LAURIE SPIEGEL: GRASSROOTS TECHNOLOGIST

By Frank J. Oteri on November 1, 2014

A conversation in Spiegels Lower Manhattan loft

September 9, 20143:00 p.m.
Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra Gardner
Transcription by Julia Lu
People often speak about computers and technology as though these things are
completely antithetical to nature and tradition, though this is largely a false
dichotomy. Electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel began her musical life as a folk
guitar player and has never abandoned that music. But she fell in love with machines
the first time she saw a mainframe tape-operated computer at Purdue University on a
field trip there with her high school physics class and has been finding ways to
humanize them in her own musical compositions and software development ever
since. She sees a lot of common ground between the seemingly oppositional
aesthetics of folk traditions and the digital realm. In fact, when we met up with her
last month in her Lower Manhattan loft crammed full of computers, musical
instruments, and toys of all sorts, she frequently spoke about how in her world view
the computer is actually a folk instrument.
The electronic model is very similar to the folk model, she insists. People will come
up with new lyrics for the same melody, or theyll change it from a ballad to a dance

piece. Nobody can remember what the origin is. There is no single creator. In the
way that electronic sounds go aroundpeople sample things, they do remixes or
sampling, they borrow snatches of sound from each others piecesthe concept of a
finite fixed-form piece with an identifiable creator that is property and a medium of
exchange or the embodiment of economic value really disappears in similar ways.
Prior to electronic instruments, you had to go through the bottleneck of written
notation. So electronic music did for getting things from the imagination to the ears
of an audience what the internet later did for everybody being able to self-publish,
democratizing it in ways that obviously have pros and cons.
A realist as well as an idealist, Spiegel is well aware of the cons as well as the pros of
our present digitally saturated society. [W]hen I was young, she recalls, You had a
great deal of time to focus on what was happening in your mind and information
could proliferate, amplify itself, and take form in your imagination without that much
interruption from outside. Our culture is at this point full of people who are focused
outward and are processing incoming material all the time. Would somebody feel a
desire to hear a certain kind of thing and go looking for it? Would they hear
something inside their head and want to hear it in sound? It seems that people are
fending off a great deal now. The dominant process is overload compensation: how
can I rule out things that I dont want to focus on so that I can ingest a manageable
amount of information and really be involved in it. Information used to be the scarce
commodity. Attention is now the scarce commodity.
The imagination is very important to Spiegel. It is what has fueled her pioneering
sonic experiments such as her haunting microtonal Voices Within: A Requiem from
1979 or her landmark 1974 Appalachian Grove created at Bell Labs soon after she
returned from the mountains in western North Carolina where she traveled with my
banjo over one shoulder and my so-called portable reel-to-reel tape recorder over
the other shoulder, listening to and enjoying older music and the culture that comes
from early music. It is also why she created the Music Mouse computer software, a
tool that transformed early personal computers such as the Mac, Atari, and
Commodore Amiga into fully functional musical instruments and idea generators for
musical compositions. It also led her to create a realization of Johannes Keplers
Music of the Spheres, the 17th-century German astronomers conversion of
planetary motion into harmonic ratios; this electronic score and a song by Chuck

Berry is the only music by living composers that was sent into outer space on the two
Voyager spacecrafts. (Although Spiegel insists that her realization, which was
included as part of Sounds of the Earth rather than Music of the Earth, is not her
musical composition.)
But perhaps even more important to Spiegel than the imagination is emotional
engagement. I always wanted to make music that was beautiful and emotionally
meaningful, she explained. The emotional level is the level at which I am primarily
motivated and always have been. Im still the teenage girl who, after a fight with my
father, would take my guitar out on the porch and just play to make myself feel better.
Thats who I am musically. I kind of knew what I liked as a listener, and what I liked
was music that would express emotions that I didnt have a way of expressing, where
somebody understood me and expressed in their music what I was feeling in ways
that I couldnt express myself. So, to some degree, I think I see the role of the
composer as giving vicarious self-expression to people, although at this point, with
the technology we have, theres no reason for anybody who wants to make music not
to be able to.
*

Laurie Spiegels equipment in 1980. Photo by Carlo Carnivali, courtesy Laurie

Spiegel.
Frank J. Oteri: The meta-narrative of electronic music, and technological
developments overall, is that we went from big anti-personal mainframe computers
that took up entire buildings to home computers to handhelds and even smaller.

Laurie Spiegel: And I went that whole journey. I started using punch cards and
paper tape. The first computer I ever saw was at Purdue University in Lafayette,
Indiana, when I was in high school. I went down there for a weekend and they had a
tape-operated computer on which I attempted to do an assignment for my high school
physics class. In this class there was me and just one other girl. All of the others were
guys, and the teacher really thought we didnt belong there. It was just so weird. But I
always loved science.
FJO: But before you got involved with making music with electronics, you were a
guitar player and the acoustic guitar is one of the smallest, most intimate instruments
that one can play by oneself and have a full sound, all alone. So it seemed to me like
theres a connection between that and how electronic music came to be made on
smaller and smaller devices.
LS: Personal and private are important aspects of music to me. When I was little, I
started with a plastic ukulele which was even smaller. Then my grandmother, who
was from Lithuania, played mandolin, and she gave me a mandolin when I was maybe
nine years old or so. That had the advantage that I could keep it under my bed and
take it out at night and play it quietly with nobody hearing me playing it. I had the
total freedom to just improvise and make stuff up. I dont think I even told anybody
when she gave it to me. It was like my secret instrument, my private means of
expression whereas the piano in the living room was this large, sacred object where
everybody in the house heard you and didnt necessarily want to hear kids practicing.
The guitar was similarly private, and I could play it in my room. The freedom of not
being heard, for a person whos basically somewhat self-conscious, is really
important, and so is the portability.

