via Peter Grenader of Plan B: "When I was in my last year in high school I worked in the school library. One day screwing around in the backroom I came upon a series of filmstrips which highlighted famous 20th century musicians and to my surprise, delight, whatnot found one from the series on Mort. I had just been accepted to CalArts and was looking forward to beginning my studies there so this was a big deal for me. Truth be told, the only image I had a visual memory of was a shot of his door bell. Years later I spoke to to Mort about this - if he remembered doing it, he did, but mentioned regrettably he no longer had a copy. I then set off to hunt one down. There were a few weeks there with only moderate progress but i finally tracked down the woman who made it; Jane Beethoven (that's actually her name). A few months later after returning from a trip to europe she graciously sent one and the stills from that presentation have been uploaded to his site.... including the infamous close-up of the door bell! This is a unique glimpse into the studio where some of the most influential west-coast music of the 20th century was created, including SIlver Apples, Wild Bull and Touch. Check it out, it's great.Go to mortonsubotnick.com, select the archive gallery and scroll to the bottom of the page.
In the next few months the Library of Congress will be transferring the entire show replete with the audio track to modern technology and I'm confident Mort will be adding it as a quicktime presentation. Until then, enjoy..."
Holy Mother Lode, Peter. That was a dream come true.
ReplyDeleteThe musical notes on the score in one of the closeups can be heard in "Touch." Go figure, he wrote it out.
wow, very cool!!
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ReplyDeleteReed i thin you're right - I need to verify this, but it looks like this was shot while he was in the midst of Touch. As evidence to this notice the mic in his studio. One of the first events you hear in that piece is his assistant (never knew her name) speaking the word 'touch' which was cut into phonic shreds and spliced together into consonant and vowel strings. Anyway this was history being made as Touch is one of the higghlight musical works of the 20th century (IMHO).
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