COMPOSITION FOR THE PRE-SCHOOL SET:
Morton Subotnick’s Making Music

by Michael Pelz-Sherman

The work of composer Morton Subotnick is well-known to aficionados of avant-garde electronic music. Although perhaps still best known for his pioneering analogue synthesis epics “Silver Apples of the Moon” (1967) and “The Wild Bull” (1968), Subotnick is one of the few composers of the “classic” analogue studio era to have stayed on the “bleeding edge” of technology while other composers either abandoned electronic music altogether or remained married to the now-traditional tape-music paradigm.

In recent years, Subotnick’s attentions have turned to the emerging medium of CD-ROM: compact discs which can be read by computers and which may contain graphics, sounds, and software programs. The CD-ROM format, now well-established in the marketplace, holds great potential to become a new medium for other composers as well. Few composers seem to be exploring this avenue, however. Although Subotnick’s “All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis,” based on the artwork of Max Ernst, debuted in 1991 to rave reviews, it has had virtually no successors.

Subotnick’s latest effort seems to be an attempt to reach out to children in hopes that by stimulating their imaginations with a high-tech musical toy, they might grow up to be more interested in new music. Published by Voyager, Inc. (an innovative company known in music-education circles for its brilliant titles based on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”), “Making Music” lists at $39.95, and is recommended for children aged 3 and above. The interface is strictly icon-based, with no menus to negotiate or commands to type. Installing the software is extremely simple, at least on a Macintosh. (Running the program on a PC-compatible computer under Windows will require a sound card capable of fairly advanced sound synthesis. Installation is much more difficult on a PC, and the sound quality much more variable and most likely inferior to Apple’s QuickTime Musical Instruments technology, which uses samples of real instruments rather than synthesizer algorithms.)

“Making Music” provides four peripheral activities: “Building Blocks,” “Mix ’n Match,” “Melody & Rhythm Maker,” and “Games,” which supplement the central composing space. All of the “Games” involve trying to distinguish differences between randomly-generated melodies. Kids can also create their own test melodies using the “Melody & Rhythm Maker.”

In “Building Blocks,” children arrange short sections of precomposed melodies (graphically represented as actual wooden building blocks) along a time line, and then play back the resulting “composition.” The preset tunes in this activity have been designed to correspond conceptually to the categories of “beginning, middle, and ending,” which are represented by the head, body, and tail of various animals — a simple and effective way to teach linear musical structure. Whether kids will get the connection between the animal body parts and the sound of the music is hard to say. There are no constraints on which body part goes where, so the users are allowed to make compositional “mistakes,” if you will, without receiving any feedback about their choices.

The “Mix ‘n Match” activity allows the child to create variations on short melodies by flipping through different pitch, rhythm, and timbre combinations, represented by “flip book”-style pictures of torsos, legs, and instruments of a virtual child. The intuitive mapping of pitch to the upper body and rhythm to the lower body helps teach these concepts. A similar separation of pitch and rhythm is presented in the “Melody & Rhythm Maker” section. Birds on telephone wires of different heights represent pitch, and hatching chicks represent rhythm. The child can compose pitch and rhythm separately and then have the program combine them. Whether or not this makes sense from a pedagogical standpoint, it is certainly fun to watch the birds “fly” down off the wires and become notes on a piano-roll “staff.”

The main attraction of “Making Music” is the central composing space, where children can “paint” a composition onto a piano-roll staff. The child can “zoom out” to get a “bird’s eye view” of the entire piece. The music can be edited very easily, and fragments can be easily stored for later retrieval. Finished compositions can be saved in a virtual composition book. Several operations can be performed on the notes painted onto the staff: transposition, repetition, augmentation and diminution, retrograde and inversion, and dynamic levels can all be affected by simply clicking on icons. Notes of different timbres, chosen from an instrumental “palette,” appear in different colors. There is also an excellent “scale editor” which lets kids design their own scales — my favorite feature!

“Making Music” is a superb musical toy, in the highest sense of the word. It is without question one of the best-crafted products of its kind on the market — a fun and easy way for kids to be exposed to the pleasures of composing at a very early age. It does have some important shortcomings, however. It does not deal with harmony or meter at all, for example. Kids will find it extremely difficult to create familiar-sounding music, because (unlike Laurie Spiegel’s “Music Mouse” or Broderbund’s “Jam Session”) the software does not provide any structure in these areas. Contrary to some of the hype surrounding this product and others like it, the use of piano-roll “notation” does not instantly enable non-musicians to understand or create music. In fact, certain musical relationships (such as pitch-class equivalence) are obscured by piano-roll notation. Furthermore, some important musical functions (such as modulation into a new key) are precluded by the software, which only allows one “scale” per piece.

My primary criticism of “Making Music,” however, is that it presents children with an extremely isolationist model of music making. The computer’s role as “performer” is taken for granted. And as if making music with a computer weren’t lonely enough, isolation is reinforced by the almost complete absence of any references to the history and literature of composition. A product like this has the opportunity, if not the responsibility, to teach children something about the broader cultural context of music-making. It would be great, for example, if the “Building Blocks” section contained some examples of actual compositions which used this technique. The examples used in the Games could also be taken from music literature (and identified as such) rather than generated randomly. Having some examples by living composers which could be loaded into the main composition space would be motivational as well as informative. Finally, it would be nice if the program offered an easy way for kids to share their compositions with one another in digital form. Especially with today’s global computer networks, I could envision students from all over the world sharing pieces they had created with each other, or perhaps collaborating on pieces. All of these things could make the experience of using “Making Music” a lot closer to the real thing. Hopefully, Mr. Subotnick will address some of these issues in his forthcoming release from Voyager, “Making More Music,” which is intended for older kids with more musical training.

For more information on Morton Subotnick and “Making Music,” grab your nearest World Wide Web surfboard and check out these URLs:

http://newalbion.com:70/artists/subotnickm/subotnickm.html

http://www.voyagerco.com.

Or telephone Voyager at (800) 446-2001.

Michael Pelz-Sherman is a Minneapolis composer, multimedia developer, computer programmer, and technology consultant.