Sarah Belle Reid on the Mills Buchla 100
Performer/composer Sarah Belle Reid, friend of the Buchla Archives, visited the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in the Spring of 2023. The objective of her visit? To spend time getting to know their Buchla 100—indeed, the first Buchla 100 modular system ever created, and Donald Buchla's first full-fledged electronic musical instrument altogether. During her visit, Reid recorded (among other things) a video demonstration of the instrument, including a brief historical overview of the circumstances of its creation along with many musical examples and technical explanations. In honor of the release of her video, we wanted to offer some thoughts about the 100, and where it fits into modern perceptions of Buchla's work. Later in this post, Sarah Belle Reid shares some of her own impressions, as well.
Today, Buchla's instruments are an increasingly common source of inspiration for electronic musicians. Some aspects of his work have gradually been lifted out of obscurity as Eurorack modular synthesizers have gained prominence. Current-day designers have drawn extensively from his instruments, and as such, musicians on the whole are perhaps more aware of Buchla's work than ever before.
However, many such musicians have never had the opportunity to play one of his instruments. Perhaps they've read about them or heard them in recordings, and commonly they have hands-on experience only with modern, second-hand interpretations of his ideas. While these instruments are fascinating in their own right, sometimes it can be a refreshing and illuminating experience to go back to the source: to learn the original instruments' quirks, nuances, and the unexpected techniques that they intrinsically suggest to users. Happily, Buchla's instruments, albeit rare, are still out there. Many are in the halls of universities, museums, or with other stewards, all of whom are dedicated to these instruments' preservation—ensuring that they are available for current and future artists and researchers to experience.
Mills College is one such institution. They hold a special place in the history of electronic music altogether, and, as mentioned, are the caretakers of the original Buchla 100 system. Developed in collaboration with the composers of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the mid-1960s, this groundbreaking invention offered musicians a uniquely expedient means of conceptualizing and auditioning ideas—using voltage control to automate processes that otherwise would have required extensive manual tape edits (and a significant amount of pre-planning) to achieve. It suddenly made the many previously non-realtime aspects of electronic music composition much more immediate: enabling new possibilities for the development of musical ideas through iteration and direct, intuitive interaction with the machine.
The prototype Buchla 100 system housed at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, Oakland, CA. Image courtesy of Sarah Belle Reid, 2023.
Today, the 100 can seem quite crude. Modern instruments—and Buchla’s later instruments—offer considerably more flexibility with respect to sound generation and control/interaction. In the 100, control voltage generators have few or no modulation inputs; some sound-generating and sound-altering modules have no voltage-controllable parameters; and those parameters which are voltage controllable cannot simultaneously respond to control voltages and make use of their own built-in potentiometers for parametric control.
According to composer Morton Subotnick, who collaborated closely with Buchla on the instrument's design, the 100 was primarily a compact, integrated electronic music studio; It was not a musical instrument, per se. And of course, the Mills system in particular was the first prototype for how all of its internal concepts could work...a sort of conceptual "proving ground" in which later ideas would be developed. Eventually, through the experience of actually using the instrument, its concepts would be refined, setting off a course of gradual evolution that continued throughout Buchla's entire life—resulting in the creation of dozens of unique instrument concepts.
So, when approaching these early instruments with a level of thoughtfulness, it becomes simple to identify the kernels of later ideas—but it also becomes possible to recognize or reinforce one's understanding of why the instrument came to exist in the first place. Sometimes it's tempting to look at the 100 purely as the "starting point" for the rest of Buchla's work...but the fact is that even it emerged in response to the needs of composers (Buchla included) who had a very specific, albeit fairly non-traditional way of thinking about how musical sound could be organized and parameterized. Working with the instrument with the goal of deepening that understanding can be a fascinating and deeply inspiring experience.
There is much more to say about the 100 in general, and about the Mills prototype system in particular...and with no doubt, we'll get into those details at a later date. For the moment, though, we'd like to share some thoughts from Sarah Belle Reid, reflecting on her personal experience with the instrument.
