Until Spring Revisited

Thurs., Feb. 10

Music critics, inclined to pontificate, like to make master lists-best of, top 10, desert-island lists-a sort of grown man's pissing contest. If I'm going to dare venture very far into this Nick Hornby cliché, I might as well make it big-how about the Top 10 Works that Changed the Direction of Music. Okay, I wouldn't presume to outline this list for you, but not even Rob Gordon would be able to argue Morton Subotnick's iconic Silver Apples of the Moon off the roll call.

Silver Apples (1967) may have been Subotnick's brightest celebrity star, but his groundbreaking catalogue of works runs much deeper, and new technologies developed in the intervening years are reshaping live-performance possibilities. Recognizing that fact, the Electronic Music Foundation has invited Subotnick to open their 10th anniversary festival celebration with a reconception of his evening-length digital work Until Spring Revisited.

Originally conceived in 1975 using analog techniques, Subotnick says that it was the last of its kind that he created. "It was about 10 years from Silver Apples to Until Spring," he explains, "and I'd evolved a whole concept and a technique, but I had gone as far as I could go with it. I could do everything I wanted to do, but I couldn't do it in real time. So I actually stopped after that and gave all my equipment to Vladimir Ussachevsky."

But then computers, increasingly faster and smaller, and the evolution of the laptop opened up live performance of this music all over again. In many ways, Until Spring's glitchy pulsations, which speed and slow like a playing card in a bicycle wheel, fit inside the stereotype of electronic music quite neatly. But even when experienced on CD, the work holds on to some sort of organic core.

Subotnick is mindful of the esthetic considerations needed to make a live show of such music interesting for an audience. In addition to monitors at the sides of the stage that will offer a bird's-eye view of the mouse and keyboard action, Sue Costabile will be throwing up large-scale projections. Subotnick is quick to point out that the visual element is no mere tacked-on distraction for those of short attention span. "The idea is to develop not a visual counterpoint but [rather] leave a place for a dancer to be able to move, like another line of music. It's like your ear's eye, like your third ear."

Symphony Space, 2537 B'way (95th St.), 212-864-5400; 8, $20/$15 st./$12 s.c.