Don Buchla — Buchla Modular 100 — West Coast synthesizer

1965

Artists: Don Buchla · Year: 1965 · Medium: Modular electronic synthesizer — touch plates and sequencers rather than piano keyboard; West-Coast counterpart to Moog · Substrate: Discrete transistor circuits; touch-plate interfaces (no piano keys); sequencers and advanced envelope generators; voltage-control architecture · Place: Berkeley, California, USA · Institution: Buchla & Associates; San Francisco Tape Music Center (context) Donald Buchla's 100 series, built to a commission from the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1965, is the other origin of voltage-controlled synthesis — the one that chose differently from Moog at almost every fork in the road. The 100 series had no keyboard. It had touch plates. It had a sequencer (the Model 123 Sequential Voltage Source) as a central compositional tool rather than a peripheral. Its oscillators were built to modulate each other in dense cross-coupled FM arrangements that Moog's keyboard-first design did not encourage. And it was designed for composers — Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Pauline Oliveros — who did not want to play notes; they wanted to specify sequences of voltages. This is the point. The 1965 fork between Moog and Buchla is one of the most consequential design arguments in twentieth-century music. Moog's instrument said: the synthesizer is a new kind of keyboard instrument; anything pianists can do, you can now do with new timbres. Buchla's said: the synthesizer is a new kind of compositional machine; you will no longer perform notes, you will program processes. The Moog won the pop-music lineage. The Buchla won the academic/studio lineage — and, through figures like Subotnick (Silver Apples of the Moon, 1967) and Suzanne Ciani (the first purely Buchla-based advertising-music career, from 1974 forward), it won the generative-sequence lineage that this archive cares about. Subotnick's 1967 Silver Apples was composed entirely on the Buchla 100, with no keyboard input; every pitch, every gate, every envelope was set on the instrument's sequencer and touch plates. The compositional unit was no longer the note but the sequence — a small graph of pitch-voltage, time-voltage, and trigger-voltage that the machine would iterate. This is algorithmic music. It is also, operationally, a direct cousin of the first algorithmic drawings being made at the same moment on plotters in Stuttgart. Buchla continued to build his own instruments for the rest of his life, never scaling or licensing. The 200e system of 2004 remained, at the level of interface and philosophy, the same instrument. Lore Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick paid for the first Buchla 100 with $500 they had received from a Rockefeller Foundation grant. The total instrument cost about $3,000; Buchla built it in his house over several months, delivered it by hand to the Tape Music Center, and refused to take orders for another one until the first had been used hard enough to prove the design. Suzanne Ciani, who learned on the 200 series in the 1970s, once said that the Buchla did not so much let you play music as invite you to enter into an argument with an instrument that had strong opinions. Buchla himself disliked keyboards on philosophical grounds and would not put them on his synths; the few keyboard-equipped Buchlas that exist were all third-party additions. Sources • Pinch, Trevor; Trocco, Frank — Analog Days (Harvard, 2002). • Subotnick, Morton — interview transcripts, Library of Congress Music Division. • Buchla & Associates — Model 100 series technical documentation, Columbia University Music Library.