Despite having computers and other electronic musical instruments from half a
century scattered throughout her loft, Laurie Spiegel still loves to play the guitar.
I used to take the guitar with me everywhere I went during high school, college, young
adulthood, up until I hit classical music circles and discovered that a lot of the people
who were studying music, and were the best at it, didnt seem to do it for personal
enjoyment. They were so serious about it. In the folk music-type circles and
improvising circles, people would bring their instruments with them and people
jammed all the time. But once I hit Juilliard, I didnt find that people really did that
kind of stuff. They didnt improvise. They were seriously working on their trills. And
they were seriously working on their performance pieces. It wasnt integrated into
their lives the same way as for amateurs who really love music. I guess I still regard
myself somewhat as an amateur, just doing it for the love of it really, which is the
technical definition of that word. Ive always been an improviser too, which electronic
instruments were perfect for because you were actually interacting live with the sound
in electronic music; whereas, when I write music on paper, for instruments, I dont
get to hear it, or not for a long time, or not while Im working on it. Of course, thats
no longer true because all the notation software now lets you hear stuff while youre
working on it, and you know that a rhythm isnt what you meant right away. But in
the old days, when I was learning notated composing, it was in your head.

FJO: Its interesting that that came much later for you though, long after you were
playing music.
LS: I was playing music, I was improvising, I was making stuff up, and at a certain
point I wanted to learn to write things down so I wouldnt forget them. So I started
trying to teach myself to write stuff down. One of my roommates in the house that I
lived in pointed out to me that they call that composing. You make things up and
write them down. I was living in England and studying philosophy and history, doing
a social sciences degree basically. I said, No, Im not composing. Im just writing
things down so that I dont forget them. Im not a composer. But eventually it
became undeniable, and composing took over.
FJO: And so the social sciences became less of a concern for you once music took
over?
LS: No, it never really went away. Im still very interested in politics, sociology,
economics, statistics, anthropology, psychology, all that stuff, and animals. Im a
complete sucker for animals.
FJO: But it was still a transition. You were at Oxford and then you were studying
with John Duarte.
LS: In London, during the second year that I was over there. He was probably the
perfect teacher for me. He had a partly classical, partly folk, and partly jazz
background. He taught me counterpoint and theory and a bit about composing, as
well as classical guitar. Once a week I would take the train into London for the
weekend and spend a whole day in his house. And we stayed in touch. Much later,
when he was in his 80s, he started to learn to use personal computers and began
doing his composing directly into the computer. It was amazing. He was an English
composer not obsessed with avant-gardism, firmly rooted in some kind of folkfolk is
not a general enough word, but a grassroots sense of musical meaningfulness, or
maybe it is more accurate to say he was connected to tradition very organically and
naturally in his music, like quite a few other British composers. I identify with that.

Laurie Spiegel in the early 1970s. Photo by Louis Forsdale, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.
FJO: So thats a very different experience from then enrolling in a composition
program at Juilliard, of all places.
LS: Yeah, well, I was completely not expecting the dominance of the post-Webernite,
serialist, atonal, blip and bleep school of music. I wasnt interested in that. I mean, I
knew what I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn harmony, structure, form, process,
history, and repertoire, lots of stuff. But it wasnt really considered cool to be
interested in learning to write tonal music. I remember a teacherwho shall remain
namelesswho, when I brought in a piece in E minor for guitar, said, Hmm, key
signature. Doesnt mean for sure that you dont have any musical imagination, but its
not a good sign.
It was so much more uptight then. I was in a way intellectually prepared for it because
at Oxford there was a comparable phenomenon going on. The logical positivists were
in charge talking about how many definitions can dance on the head of a whatever.
I was more interested in phenomenologists and Asian philosophy, and all kinds of
stuff that was about the opposite of the dominant philosophers at Oxford at the time.
Logical positivism is divorced from gut feelings, which were my personal link to
music. As a teenager, when I was miserable I would take my guitar out on the porch

and play and express my emotions. And when I heard great classical repertoire, it
could vicariously express emotion for me. And so music was really about emotion. It
was also about structure, because I love structure. Thats the computer programmer
in me. So the things that I was most attracted to in music were slightly at odds with
the music that was in with the dominant power structure when I went to Juilliard.
Then there were also all these child prodigies wandering around. I already had
finished a degree in the social sciences. I was older, which made me immediately
suspect because its a highly child prodigy-oriented atmosphere; if you werent
discovered by 12, you were a has-been. But there were a number of things that saved
me from giving up and going crazy. One was that through electronic music I was able
to create music people could hear and I became active in the Downtown scene while I
was still up there. And people liked my work. I played music in other peoples
ensembles, played guitar or banjo or whatever for Tom Johnson and with Rhys
Chatham. I would do these filigree patterns, and Rhys would do these long drone-like
lines against the stuff. That balanced it. Also I was making a living. I got a job with a
small company that did educational films and filmstrip soundtracks. I composed all of
their soundtracks for, I think, three and a half years or about that, and it paid
decently. And again, when you do soundtracks, all that really matters is emotional
content, and to a lesser degree the style. Its the opposite of the aesthetic that was
dominant uptown with Boulez, Wuorinen, and Milton Babbitt, although I liked
Milton and a lot of these people. I was friendly with and hung out with the Speculum
Musicae people, but our musical tastes were just in contrast to each other.
FJO: But your primary teacher at Juilliard was Jacob Druckman, who was really all
over the map aesthetically.
LS: Yeah, boy, Jake was amazing. I was also his assistant and spent a lot of time in
his house up in Washington Heights. I proofread the parts for Windows. He let me
use his extra studio time when he wasnt using it at the Columbia Princeton Studios,
so I got to know Vladimir [Ussachevsky] and Otto Luening pretty well, and of course
Alice [Shields] and Pril [Smiley]. I have a reel of pieces I recorded up there that at
some point Ill transfer and see what they sound like.
FJO: Id love to hear those!

LS: I also studied with Vincent Persichetti, who was a wonderful teacher. He really
did his best to try to help each of his students find themselves individually and learn
to make the music that they personally wanted to make. He didnt push you in any
direction. He didnt want to create a clone of himself, unlike some of the teachers
there, and he was great. And I also had some lessons with Hall Overton, who
appreciated that I was one of the very few students there who could improvise and
enjoy it. But at the same time, I was going downtown to meet Mort Subotnick and
visit his studio when it was still upstairs from the Bleecker Street Cinema. I fell in love
with the Buchla, so I was doing that too. I was doing all of these different kinds of
music at once. Unlike most people who might be immersed in the atmosphere of
Juilliard, it was one of the places that I was active musically, but it wasnt the place. It
didnt dominate me.

