Silver Apples of the Moon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) by Morton Subotnick is one of the first commissioned electronic compositions expressly for home listening on a phonograph system. The work has been choreographed by dance companies.
Silver Apples of the Moon was notable for more than being an answer to a record-biz trivia question. Early electronic music was made using wave generators and tape-manipulated sounds. Subotnick was among the first composers to work with electronic instrument designer Don Buchla. Buchla's modular voltage-controlled synthesizer, which he called the Electric Music Box and which was constructed partly based on suggestions by Subotnick and Sender, was both more flexible and easier to use, and its sequencing ability was integral to Subotnick's music.
At a time when electronic music was highly abstract, largely concerned with pitch and timbre, with rhythm an afterthought or of no consequence and patterns largely avoided, Subotnick broke with the academic avant-gardists by including sections with regular rhythms.
The phrase silver apples of the moon is derived from the W. B. Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus".
