An electronic live wire

Morton Subotnick is a little amused and a little alarmed. He’s about to turn 70 and he’s hearing too much about “grandfathers” and “gurus,” as in “Morton Subotnick, grandfather of electronica” or “Morton Subotnick, guru of electronic music.”

“I don’t know about ‘guru’ or ‘grandfather,’ ” he says by phone from Manhattan, one half of his home bases (the other is in Newhall).

“We’re talking about my 70th birthday. I used to think that was old. I know that it’s far along in one’s life in the sense that you have fewer years to live than you’ve lived. But outside of that, I don’t feel old. I feel a part of everything that is going on. I feel great,” he says, laughing.

Subotnick is one of classical music’s most determined forward thinkers, and now as always, he would rather be aimed at whatever comes next. He is headed to Phoenix to monitor a test group of children trying out his third interactive music-education CD-ROM, “Hearing Music.” (On his related Creating Music Web site, he appears as a kindly cartoon visage, half-mad scientist, half-mad conductor.)

Then on to California Institute of the Arts -- where he teaches every fall in the music school he co-founded -- and a concert Wednesday in celebration of his April 14 birthday. Like his other birthday concerts (another comes in May with the E.A.R. Unit in L.A.), this one will offer a look back at works from the past but, always, also a look ahead. In this case, a homage from a former student will have its premiere and Subotnick will show off a snippet of a computer-aided work in progress, “Gestures.” In finished form, “Gestures” will be one of the opening attractions at CalArts’ REDCAT space at Walt Disney Concert Hall in November.

Just beyond that, Subotnick is trying, as he has for a few years, to perfect playing music on all kinds of instruments by remote control, the art of being in two places at once.

In fact, the thing that keeps Subotnick going is the pointed pursuit of his own imagination. Every once in a while, musical technology catches up to what he’s been dreaming about.

“What I’m doing is sitting around with this parcel of ideas, starting in 1961. They keep coming. It doesn’t end: Ideas pop into my head of where I would like to go with technology and then waiting for the technology to get there.”

“Experiment is art” might not be too strong a credo for Subotnick. To find your own voice, he counsels, “go to the edge, to the areas that haven’t been touched.”

An experimental bent

Subotnick is an L.A. native, the son of a mandolinist. He studied clarinet and 12-tone theory while still at North Hollywood High, then went on to USC and later to Mills College, where he studied with the boundary-crossing, ever-theatrical Darius Milhaud. He points to 1961 -- by then he was teaching at Mills and about to co-found the San Francisco Tape Music Center -- as the point at which he took a left turn from the musical mainstream and never looked back. The world of physical instruments and markings on manuscript paper seemed obsolete, and Subotnick traded it in for early synthesizers, tape loops and “sound and light” experiments.

He zoomed into public consciousness with “Silver Apples of the Moon” in 1967, the first commercially widely available all-electronic record, commissioned by Nonesuch Records. By then he was doing multimedia experiments in an art space in New York City and for Lincoln Center. The success of “Silver Apples,” created on the relatively prehistoric Buchla modular synthesizer, sealed his fate as a musical futurist.

“It was a big success in a very small place,” he says, referring to the esoteric world of electronic music, “but there were reviews. People were saying things like ‘This is a new art form.’ ”

His vision he says, “got validated. It was a moment that allowed that whole thing to crystallize for me.”

Subotnick looks back at the landmark work as his grappling with the medium of the LP. At the same time, he was never content -- “not from Day One” -- with “tape music,” electronic effects created and recorded in the studio, then played back in a dark concert hall. Instead, he wanted to mix live “natural” sound with electronics, to make the new medium an instrument among instruments, to create sound theater.

Subotnick has been there, done that with all kinds of sound breakthroughs: using what’s called SMPTE code to sync sound to film, playing with the connectivity of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), moving into laptops and using the interactive power of the Internet.

One habit is to take one work and keep evolving it as the technology evolves. “Jacob’s Room,” one of his most important pieces, began in 1985 as a piece for one voice plus the Kronos Quartet. By 1993 it was a multimedia experiment in “languages” -- traditional musical languages, abstract sounds on tape and manipulated through computer, live sung language, and visual language, in the form of video.

Other works explored one or another of these areas. The 1993 “Jacob’s Room” was the first work “where everything got put into it. It was the fulfillment of a trajectory that started in 1961, in one piece.”

His evolutionary tinkering continues. The work in progress, “Gestures,” takes off from a DVD and CD released two years ago and is part of his fascination with interactivity. The release is set up so that whoever buys the disc can “conduct” the work via mouse. The programming, says Subotnick, reads “a slow, gentle gesture or a vibrant one, and it gives you music appropriately. As you pass the mouse around the screen, it remixes it and does all sorts of things. It’s completely open-ended.”

And how is it evolving? At REDCAT, variations on “Gestures” will be run through three laptops, accompanied by projections and disseminated via surround sound.

Performing by remote control

For Subotnick, the next big thing is solving one of the ideas he’s been thinking about for years: presenting simultaneous, multi-city performances of instruments triggered by performers in another location.

For a few years, he conducted experiments that involved Santa Monica’s Electronic Cafe, with simultaneous setups and audiences at sites in Santa Fe, New York and even Europe, based around the digital Yamaha Disklavier. “I stopped because the technology just wasn’t there yet,” he says. The Internet connection was just too slow.

Now, he wants to do much more than trigger a digital instrument through digital means. He wants to find a way to “perform” on remote traditional instruments.

“It’s a magical notion,” he says. “We all grew up under the sign of McLuhan. Every medium has a message. I like to use Chopin as an example. He was really one of the first composers to use the message of the piano.”

If Subotnick can make his medium -- technology -- work remote-control magic, like Chopin and the piano, he will have done something meaningful. And that’s not nearly as far as he’d like to go. It’s not “really new.”

For that, he’s looking to his students, and to kids growing up immersed in all the “beautiful technology, who say, ‘Gee, what can I do with it?’ ” That, he says, is a very different tack from his own “Wow, now I can do X and Y” approach.

“That’s why I’m doing the kids’ programs, to give kids at the beginning the chance at creativity that they ordinarily wouldn’t have gotten their hands on.

“No one on a laptop is going to replace a symphony orchestra,” Subotnick adds, laughing. “The piano didn’t replace the orchestra. I think we’re talking about new art, new thought, new feelings, new participation.”

And when will the future hit? “I would guess you’ve got another two generations before you even begin to see what might be the early evolution of a new form of music.”

But he’s not waiting for it to happen. Between the pace of technology and the skill 70 years of practice provides, experimenting only gets easier.

“Whereas it took me 30 years to do ‘Jacob’s Room,’ I’m actually getting closer, faster to focused works, works that take these ideas and find the message that is appropriate, and complete it in a form that I feel comfortable with. It’s a nice time.”

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Morton Subotnick Birthday Concerts

Who: CalArts New Century Players

When: Wednesday, 8 p.m.

Where: Roy O. Disney Music Hall, CalArts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia

Price: Free

Contact: (661) 255-1050

Also

Who: California E.A.R. Unit

When: May 21, 8 p.m.

Where: Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Price: $17

Contact: (877) 522-6225