Laurie Spiegel with various synthesizers and reel-to-reel tape recorders in the 1970s.
Photo by Louis Forsdale, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.
FJO: You played piano, but it wasnt your major instrument.
LS: No, I had to kind of begin to learn piano because it was useful for theory,
harmony, and composing and studying. And I love the repertoire, but it wasnt like

anything with strings on it, which attracted me like a magnet. But pianosI mean, I
love them, but they came later.
FJO: But in terms of compositional paradigms, a keyboard configuration creates a
certain kind of mindset. I want to discuss this more when we talk about the Music
Mouse software you developed and your algorithmic compositions. If you think in
terms of a seven-five keyboard, whether youre improvising on it or even composing
in your head and coming from a keyboard-oriented background, certain patterns are
going to emerge. And if your frame of reference is a guitar fret board, other kinds of
things are going to happen.
LS: If philosophically youre a determinist, you could say that absolutely everything is
algorithmic, but we do have a sense of free will and we do have the perception that
were making decisions. But yeah, you could argue that if everything is deterministic,
including the workings of the mind, then all music is algorithmic.
That seven-five pattern you see on the keyboard is only visible there because its the
structure of the diatonic scales that we hear. Its a pattern within the musical model
our culture is dominated by. Its not that pattern, but how it fits the hands, and the
habits of the hands that become actual reflexes, that can be limiting. They can become
so ingrained that they keep the imagination from roaming. That happens with the
guitar fretboard too, though with different patterns, and with an instrument such as
Music Mouse too, I suppose. Each instrument somehow biases our music in its own
unique direction. Some composers manage to transcend those kinds of habits, some
compose away from any instrument, others invent new instruments. But the
physiological interface is sort of an algorithmic constraint all on its own, and I would
think there are also similar cognitive constraints.

Some of the analog synthesizers in Laurie Spiegels loft.

FJO: You were telling me when we spoke the other day that there was a music
composition teacher who was so upset with you because if his students used Music
Mouse he wouldnt know if they were coming up with their own music. So when you
mentioned falling in love with the Buchla, I remembered that when we did our talk
with Morton Subotnick he said that he was very determined to avoid the standard
piano interface, that it was very important for him not for it to have that interface in
order to free peoples creativity, that you would have to deal with the instrument in a
completely new way. Otherwise the paradigm would force you into familiar patterns.
LS: I believe that was some of Schoenbergs rationale for coming up with the 12-tone
system, too. It breaks you out of all of your customary habits and the patterns that are
ingrained. Every time I pick up the guitar, my hands tend to fall into patterns of
things that Ive played before, which can be good. But you are looking for something
new when youre composing, unlike when youre just performing. Yeah, that was one
of the wonderful things about the Buchla versus the Moog and Arp and other early
electronic instruments. It was modular and there was no keyboard, and so you really
worked with timbre and texture and sonic shapes and architectures, as opposed to
falling into melody and harmony.
FJO: You came to these various pieces of equipment and youve done new things
with them, but you also wrote music that was instantly beautiful. But beauty is also
something that is in part acculturated.

LS: I always wanted to make music that was beautiful and emotionally meaningful. It
was out of fashion to do that. A lot of people were simply trying to avoid doing that at
the time, whereas I was willing to go for it. Newness was being pursued for its own
sake.
FJO: You even composed a short piano piece that addresses the whole history of
music and shows a way out of that.
LS: Oh, The History of Music in One Movement.
FJO: I love the program note you included in the score and how even though the
music is inspired by all these periods in history, every note of it is yours. There are
moments that almost get into sort of a modernist place, but it doesnt end there.
Writing something like that when modernism was acknowledged as the final phase in
musics evolution was very brave.
LS: That piece was one of the most fun composing experiences and one of the most
interesting that Ive ever had. At every point when I was writing something evocative
of a certain period, I had to sort of try to feel through what it would feel like to need to
go on to break through into what happened in the next period. I had to want the
freedoms that the next musical era took. There are many transitions in there. The
hardest part of writing that was that horrible little place where I did an actual pair of
serial rows that retrograde and invert against each other and that sound so ugly and
harsh to me. For historical accuracy, I thought I really had to put that in. And at that
point in the piece, it says Oh my God, we cant do this, and it retrogrades back and it
takes a different direction and kind of goes off into a sort of Impressionist-tinged
blues, and then into minimalism, texture, pure sonic fabric. But of course, when we
wrote that, we hadnt yet gotten to post-minimalism, whatever that means.

Two excerpts from the score of Laurie Spiegels The History of Music in One
Movement showing her version of medieval music and high modernism. Copyright
1981 by Laurie Spiegel, Laurie Spiegel Publishing (ASCAP) International Copyright
Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
FJO: Musicologists point to the late 50s and early 60s as the beginnings of
minimalism, but the 70s were really when it had its greatest impact with audiences.
In fact, its full flowering seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the sudden
availability of electronic instruments. This is also true for other kinds of music that
were evolving at that time, like prog rock.

LS: Electronic instruments gave people the freedom to create works and sound on an
unprecedented scale. Prior to electronic instruments, you had to go through the
bottleneck of written notation. You had to go through the bottleneck of a limited
number of orchestras with very conservative tendencies, because they had their
subscribers to please. Electronic instruments were a great democratizing force. Thats
one of the reasons why you began to see so many more women composers because
you could go from an idea for a piece to the point where you could actually play it for
another human being. I mean that had been true all along if you limited yourself to
writing only for the instruments you played yourself. But when it came to writing
things on an orchestral scale of sonority, to be able to realize something and then play
it for other people all on your own was a brand new phenomenon. So electronic music
did for getting things from the imagination to the ears of an audience what the
internet later did for everybody being able to self-publish, democratizing it in ways
that obviously have pros and cons. The economic models of these various ways of
getting something from the inside of my mind to the inside of someone elses mind,
for whom it would be meaningful, have been completely upset and will have to settle
down differently. Analog electronics were revolutionary, and now the digital ones are
also. Its amazing how quickly so many changes have taken place and theyre very
disorienting to a lot of people, understandably.

