never felt the need to change them. Also, they work really well together.

Buchla was notoriously agnostic about control interfaces, building touch plates, touch keyboards, and mechanical keyboards. As a trained pianist, how did you receive this? What was your relationship with the 237 Polyphonic Keyboard, which is involved in the Cookbook?

Buchla trained me early on that the traditional keyboard was “an inappropriate interface.” I took that to heart and hardly touched a piano in those years. I was very conscious of the difficulty he had presenting his ideas to the community…that people didn’t understand and you had to be very clear about things. The traditional keyboard was the enemy. I became a staunch proponent of communicating his ideas. The 237 came about, I think, because Buchla wanted to show polyphony…he created the possibility of polyphony, though it wasn’t true polyphony. I never used the keyboard to play chords but found other interesting ways to use the design.

The Cookbook is unusual in that it documents patches and transitions between them, as a blueprint for live performance. Was the idea of live electronic performance being discussed in the avant-garde circles around you, or were you working that out largely alone?

There was no awareness of electronic live performance in my “avant-garde circles.” I thought Phillip Glass should be using a Buchla to perform his mechanistic patterns that humans played like machines. He wasn’t adaptable to it. Steve Reich thought that such electronic instruments should be “sent to the moon.” Vladimir Ussachevsky came to my concert at Phil Niblock’s loft. Ilhan Mimoroglou gave me my first American record deal at Atlantic/Finnadar. These were both electronic composers, but we were using different media