Subotnick: Touch; Jacob's Room

On this CD:

1. Touch for synthesizer
Composed by Morton Subotnick

2. Jacob's Room for soprano, cello & ycams
Composed by Morton Subotnick
Performed by Joan La Barbara, Erika Duke Kirkpatrick

Subotnick: Touch; Jacob's Room, Music, Erika Duke Kirkpatrick, Morton Subotnick, Joan La Barbara, Classical, Electronic/Computer/Tape Music, Solo Voice(s) and Small Ensemble, Vocal

Touch/Jacob's Room
Average customer rating:
Touch/Jacob's Room

Manufacturer: Wergo
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music
General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
ASIN: B000025YX0
Release Date: 1993-06-28

Tracks:

Touch, Pt. 1 - Morton Subotnick
Touch, Pt. 2 - Morton Subotnick
Jacob's Room, Pt. 1 - Erika Duke, Joan La Barbara, Morton Subotnick
Jacob's Room, Pt. 2 - Erika Duke, Joan La Barbara, Morton Subotnick

Average customer rating:

Touch - Jacob's Room

Manufacturer: Wergo
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD
ASIN: B000A3IA8G

Product Description

1)TOUCH (1969) 2)JACOB'S ROOM (1986) Joan La Barbara (soprano) Erika Duke (cello)

Average customer rating:

Worth the price for Jacob's Room
Sorry to Disagree
The Brilliant and the Annoying
Touch, yes; Jacob, no
Proof that intuition outshines intellect.

Touch/Jacob's Room

Manufacturer: Wergo
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music

General | Classical | Styles | Music
ASIN: B000005W8Z
Release Date: 1993-06-28

Tracks:

Touch: Part I
Touch: Part II
Jacob's Room: Part I
Jacob's Room: Part II

Customer Reviews:

Worth the price for Jacob's Room.......2005-09-21

Like the last reviewer, I'm disappointed with the reviewers who panned "Jacob's Room". I was a big fan of Subotnick's early electronic works like "Silver Apples" and "4 Butterflies". However, I've always had trouble getting into his work once he began to incorporate organic performance into his synthetic soundscapes. I purchased this CD to get "Touch", the electronic work. It doesn't fail to entertain, but it also can seem like simply an extension of his earlier synthesized works (not necessarily a bad thing).

When "Jacob's Room" came on, I was simply blown away by the sheer imagination and originality of the composition. The only thing I can compare it to is John Cage's "Aria With Fontana Mix". Subotnick's score displays a warmth and accessiblity not usually associated with his work. However, Joan LaBarbara's vocals take the piece to somewhere quite unique. Whereas Cage's "Aria" is very abstract, the narration in Subotnick's piece keeps the vocals anchored despite some very impressive sound gymnastics by Ms. LaBarbara.

Overall, this CD presents two very different sides of Subotnick. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to taste both the old, synthetic, and new, organic, Subotnick. I knock one star off for "Touch's" lack of originality, but if you are unfamiliar with other works by Subotnick, this piece makes a fair introduction to his early style. However, I recommend "Jacob's Room" for anyone who enjoys listening to a first-rate vocalist wrap herself around some incredibly avant-garde music. It sounds cliche, but "Jacob's Room" gives me shivers every time I hear it.

Sorry to Disagree.......2002-05-19

I was shocked and disappointed to read the reviews of my other colleagues. Sorry, I must disagree. Contrary to other opinion, I believe Jacob's Room is one of the most extraordinary examples of extended vocal techniques that I have ever heard. Jacob's Room is what makes this CD. Unfortunately, Touch is the poor step-child of the original Buchla electronic music triumvirate that included Silver Apples and Wild Bull. Its exploration of the sound and texture possibilities of electronic music is simply a variation on the two previous, and finer, compositions.

Jacob's Room is a vehicle for Subotnick's wife, Joan LaBarbara to demonstrate why she is universally considered the master of extended vocal techniques. She leaps effortlessly from beautiful operatic tonality to microtonal notes and the gutteral animal noises requires an impressive control and technique. The resulting music is riveting in its vocal breadth. Erika Duke's cello work adds an aggressive edge befitting the difficult subject of Jacob's Room.