Laurie Spiegel at the McLeyvier Music System, an early digital synthesizer with a
computer terminal, in the early 1980s. Photo by Rob Onadera, courtesy Laurie
Spiegel.
About what you asked, minimalism and electronic instruments, it was liberating for
us players of plucked instruments and pianos to work with sustained tones. Instead of
composing additively, but writing down one tiny sound at a time, we could start with
a rich fabric of sound and subtractively sculpt form into it, or we could set up a
process and let it just slowly evolve on its own.
FJO: The other big change happened with how those electronics were situated. In the
early stages you had to be attached to some kind of university system or, if you got

lucky, you could afford a Moog or a Buchla.

LS: One the things that I think made the 70s a really special period was that
electronic instruments were too expensive for most people to own one. Sure there
were people who had their ownMort had one, Suzanne Ciani had one, a lot of rock
groups could between them get one. But for a lot of us, the way to get access to
electronic instruments was through shared studios. There was PASSthe Public
Access Synthesizer Studiowhich later evolved into Harvestworks. There was the
NYU Composers Workshop. There was WNETs Experimental TV Lab where I was a
video artist in residence for a while, though I ended up really not doing much video
but doing sound tracks for everybody elses videos. There was Morts little studio, and
its community of people upstairs from the Bleecker Street Studio. The Kitchen was
another one. The Kitchen started as a center for video and then expanded into music.
So there was community. There were interactions between people. People would meet
each other and they would get ideas and bounce ideas off each other and work
together in ways that I would think must be much more difficult to achieve now that
everyone has an extremely powerful studiobeyond our wildest dreams back then
in their bedroom or sitting on their desk. To be working in the studio and, okay, Im
coming in and Eliane Radigue is just finishing up, and she shows me what shes
doing. Then she watches me put up what Im doing, and then when Im done, Rhys
Chatham comes in and hes like, Oh, you could do this and this, and by the way, you
know, were trying this; do you want to come and play with us?I mean, things just
happened between people and I think that made the 70s a really special period, the
fact that there were so many shared studios where people worked together, interacted
with each other, commented on each others work, and helped each other with their
work, as opposed to everybody sitting by themselves in their rooms with their
computers.

Spiegel at work in the era of mainframe synthesizers. Photo by Emmanuel Ghent,

courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: Even some companies, like Bell Labs, became hotbeds of activity for composers
at that time.
LS: Well, there was no place like Bell Labs. You cant really even consider it a
company. Bell Labs was pure research with a level of autonomy given to each person
working there that probably no longer exists anywhere. There was no need to do
anything with any commercial buy in. You could do whatever you were interested in,
everyone was brilliant, and everyone was interested in stuff. You didnt last that long
or do that well at Bell Labs if you werent self-motivated and a self-starter. You were
expected to have your own ideas and be able to realize them. Im still in very close
touch with my friends from that lab. We email all the time and toss ideas around. I
just dont know if there is any other place quite like that, although I think places like
Apple and Google like to think they have the level of freedom that they had at the lab.
Ive never really been around them on a work-a-day basis to find out.
FJO: I love that they would just let artists come and do their thing.
LS: Well, they did and they didnt. The arts were a little on
the hushed side because of their regulated monopoly
status, and moving into the 70s, they began to be under
attack by the various powers that wanted to divide Ma
Bell into a number of small, separate, competing
companies, which ultimately did happen and was a great
loss in my opinion. They were under a certain mandate;
there were a number of considerations. One was that
everything they did should be oriented to communications

Robert Moog, Laurie Spiegel

and Max Matthews. Photo
courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

research. So when they came up with Unix and the C language, they just gave them
away for free. Another was that they were not really supposed to be doing digital
communications so much, I think, as improving existing analog telephone service. Im
not really that sure. I wasnt in the managerial level of the lab. Max Matthews was,
though; he was a fairly high-up person. He ran twelve sub-departments that did all
kinds of amazing stuff: acoustic research, speech synthesis and analysis, non-verbal
communications, various cognitive studies like studies of the characteristics of longterm versus short-term human memory and stereopsis, and in vision the study of
eiditic memory. You would just walk around or ask whoever happened to be at the

coffee machine when you were getting a cup of coffee: What do you do? and they
would tell you something absolutely fantastically fascinating that they were very
much into. It was an amazing place.
FJO: In addition to music, you were also doing video work at Bell Labs. I love the
name of the program you worked on there.
LS: VAMPIRE! (Video And Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration.) It
was a system that could only be used at night. That was the mandate. We artist types
could use the computers during the hours during which they were not in use for
legitimate Bell Telephone research.
FJO: I think my favorite work of yours from that period though is that gorgeous
Appalachian Grove.
LS: Yeah? At that point I had a graduate research fellowship starting in I think 73 at
the Institute for Studies in American Music with Wiley Hitchcock, whom I greatly
admired. Anybody who hasnt read his book, Music in the United States: An
Historical Introduction, should read it. He put me back in touch with and made me
feel better about my banjo playing and the folk level, which had been basically kind of
ridiculed in some of the other circles Id been in during that era.

