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Rating: United States, 1967: a record company, Nonesuch, commissions a composer, Morton Subotnick, to create an electronic music piece intended for publication on a long-playing record; the disc and the track contained in it were meant to make this new music genre accessible to the general public. Thus, "Silver Apples of the Moon" came into existence, becoming at the time a sort of international sensation.
New genre, it was said. Because while in Europe electronic music had already been producing significant works for about fifteen years, the USA was experiencing a certain delay, more from the perspective of creativity and inventiveness than from the technical aspect. So Subotnick contributes and the result is a piece that for originality and character would find a stable place among the most significant achievements of this genre.
"Silver Apples of the Moon" is divided into two parts (like the sides of the long-playing record) for a total of 31 minutes of music. All the sounds are generated by a Buchla modular synthesizer instead of with the traditional instrumentation and technique of European electronic music studios (pulse generators, oscillators, tape manipulations, etc.). The first synthesizers were being developed right around that time, and Subotnick himself provided inspiration and suggestions to the designer Don Buchla, in the same months that Robert Moog was creating his pioneering models.
Subotnick makes creative use of the synthesizer (he was highly regarded for this by Luciano Berio, who said that synths are not musical instruments), creating a wild ballet of swift and whimsical sounds, organized into a sound weave of almost constant density with rare pauses for relaxation. Certainly, the sounds are cold, very clean but not very engaging for listeners not accustomed to the genre. Subotnick's preference for pulses, rather than the abundance of sound layers used elsewhere in electronic music, makes this piece not easy to listen to, yet it still retains various points of interest.
Rhythm also plays an important role (another difference compared to European electronics), especially in the second part where a crescendo in the first 8 minutes leads to a well-characterized and recognizable section. The title of the track, for the record, cites a line by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. "Silver Apples of the Moon" has now become a classic of electronic music, and now that the vinyl era has been archived, it can be found today on CD often paired with a 1968 track, "The Wild Bull".
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