It was at the Tape Music Center – a “community of interest” which grew “into an interesting kind of institution” – that Sender and Subotnick worked with engineer, Donald Buchla, to create the Buchla Music Box. The almost exact contemporary to the first Moog but designed and developed independently, the Buchla was one of the very first modular synthesizers – and unlike Robert Moog’s machine, Buchla eschewed the traditional piano-style keyboard in favour of more idiosyncratic controllers like the Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator. Buchla’s Box would later be used extensively by Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel, and to stunning effect on Buffy Sainte Marie’s Illuminations album. But Pauline Oliveros was initially sceptical of the new toy.
“Well, it was fine, you know, but it was all about control; it wasn’t about sound. Which is different,” she says, laughing a little. “And that’s probably what differentiates me from the other composers that were working at the time, because they were very interested in controlling things, but I was very interested in playing and performing things.”
Read the full text of my interview with Pauline Oliveros at Fact Magazine.