Laurie Spiegel playing the banjo in October 1962. Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.
I had just been down in the mountains in western North Carolinawith my banjo
over one shoulder and my so-called portable reel-to-reel tape recorder over the
other shoulderlistening to and enjoying older music and the culture that comes
from early music. I mean, music from Europe went into those hills before the Baroque
era and evolved on its own there, amazing music. I had just come back from there
when I did Appalachian Grove and wanted to capture some of the feeling of being
down there.
The wonderful thing about being surrounded by scientists, and not being in a
computer music studio in a music department, is that a lot of scientists really love
music. They are unabashedly lovers of fine music thats meaningful in all the ways
that I find music meaningful. They go to classical concerts, and they play instruments
themselves. They love music the way ordinary people do. Whereas, something
happens when you put music into an academic context in which down the hall is a
science lab where everything has to be provable and rationalizable. You begin to get

pieces where every note needs to be able to be explained, a certain level of selfconsciousness begins to be laid on a musical experience. Im not saying that always
happens, but it seemed to be a tendency in academia during that period which was
not present at Bell Labs.
FJO: Whats nice about the re-issue of your first album, The Expanding Universe,
that came out last year is that we can finally hear all of the compositions you created
at Bell Labs.
LS: Well, most of them. I did an awful lot of stuff. Two and a half hours, or a little
more than that, was all we could fit on two CDs.
FJO: Only a tiny portion of that material was issued on the original LP, which
curiously was released by the folk music label Philo.
LS: Another thing that I keep harping on is that the computer is a folk instrument.
One of my favorite subjects in college had been anthropology. You have all these
various techniques of going into an alien society and trying to figure out whats
important. One of the techniques is to try to figure out the cultural premises, the rock
bottom assumptions that members of that culture would make. So I took a look at a
number of different distribution media for music: classical concert venues; grassroots
organizations like community sings; bands and church groups; parlor music, music
that is done at home with people gathering around a piano singing or playing guitar
together; and electronic mediaphotography, radio, and electronic music. I looked at
the characteristics of the music that is disseminated by each of these methods and
certain patterns begin to fall out.
The classical model is a finite piece of music with a fixed form that is attributable to
one creatorBeethoven, for example. But the electronic model is very similar to the
folk model. You have material that floats around and is transmitted from person to
person. Its in variable form; its constantly being transformed and modified to be
useful to whoever is working with it, the same way folk songs are. People will come up
with new lyrics for the same melody, or theyll change it from a ballad to a dance
piece. Nobody can remember what the origin is. There is no single creator. Theres no
owner. The concept of ownership doesnt come in. In the way that electronic sounds
go aroundpeople sample things, they do remixes or sampling, they borrow snatches

of sound from each others piecesthe concept of a finite fixed-form piece with an
identifiable creator that is property and a medium of exchange or the embodiment of
economic value really disappears in both folk music and electronic and computer
music in similar ways.
FJO: But certainly in the earliest era of electronic music, there would be these
musique concrte and studio-generated electronic music tape pieces that are even
more fixed than a piece by Beethoven because not only is there one piece, theres only
one interpretation of it because the interpretation is a fixed form.

Laurie Spiegel with her analog synthesizer and reel-to-reel tape recorders in 1971.
Photo by Stan Bratman, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.
LS: That was pretty much true back when electronic music could only be
disseminated on reel-to-reel up until cassettes were invented, since you had to

actually own two reel-to-reel machines to make a copy and very few people did. You
would have tape concerts where you could play pieces for people or it might get on the
radio or a record as a medium of dissemination. But once there were cassettes, you
started to get people doing mixes and overdubs, excerpting things and chopping
things together. Not a lot of people did the kinds of techniques that had been used in
classic studio techniquelots of splicing and cuttingon cassette. To edit a cassette
tape is pretty unusual. Then when you got digital recording, the first wave of digital
excerpting was samplers before personal computers and the internet made other ways
more feasible. The business end of the music industry is trying very hard to make
everything identifiable and institute royalty systems and stuff. But I think, even
though Id benefit from receiving royalties, its to some degree a losing battle and a
superimposition of a model that no longer really fits. We dont have a new model yet
that provides economic support back, but maybe we dont need onebecause music
production is so much cheaper and faster.
FJO: I definitely want to talk more about these issues with you, but lets get back to
Philo. Its really unusual for them to have released an LP of electronic music. That
record proves in a way that the divide between folk music and electronic music was a
fake war that was created in part by the media overblowing some peoples negative
reactions to Dylan plugging in at 1963 Newport Folk Festival.
LS: Well, I was a folk person and a banjo person. The lowest, most grassroots
technology and the most sophisticated electronic technology you would think would
be diametrical opposites, but the fact that you can make music independently at
home, and make music locally with other people in an informal way without any of
the traditional skills such as keyboard skills and music notation, thats a great
commonality.
FJO: And some of the popular rock groups at that time were also doing some very
sophisticated stuff with electronics.
LS: Pink Floyd.
FJO: Perhaps even more so some of the German groups like Tangerine Dream and
Kraftwerk, many of whose recordings were purely electronic music without vocals or
anything else. There isnt that much of a sonic difference between some of their music

and some of the stuff on the Expanding Universe LP.

LS: Yeah, there is and there isnt. In a way, its almost closer to minimalism. Im
thinking the earlier Terry Riley pieces like Poppy Nogood and In C, which are pretty
much open form. My pieces tend to actually be relatively short and have pretty clear
forms and the processes in them tend more toward melodic evolution than repetition.
FJO: But in terms of the surface sound, I think the music on that LP could appeal to
anybody whos a fan of Tangerine Dream, and having that recording appear on Philo
rather than one of the labels that was releasing electronic music that had been created
in university settings, like CRI, seems like a reaching out to this broader audience.
LS: I have been in multiple musical worlds
simultaneously throughout most of my career.
I havent lived in the classical world, although I
still totally love classical music, probably really
the best. But none of those labels would have
had me. Philo were willing. And then Rounder
took it and kept it right up until Unseen Worlds
Records put out the CD re-release. I mean,
listen to Appalachian Grove and Patchwork
and Drums. Theyre clearly closer to a
grassroots, folk sensibility than they are to any
of the post-Webernite composers. But I did get
it through personal connections that were
more in the folk world. I had a roommate for
about 14 months, Steve Rathe of Murray Street
Productions, who was at that point working for
NPR. He decided to move to New York and

Laurie Spiegel playing the electric guitar at a

NAMM showcase in Anaheim in the late
1980s. Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

stayed here for 2 weeks until he could find a

place, which turned into 14 months, which was actually great. I like him a lot. And he
connected me up with Philo. He went to them and said, You gotta hear this stuff.
Thats how that really happened. He still invites bunches of people over to his loft to
just have an old fashioned country music evening with banjos and fiddles, and I play
banjo or fiddle or guitar at those.

