Sospeso gives the east coast premiere of legendary electronic music composer Morton Subotnick's Release for live musicians and surround sound electronics at The San Francisco Tape Music Festival in Troy, NY.

Morton Subotnick is one of the acknowledged pioneers in the field of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. He was the first composer to be commissioned to write an electronic composition expressly for the phonograph medium, Silver Apples of the Moon (Nonesuch 7114, 1967). This now classic work along with The Wild Bull (Nonesuch 71208, 1968), A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur (Nonesuch 78001, 1978) and The Key to Songs (New Albion 012, 1987) have been choreographed by leading dance companies throughout the world and remain in permanent repertoire.

In addition to composing numerous works in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written eight works for orchestra, including Before the Butterfly, a Bicentennial Commissiion by the six major U.S. Orchestras; chamber and ensemble works; music for the theatre and multi-media productions. His "staged tone poem" The Double Life of Amphibians, a collaboration between director Lee Breuer, visual artist Irving Petlin and composer Subotnick, utilizing live interaction between singers, instrumentalists and computer, was premiered at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles; a chamber version of that piece was premiered at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe in August 1985.

Subotnick's interest in the relationship between performers and technology resulted in the composition of a series of "ghost pieces," eleven chamber works for instruments and interactive electronics. The "ghost" score (which contains no audible sounds) consists of a digital program which commands electronic modules to modify the instrumental sounds as they are played from a traditionally notated score. The electronic processing includes changing the pitch, timbre, volume and directionality of the sounds. Thus, the digital program, different for each of the "ghost" works, produces its own set of attacks and rhythms, adding another dimension to the sound of the instrument or voice. Included in this series are Axolotl for solo cello and Tremblings, for violin and piano.

His present series of works utilize computerized sound generation, specially designed software and "intelligent" computer controls which allow the performing musicians to interact in a complex and musical way with the computer technology. These works include Jacob's Room and All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis.

Included among Subotnick's numerous grants and awards are six from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Meet the Composer and ASCAP awards, two Rockefeller Foundation grants, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Composer Award, the Brandeis Award in Music composition, The Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Kunstlerprogramm Award as composer-in-residence in the former West Berlin, and a two-month artist residency at MIT.

Subotnick received a B.A. From the University of Denver and an M.A. From Mills College, studying composition under Leon Kirchner and Darius Milhaud. While in San Francisco, he co-founded (with Ramon Sender) the San Francisco Tape Music Center (now located at Mills College) and was Music Director of the Ann Halprin Dance Company and the San Francisco Actor's Workshop. Later, in New York City, he was Music Director of Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre during its first season, Director of Electronic Music at the original Electric Circus on St. Mark's Place and Artist-in-Residence at New York University School of the Arts. Subotnick's other faculty appointments have included Mills College and, as visiting professor in composition, University of Maryland, University of Pittsburgh and Yale University. Subotnick tours extensively as a lecturer and composer/performer and heads the Composition program at the California Institute of the Arts, near Los Angeles.