-RG
Sarah Belle Reid on the Mills Buchla 100
Sarah Belle Reid at the Mills Buchla 100 system, 2023.
Before visiting Mills in 2023, I had very little hands-on experience with original Buchla instruments. I had only briefly used a small hybrid 200/100 system at the University of California at Irvine, and a small amount of 200e equipment. Despite being quite unfamiliar with the specific technical details of the 100 Series at the time of my visit to Mills, I was very familiar with much of the music created with it—early electronic music pioneers such as Pauline Oliveros & Morton Subotnick have been a huge inspiration to me for many years.
So, I came into the CCM Electronic Music Studio with a head full of creative ideas for sounds I wanted to make…and only a little technical understanding of how to create them. I had my own assumptions about how I might try to achieve specific results, but having little prior experience with the 100, I wasn’t entirely sure how those plans would pan out.
I’ll admit that my first few hours working with the Buchla 100 were a bit frustrating! Having a fair amount of experience with other modular synthesizers, I had a lot of expectations about what it “should” be able to do, and I found it challenging to make the 100 fit into that mode of patching and music-making.
What I realized in time, of course, is that the Buchla 100 is not a modern Eurorack system—nor, for that matter, is it a Buchla 200, 200e, or any other instrument other than itself.
When I started to explore the Buchla 100 for what it was, rather than what I was trying to make it be, everything opened up in a really special way.
For example, the Model 144 Dual Square Wave Generator, which at first felt like a totally ungraceful, very intense oscillator, quickly became one of my favorite parts of the system, due to its quirky behavior and because of the huge range of each of its parameters (frequency and modulation depth). It produced some of the best cross-modulation I have ever heard—and I use that technique a lot on my own instruments. But this was different: strange sync-like cascading tones, fragile high-frequency crackles, and a kind of brutal yet brittle sound quality I’d never heard before.
Sarah Belle Reid at the Mills Buchla 100 system, 2023.
The lack of control voltage inputs on many of the modules inspired me to get super hands-on with the instrument to create more motion and shape—manually controlling attack / decay times, timing pulse speeds, and wave shapes rather than relying on modulation. What I first felt was a limitation turned into a hugely inspiring benefit for me: instead of letting things cycle and loop, I was physically connected to every single sound, pushing and pulling and responding to the instrument.
Having to grapple with not one, but three sequencers (especially as a person who really doesn’t use sequencers very often!) was extremely eye-opening. This seemed to me like a particularly striking and likely important, intentionally-considered aspect of the design. I tried to think about what the composers of the time were thinking about: why would they need three sequencers in a relatively compact instrument? How might they have used sequencers to aid in processes that previously would have been handled by tape splicing? Rather than defaulting into melodic looping patterns, I found myself manually moving through stages on the sequencers one at a time, triggering individual sounds surrounded by lots of silence. I also really enjoyed using the touch controllers to start and stop the sequencers, gesturally initiating strings of sonic events. These were the moments when I felt that I came closest to the sound world of some of my favorite tape music from the 1960s: warbly bell tones, spacious swells, mischievous chirps, and clusters of sound.
Detail of the Mills Buchla system's Sequential Voltage Source Model 146. Image courtesy of Sarah Belle Reid, 2023.
It was certainly a rare and special opportunity to get to work with the Mills Buchla 100 System, and to make music with the same instrument as some of the musicians whom I respect the most.
It has been almost a year since my visit to Mills; and as I’ve recently worked on editing the video I made there, I have found myself reflecting on the general influence the experience has had on me.
Some of the biggest personal takeaways that have stayed with me have been less about the Buchla 100 itself, and more about embracing this spirit of working with what you have, and treating limitations as opportunities to discover new, unexpected sonic corners within an instrument or workflow. I definitely intend to revisit my own instruments with a renewed sense of curiosity, asking “What if?” a lot more, and experimenting with new ideas rather than sticking to what I already know works—and I’m excited to see what I discover as a result.
-SBR