FJO: Youve never gone over to one of these things and played with Music Mouse.
LS: No. Music Mouse doesnt work like that. I have jammed playing Music Mouse,
but it doesnt lend itself well to playing with other people, because it tends to not be
good for standard chord changes.
FJO: Now in terms of how worlds opened up, Im curious about how your music
wound up getting sent into outer space on Voyager.

The gold-plated Sounds of Earth Record containing Laurie Spiegels realization of

Johannes Keplers Harmonices Mundi and its gold-aluminum cover (left). Photo by
NASA (Public Domain). A copy of this record was sent into outer space on both the
Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts in 1977. The cover was designed to protect the record
from micrometeorite bombardment and also provides a potential extra-terrestrial
finder a key to playing the record. The explanatory diagram appears on both the inner
and outer surfaces of the cover, as the outer diagram will be eroded in time.
LS: I was visiting friends up in Woodstock on a lovely summers afternoon, and
somehow a phone call got forwarded to me and they said, Were with NASA, and we
would like to use some of your work for the purpose of contacting extraterrestrial
life. And I said, What kind of a crank call is this? If youre really from NASA, send
something to my address on NASA letterhead. Okay, goodbye. And they did, which
really surprised me.
There are a number of algorithmic works. One type might start with a truly logical

progression that generates the information for a piece. Another kind is to use the
patterns we find in nature and translate those into the auditory modality, like the
Kepler piece [which is what was put on Voyager]. Kepler of course didnt have the
means to do that back in the 16th century. But we do.
FJO: And so you realized that.
LS: Yeah, yeah. Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, and Carl Sagan liked it for the opening
cut on the Sounds from Earth record. There are two records on Voyager. One is Music
from Earth. Its not in the music part. Its in the Sounds from Earth.
FJO: Thats always bothered me.
LS: No. It really is simply a translation into sound of the angular velocities of the
planets. Its a transcription really. I dont think of it as a composition. Its an
orchestration I did, and I think I did a good one, because I have listened to some
other ones and they seem rather dry and academic sounding; whereas, I somehow,
being me, managed to get some sense of feeling into the ways that I mixed it and the
pace at which I let it unfold, and the decisions I made such as only including the
planets that were known during Keplers times instead of all of the planets we later
came to know.
FJO: There was an LP that came out of another realization of Keplers Harmony of
the World in the late 70s, and in that realization the other three additional planets
discovered after Keplers lifetime were represented as percussion tracks. There is
some similarity between that recording and what you did.
LS: Its the same solar system.
FJO: But still I hear your sensibility in your version somehow.
LS: But its not an original piece by me. If anybody composed it, it was Kepler who
created this score, or as Kepler would have said, Its a composition by God rendered
audible to man, although I dont know if he really believed in God. His mother was
almost burnt at the stake as a witch.
FJO: That leads us into this whole question of who can claim compositional
ownership of algorithmic compositions.

LS: Well, if the piece is generated by a process then whoever creates the process you
would think composes the piece. It gets more complicated when its an interactive
algorithmic situation. I have never called Music Mouse an algorithmic music
generator. Its interactive. Its an intelligent instrument, an instrument with a
certain amount of music intelligence embedded in it, mostly really by a model of what
I would call music space music theory, rhythmic structures, and orchestrational
parameters that one can interact with. If someone composes with that, to some
degree, its a remote collaboration because there is certain decision making I put into
that program that theyre stuck with. And the rest of it is up to them. So there is
decision making from both me and them, in that the computer is really almost
passive. I would say it only does what you tell it to in simple situations like Music
Mouse. In complex situations such as the entire world internet system, things become
so complex that things will happen that the system was not instructed to do. But
thats on a different scale from a program where you actually describe a process of
music generation, or a program such as Music Mouse, where if you do exactly the
same thing you will always get exactly the same result, as with other instruments.

Music Mouse running under the STEEM Atari STe Emulator on a Windows Vista PC.
Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.

FJO: Allow me to play devils advocate.

LS: Go for it.
FJO: Even if youre creating music on a piano, there are things that are built into that
piano that sort of predetermine the kind of things you can do with it.
LS: Sure, each instrument really does have an aesthetic domain. You obviously cant
do the same music with a flute and with a harp. But you say that you could hear my
sensibility in the Kepler. You probably hear a related sensibility when you listen to my
piano pieces or my orchestral writing.
FJO: Yes.
LS: So the medium interacts certainly with the individual person expressing
themselves through the medium. Its sort of a collaboration between a structure and a
person.
FJO: Well, the reason Im bringing this up is the story you told me last week about a
music composition teacher being upset with you because your software made it
difficult for him to know if his students were actually composing the music he
assigned them to write.
LS: I wrote Music Mouse for my own use, and then I showed it to people and they
wanted copies of it, and then they showed it to people, and it got to the point where
more people wanted copies of it than I could sit down and explain how to use it to and
so I wrote a manual. Then it kept snowballing, and it needed a publisher, so I gave it
to Dave Oppenheim at OpCode to publish. And then a lot more people had it. At one
point, later when Dr. Ts Music Software were publishing it, Music Mouse was
bundled with [Commodore] Amiga computers, and something like 10,000 copies of it
shipped. A lot of people used that program.
So I began to get feedback back from all manner of people who I didnt know. The
program was in many contexts I had never dreamed it would be in. So I get a
somewhat upset letter from a college music teacher telling me that because of my
program, he doesnt know how to grade his students. He cant tell if they know
harmony, or theyre relying on my software for the harmony that theyre using in the

compositional exercises theyre submitting to him. What is he supposed to do about

that? How is he supposed to grade them? Music isnt really something thats supposed
to be graded anyway. But yeah, a lot of unexpected and interesting things happened
as a result of that program going out in the world on such a large scale.