Because of the vocal mastery of Jacob's Room I give this CD 5 stars.

The Brilliant and the Annoying.......2000-11-08

Touch is an incredible piece of music, a brilliant construction of sounds from the Buchla Modular synth and a must listen for anyone even remotely interested in "electronic music". The palate of sounds are both electronic and organic sounding and are more mature than those on Wild Bull and Silver Apples, both ground-breaking albums in their own right.

Touch is the precursor of music to come from Mr. Subotnic. Four Butterfiles, Sidewinder, Until Spring (all sadly never release on CD) are all great works of electronica. Nobody does Subotnic better than Subotnic; his sense of timing, pace, dynamic, timbre and texture are at the top of the scale. So IMHO Touch being the only mid-late work avialable on CD is a must have. As stated in both of the previous reviews, one can ONLY wonder WHY once of his other CD's like Until Spring, Sky of Cloudless Sulpher, Four Butterfiles, ect was not the second selection for this CD.

I wish I could say something positive about Jacob's Room but I simply find it dry and sterile. It has none of the charm and organic qualities of his "early" works and leves me cold. It is actually kind of annoying to listen to. Bummer! So three stars are for the CD as a whole, (5) stars for Touch.

Touch, yes; Jacob, no.......1999-01-23

I have always been a Subotnick fan and was overjoyed when The Wild Bull and Silver Apples of the Moon appeared on CD. I was equally delighted to discover that Touch, another Subotnick favorite, was now available. Subotnick, like W. Carlos, has excellent taste in sound. Touch consequently exhibits sonic textures and contrasts that are still fresh, even after three decades and the digital revolution (despite what the CD label says, Touch is not computer music). Part II of Touch, however, still seems like record filler--everything Touch has to say it says in Part I. The piece has also suffered a bit in the transfer to CD. The smoothness the LP had is gone, one passage has been strangely distorted, and some annoying location modulation "ping-ponging" that was absent on the original album has been introduced. It's still enjoyable, though.

Jacob's room was an odd choice to pair with Touch; another Buchla work would have made a lot more sense. This composition, with its Yoko Ono-like vocalizations and cello/computer accompaniment that quickly degenerates into boring minimalism, strikes this listner as pretentious (it might have been saved by leaving out the spoken text). "Jacob" is simply too full of itself to enjoy, so the three stars I'm giving this CD are for "Touch".

Proof that intuition outshines intellect........1998-10-27

Herein lies a strange marriage. Touch, the 1969 daughter of two towering classics of analog electronic composition (Silver Apples of the Moon, 1967, and The Wild Bull, 1968), and a mid-80's pseudo-intellectual property composed for computer-assisted synthesis, voice and cello (an opera based loosely on a passage from a Virginia Woolf novel). The former, which could have more happily coexisted with another Subotnick Buchla 100 series analog synthesizer composition, is of lighter weight than its ancestors, possessing neither their breadth of emotion nor their range of compositional density. It favors a sparse landscape, which only rarely reaches that delicious polyrhythmic state where musical elements hurl you along seemingly random trajectories, neither clashing, nor coalescing, but somehow always moving you toward an uncertain future-a state which Subotnick's earlier works explored with madcap perfection. Still, Touch possesses Subotnick's superb sense of musical intuition. It remains an organic and original piece, even if it does not measure up to its immediate predecessors. Of the latter selection on this CD, I cannot be so kind. Subotnick's heavy emphasis on meandering, jerky, sixteenth note staccato phrases and annoyingly pretentious dramatic content in Jacob's Room drives this listener to absolute distraction. In the original liner notes of The Wild Bull, which derived its title from an ancient Sumerian poem, Subotnick states, "There was never an attempt to 'portray' the poem (I don't think music is about that)..." Well, he certainly abandoned that sentiment in the this 1986 composition. Not only does the soprano's recitation of the innocuous libretto become melodramatically inflamed, but the musical content quivers and distorts to echo her vocal gesticulations. There's nothing heart-felt about this bad boy: Jacob ought to have been locked in his room, never to see the light of day again. So . . . after listening to Jacob's Room, Touch sounds downright fabulous. One thumb up for the 60's and musical intuition, two thumbs down for the 80's and its inherent intellectual pretense.

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