The "Lost" Works of Morton Subotnick: Ascent into Air

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 11, 2014, 4:16 p.m.

Morton Subotnick has enjoyed an expansive career as a composer and technical innovator for decades, and his touring schedule has grown extensively in the past decade, as he is recognized for his pioneering role in electronic and electro-acoustic music. Equally appreciated by fans of concert and electronic music, Subotnick is a legend in his own time. If you haven't yet, check out this lecture he gave at the Red Bull Music Academy:

Lecture: Morton Subotnick (Madrid 2011) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

We're happy to announce the publication of several of Subotnick's "lost" works-- works that have been otherwise unavailable until now. The first of this series is Ascent into Air, commissioned and premeired at IRCAM in 1981, with Peter Eötvös conducting. 

Scored for pairs of clarinets, trombones, celli, pianos, percussion, and computer-generated sound, this work uses the metaphor of an amphibian's ascent from water to air as a dialectic metaphor for the evolutionary role of technology in art in the late 20th century. The amphibian represents art's double-inhabitance of two modes of existence, two modes of communication: one in water and one in air. As technology evolves in artistic practice, music finds itself in a similar position, inhabiting two modes of existance at the same time. Dialectically, "Ascent into Air" produces a synthesis of Subotnick's vision of the aesthetic and technical possibilities that contemporary music can afford us.