Floppy discs for two of Laurie Spiegels software programs, Music Mouse and MIDI
Terminal, as issued in the 1980s. Photo courtesy Laurie Spiegel.
FJO: One of the things that I find fascinating about it is it can help you get out of
habits that you had.
LS: I used to call it an idea generator. Youre certainly not going to be able to do
anything you ever did on a keyboard or guitar, and you will be doing other kinds of
things. And youll be focusing not on the level of the individual notes, but on the
shapes of the phrases and the architecture of the musical gesture. It forces you to
conceptualize on a larger scale. Music composing often really bogs down at the level
of the note, and people lose perspective and they muddle around. If its really
beautifully done, you can be utterly fascinated and transfixed by whats happening on
the level of the notes. But you also find an awful lot of pieces that seem to just kind of
go on and on and wander around because the person creating them has lost
perspective in terms of an overall form. Music Mouse orients you to think on a
slightly larger scale of the phrase or the gesture. Of course, you can still wander
around, making a mess for a really long time. Weve all done that. But its an

improvising instrument and its a brainstorming instrument.

FJO: In terms of how it affected your own composition process, are there things in
your music that are different before Music Mouse and after Music Mouse?
LS: Music Mouse had things in common with the various FORTRAN IV and C
programs I wrote at Bell Labs, but I cant begin to say how much the orchestration of
electronic sounds that could be dealt with in real time changed in a single decade. I
mean, you talk about 1975 when I was doing pieces like Patchwork at Bell Labs. In
1985, I was doing pieces like Cavis Muris and the orchestration of real-time electronic
sounds, real-time digital sounds, was just light years more advanced. Its amazing
what happened orchestrationally in that decade with the development of real-time
digital audio.
FJO: I love the back story of Cavis Muris.
LS: Im very fond of mice actually. There was a little family of mice living in the loft at
that point. But the mouse of Music Mouse initially was the mouse input device of the
early Apple Macintosh. It occurred to me, when I got my first Mac. It was not the very
first one, the very limited 128k. By the 512k Mac, it became usable. So what would be
the most logical thing youd want to do with a mouse-controlled instrument? You
would want to push sound around with the mouse. So, it was Music Mouse, and then
I just kept refining it and refining it. Thats how it got its name. Now, of course,
nobody uses mice. Well, some people still use mice. And of course there are still
plenty of real mice.
FJO: I still use one, but I also still use a PalmPilot.
LS: I always used a trackball, which I guess I would have had to call it Music Rat,
because it is definitely bigger than a mouse. I was thinking of doing a Rhythm Rat at
one point, but I never got that far. There were too many other things going on. I might
do a Counterpoint Chipmunk at some point. I dont know. I would love to get back to
coding. Its just been so busy and the technology changes under me faster than I can
learn to keep up with it in my spare time with so many other things always going on.

One of Laurie Spiegels current compositional work stations.

FJO: The constant change in technology raises other issues about the future of
musicality. Being adept at something because youve mastered it over the course of
many years is an alien concept to a lot of people nowadays. But in a society where the
technology changes at the drop of a dime, its really difficult to become proficient in
any specific thing.
LS: You are right. People used to learn a tool or technique and refine and develop
their use of it for the rest of their lives. Now we cant even run the software we used
most just a few years ago. We are always beginners, over and over.
This constant transitioning fits with the attention span of the channel flipper or the
web browser. And process of facing the blank page until some creation takes form on
it is now rare. More and more of todays digital tools come up with a menu of
selections, like GarageBand. Heres a library of instruments, pick onemultiple
choice initial templates. Do you want to make this kind of piece or that? Things start
with here are some options you can select among as opposed to starting with
something in my mind which Im hearing in the silence in my imagination. Back in
the dark ages when I was young, you had a great deal of time to focus on what was

happening in your mind and information could proliferate, amplify itself, and take
form in your imagination without that much interruption from outside. You had your
mind to yourself. I dont think kids walk home from school anymore. I dont know. All
parents seem to be hell-bent on making sure theyre safe and picking them up. And
they are constantly interacting, with people or with devices or with people via devices.
Our culture is at this point full of people who are focused outward and are processing
incoming material all the time. So youve got musical forms which are mixes, mashups, remixes, collages, processed versions, and sampling, all kinds of making of new
pieces out of pre-existing materials rather than starting with some sound that you
begin to hear in your imagination. Im a little concerned about this because theres
just nothing like the imaginationbeing able to focus inward and listen to what your
own auditory mechanism wants to hearlistening for what it wants to hear and what
it would generate on its own for itself. You can do processing of the stuff coming at
you til the cows come home, but are you going to get something thats really the
expression of your individuality and your sensibility the same way as listening to your
own inner ear? Are you going to come up with something original and authentically
uniquely you?
FJO: But you were saying before that weve moved to this point where nobody owns a
sound and that reconnects us with much earlier folk music traditions.
LS: Well, people still do, but it seems to be very hard to enforce ownership of sounds.
FJO: I loved the story you told Simon Reynolds about wanting to listen to an LP you
thought you had and when you were not able to find that recording, you made your
own music instead.
LS: Thats where the piece The Expanding Universe came from. I was looking back
and forth through my LPs, and I wanted to hear something like thatnot a drone
piece, not a static piece, not like La Monte Young, and also not something that was a
symphony. It just needed to be this organic, slowly growing thing, and I couldnt find
it, sodo-it-yourselfer attitudeI made one.
FJO: So do you think its less likely that somebody would do that now?
LS: Would somebody feel a desire to hear a certain kind of thing and go looking for

it? Would they hear something inside their head and want to hear it in sound? It
seems that people are fending off a great deal now. The dominant process is overload
compensation: how can I rule out things that I dont want to focus on so that I can
ingest a manageable amount of information and really be involved in it. Attention is
now the scarce commodity. Information used to be the scarce commodity,
information including music of course.

