Efr?n del Valle<efrendv@yahoo.es> asked:
Does anyone own/has seen Subotnick's "Electronic Works" DVD and would care to comment? It looks pretty interesting, I'd just need a bit of encouragement to order it!
Hi Efren, I like Subotnick's work quite well, but the DVD package is an odd one, so you'll need to consider whether it's worth getting the DVD over the CD. The CD has good stereo recordings of three works by Subotnick: Touch (1969); A Sky of Cloudless Suphur (1978) & Gestures (1999-2000). The two earlier pieces are for electronics alone, Gestures: It Begins With Colors includes Joan La Barbara's voice amidst the electronics (BTW, this recording seems to be only one of the work's four sections). (For both the CD & DVD versions of the music Subotnick went back to the original masters and made new stereo and multi-channel mixes. &, FWIW, you might should note that the multi-channel mixes for these pieces were made for four equal speakers, rather than the common DVD 5.1 setup with smaller back speakers.) The DVD is pressed on both sides. One side has a DVD-Audio version of these works in 48Khz/24-bit sound in both stereo and surround-sound mixes. The other side is DVD-Video and it includes regular CD-quality stereo and surround-sound mixes of the three works, video interviews with Subotnick, La Barbara, Melody Sumner Carnahan (who wrote the texts), Brian Brandt (who produced the discs), & John Schaefer (a NYC radio producer). There's also an audio-only interview with Subotnick and his son about creating the interface for performing Gestures. There's also a CD-ROM version of Gestures which you can perform on your own, and in some ways this is the coolest part of the package, but can also be frustrating. You control the mix of sounds for the work by using your mouse to make gestures over various areas of the screen. (There may also be a DVD-ROM version of this on the DVD, but I don't have that kind of DVD drive & I can't tell if the screen telling me to use the CD-ROM version of the work comes up because of this or if they didn't get the DVD version of the work onto the DVD.) While I've seen several very good free-standing arrays of Max patches, Gestures may be the most sophisticated computer-interactive music interfaces readily available for people who aren't working with programs like Max/MSF or SuperCollider. The interface for Gestures is pretty powerful and quite sensitive. It parses your mouse movements into 24 levels of activity depending on the speed of the motion and it will take a while before you have much real control of the interface. Unless and until you get pretty adept at using the interface, you can't really do much that's very musical with it, certainly nothing like the recorded performance. So I guess the difference between the CD & DVD is largely a matter of how much you want to mess around with the Gestures interface. The interviews are good, too, but I don't know how much of an attraction they may be for you. Bests, Herb -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com