The Garden Weasel

Marketing photo session - August 1973 (Berkeley, California)

Without immediately getting into the all-too-tempting weeds, suffice it to say that the Music Easel is a portable, performance-oriented encapsulation of many of the design concepts from Donald Buchla's 200 Series Electric Music Box. It is a self-contained instrument that combines the Stored Program Sound Source Model 208 with the Touch Activated Voltage Source Model 218 capacitive keyboard, all housed in a briefcase-like enclosure with a removable lid. There's much more to be said about the Buchla Music Easel and its unique musical logic, and with no doubt, this post will be followed by many others exploring various aspects of its design and history. But for the moment, let's focus specifically on the concept of portability.

In hindsight, we can think of much of Buchla's work as involving many successive stages of iteration on specific design ideals and functional concepts. Several "design trajectories," as we like to think of them, played out simultaneously throughout his career, intersecting with one another at various points in time. The concept of portability specifically is central to many of these trajectories. Looking across Buchla's history of instrument design, it's easy to pick out a set of instruments that, with each new generation, became increasingly self-contained, self-sufficient, and compact. And, while physical compactness and functional density was certainly a central design premise in his instruments, for Buchla, portability was not a matter of size or form factor alone. Portability also involved independence from electrical outlets—and from the whims of utility companies.

The Music Easel is an early embodiment of these sentiments. A portable, all-in-one performance instrument, the Music Easel was designed by Donald Buchla in close collaboration with composer and educator Allen Strange and others. It featured, in Buchla's own words, "a vocabulary that was unpresumptive, varied, and accessible," and offered "the potential for expressive, real-time performer-instrument interaction."

Music Easel with designer - August 1973 (Berkeley, California)

By the summer of 1973, the Music Easel had taken shape and was nearly ready to be revealed to the public. The photographs in this post were part of an early photo shoot intended to produce marketing materials for the new instrument. They were taken in the garden at Buchla's shop at 1750 Arch Street, in Berkeley, California, in August of 1973. The astute observer will note that this is indeed one of the earliest Music Easels built, with a smaller program card connector and slight cosmetic differences from the more familiar later versions.

The novelty of seeing Donald Buchla lying on the ground with a patch cable in his mouth notwithstanding, the intended purpose of photos like these was to emphasize the Music Easel's on-the-go nature—out among the grass and bushes, a not-altogether common experience for studio-bound electronic musicians of the time. But, not only was it small: because of the importance Buchla placed on independence from conventional power sources, the Music Easel's power supply allowed for direct connection to external batteries; later models also included a VU meter for monitoring the battery's voltage level. Initially, the Music Easel was offered for sale along with a battery pack that allowed for three hours of use; additionally, sales literature directly indicates that the monitor output could be used to drive low-level speakers without the need for an additional power amplifier. So, the Music Easel was portable not just by nature of its being packaged in a briefcase; it could also easily operate untethered from human-made systems of power.

The Music Easel was only one of Buchla's solutions to his lifelong preoccupation with playing his instruments outdoors—to operate with the same degree of location-based freedom as acoustic instrumentalists. The later Touché, 400, 700, and 200e, for instance, evolved with similar ideals in mind; but, we'll talk more about those at another time. -RG

For now, stay tuned for more photos, information, thoughts, and updates on the Buchla Archives book and other endeavors.