Laurie Spiegels loft is an oasis of books, musical instruments, electronic equipment,

and toys.
FJO: In terms of finding that original sound, theres a piece of yours that I certainly
think is one of the most original sounding pieces and its one of my favoritesVoices
Within. Its also one of the only pieces that you did using alternative tunings.
LS: Wandering in Our Time is similar, although not as highly structured as Voices
Within. Its easier to use tonality or modality. Microtonality is hard to deal with. I
didnt use any particular microtonal scale. It was really by feel.
FJO: But theres a real sense of it being another world.
LS: It was a very internal world. I keep using the word emotions, but emotionally,

subjectively, the kind of unformed sense of experience you cant even identify or label
or describe, but its something haunting you inside that you feel music is the way to
express. Does that make any sense?
FJO: Yes, but the reason I bring it up is because of what you were saying about
attention being so hard to come by these days. That piece really struck me because I
didnt have a framework for listening to it since it was so unlike anything else. With
technology today and where we are in terms of being offered all these possibilities and
having to choose from a set of options rather than striking out on our own paths, I
wonder how possible it is for a piece like that to be created now.
LS: You wouldnt have come up with that piece on a keyboard-based synthesizer. It
needed a synthesizer without a keyboard. To some degree, all of these computer
programs for music out there now are virtually keyboard synthesizers; they all give
you a scale. You have to really work to get out of the scales, those normal diatonic
scales that are in every software package on the market. There are a lot of
assumptions about the nature of music in most of the commercial software. Theyre
perfectly fine for making music thats a lot like previous music, but not in terms of
finding those places on the edge of what we know where were feeling for something
that is so subjective and so tenuously there that we cant begin to describe it. Those
kinds of aesthetic experiences in sound are not really what the software that most
music is done on today is optimized for. I suppose Im guilty of using existing
software by other people as much as anyone, but you do have to really work to get
beyond the assumptions inherent in most software tools for any of the creative arts
these days.
FJO: In terms of working within conventions, it was fascinating for me to discover
Waves and Hearing Things, your pieces for orchestra.

An excerpt from Laurie Spiegels Seeing Things for chamber orchestra. Copyright
1983 (revised 1985) by Laurie Spiegel, Laurie Spiegel Publishing (ASCAP)
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
LS: I can thank Jake Druckman for actually giving me an opportunity to, both of
those opportunities actually. He agented both of those. Everybody just wants to hear

my electronic stuff, pretty much.

FJO: But those pieces are extraordinary, too. Theyre very interesting musical paths
that might not have been intuitive had you not immersed yourself in electronic music.
I hear the same kinds of transformations of timbresan instrument emerges out of a
cloud of sound the way that a timbre would emerge in electronic pieces from that
time. Yet its all done acoustically.
LS: But that happens in classical music, too. Much as I would have never admitted it
to other kids at Juilliard, I absolutely love Rimsky-Korsakov and how he orchestrates.
His orchestration is one of my great inspirations. And I love his orchestration book,
too. Its just really about sound and feeling it, its not about instruments ranges or any
kind of nuts-and-bolts level stuff. You could say that what he does in some of his
orchestrations is virtually electronic. Its so focused on the sounds that you practically
forget that theyre instruments.
Orchestras are great because you have all these timbreswow! Then again, I love
writing for solo instruments, too. Concerts are good, and Ive enjoyed many concerts,
but to me the most important music was always the music that happened at home
where I would just pick up my guitar and play it to feel better, or I would sit there and
sight read at the keyboard, which I used to love to do a lot, but havent had much time
for in recent years. Or playing music for just one other person. Or playing music with
one other person at home. Writing music that somebody can just put on the piano,
trying to write things that are not that hard to play so that more people can play them.
Im not interested in virtuosity. Im not interested in writing show pieces for concert
halls. Im interested in writing something that someone can sit down and play at
home and enjoy the musical experience of playing it. Thats more important for me as
a composer, so I tend to write pieces just for guitar or piano, the instruments that I
have played the most.
FJO: Thats a beautiful statement because so many people talk about getting into
electronic music so that they could write music that they werent able to get players to
play, creating a music that is even too hard for the virtuosos, music thats beyond
human ability. Youre saying the exact opposite.
LS: Well, that too. Its not an either/or. Theyre both valid. Thats one of the reasons

to do Music Mouse. Its as close as you can come to playing an entire orchestra live in
real time. I have all this timbral control. Nine of the twelve tracks on my CD Unseen
Worlds were created with just Music Mouse and it was like playing a pretty full
orchestra.
FJO: So if you somehow had the time to take those pieces and orchestrate them and
have them played by actual orchestras, would that be aesthetically satisfying you?
LS: That seems like an awful lot of time and work to do something that already exists,
as opposed to doing something different if given the opportunity to do something for
orchestra. But yeah, that would be interesting. They would be different pieces, I
would think. But that would be a lot of work. Well, it might not be. Actually you could
automate an awful lot more of the transcription than you used to be able to do.
Writing notes down, God, its so much slower than playing. Thats partly why Ive
always been an improviser. Jack Duarte, my teacher in London, said composition is
improvisation slowed down with a chance to go back and fix the bad bits. Or bad
notes, I think he may have said.

Laurie Spiegel playing the lute in 1991. Photo by Paul Colin, courtesy Laurie Spiegel.
FJO: So weve talked about the composer and the interpreter, what about the
listener?
LS: Well, I think one of my advantages as a composer was that I didnt accept the
identity professionally until I had already grown up as a listener and a player. The
emotional level is the level at which I am primarily motivated and always have been.
Im still the teenage girl who, after a fight with my father, would take my guitar out on

the porch and just play to make myself feel better. Thats who I am musically. I kind
of knew what I liked as a listener, and what I liked was music that would express
emotions that I didnt have a way of expressing, where somebody understood me and
expressed in their music what I was feeling in ways that I couldnt express myself. So,
to some degree, I think I see the role of the composer as giving vicarious selfexpression to people, although at this point, with the technology we have, theres no
reason for anybody who wants to make music not to be able to. But there really still
are levels of ability. Not everybodys going to be Beethoven or Bach. There still will
always be room for truly amazing artists of composition and sound who can do things
that other people cant. Its just that I really kind of rail against the old dichotomy of
the small elite of highly skilled makers of music and this vast number of passive
listeners that have no way to actively express some thoughts in music. That seems
really wrong to me, and that no longer needs to be the case. But thats not to say that
it isnt still worth listening, because there arent that many truly great works out
there, percentage-wise.

In addition to her musical compositions, computer software, and extensive writings

about music, nature and many other topics, Laurie Spiegel is also a visual artist.
These are two of her Xerographs.