About

Theodore (Ted) Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work connects experimental music, critical organology, and science & technology studies. His book, The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America, forthcoming from the University of California Press, shows how scientific concepts and technologies borrowed from cybernetics, information theory, and systems-thinking became catalysts for new musical organizations of practices, processes, and bodies in the 1960s.

Most recently, he has contributed the chapter “The Buchla Music Easel: From Cyberculture to Market Culture” to the edited volume Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People, edited by Ezra J. Teboul, Andreas Kitzmann, and Einar Engström, published by Routledge.

His writing has been published by the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Contemporary Music Review, Organised Sound, Current Musicology, Portable Gray, the American Musicological Association, the Library of Congress, and Cultural Anthropology, and his research has been supported by the New York Public Library and the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York. He has written program and liner notes for Unseen Worlds, and contributed exhibition texts for the 2019 exhibition Sounding Circuits at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He is the incoming Music Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

He received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music from the University of Chicago in 2018. From 2018–2020 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, where he was also a Visiting Researcher at the Computer Music Center. Since 2020, he has served as Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, City University of New York, and since 2024 has served on the Doctoral Faculty in the Music Department at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Since 2016 he has performed with viola and Buchla instruments at venues such as Elastic Arts (Chicago), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), Rhizome DC (Washington, DC), Roulette (NYC), and 411 Kent (NYC), frequently collaborating with Marcia Bassett and visual artists including Jeffrey Perkins, Camilla Padgitt-Coles, and Patrick Cain. He currently lives in Queens, New York.
Book

In The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America, I ask: what can a black box do for a composer? What can a composer do with a black box? These intertwined questions have fueled nearly a century of musical and technical experimentation. I explore some of the earliest approaches to these questions in the mid-1960s in my first book, published by the University of California Press. 

From their website: 

Stories about new musical instruments are often told as quests for new kinds of sounds. The Composer's Black Box asks, What happens when new musical instruments produce not only new sounds but also new dynamics of musical agency and control? And what consequences do those new dynamics have for musicality beyond sound? With a focus on five key figures—Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Donald Buchla, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra—this book explores how scientific and technological developments in mid-twentieth-century America galvanized musicians to reconfigure their conceptions of sociality, freedom, and the creative self. Theodore Gordon shows how cybernetic thinking in a range of disciplines, from experimental music to jazz and electrical engineering, shaped musical techniques and technologies and changed what it means to be a composer—or, more broadly, a music-making human—in an increasingly informational world.

Advance Praise: 

"How can information systems make music? And when they do what happens to composers? This fascinating book reveals how electronic music cracked open questions of what it meant to be human at the dawn of the digital age. Read it, and you’ll never hear a synthesizer quite the same way again."—Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

"In this electrifying study, Theodore Gordon convincingly portrays the musical instruments of the 1960s as experimental tools for rethinking creative agency. Reveling in the jetsam of the military industrial complex, this book’s artists, misfits, and dreamers launched new quests for uncertainty that ever deepened the eternal problem of control and chance."—Ben Piekut, author of Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem

"Gordon tells five compelling stories of musical creativity and cybernetics in the Information Age. But this is not a tale of technological determinism. The Composer’s Black Box shows us not how music was shaped by oscillators, circuit boards, and voltage controls but how deeply all of this depended on the imaginations of the people who used these technologies, their diverse notions of agency, and, ultimately, their visions of freedom and control."—Emily I. Dolan, author of The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre

"At last we have a detailed, sophisticated history of the impact cybernetic thinking had on the music of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. Gordon’s book represents an important intervention into postwar music history—one that is as urgent as ever, given cybernetics’ role in laying the groundwork for contemporary digital culture.”—Eric Drott, author of Streaming Music, Streaming Capital

"The Composer’s Black Box offers a new and significant examination of what it means to be a composer (or 'musicking human subject') in a cybernetic world. The book enriches our histories of music technology while addressing broader questions of composerly subjectivity and identity, showing how these are deeply entangled with musical instruments with agentic capabilities of their own. Bringing new evidence to light on Subotnik, Buchla, Oliveros, Lucier, Moog, and Sun Ra, Gordon revises our understanding of what these figures were up to and navigating at formative points in their careers. His in-depth look at these musicians adds up to a new view of music and the impacts of technoscience on culture."—Deirdre Loughridge, author of Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020

The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America


Book Chapter

“The Buchla Music Easel: From Cyberculture to Market Culture,” in Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People, edited by Ezra J. Teboul, Andreas Kitzmann, and Einar Engström.
In this book chapter I map the short life and long afterlife of one of the most mythologized instrument designs of the late Donald Buchla, the Buchla Music Easel, from its emergence in early 1970s Californian cyberculture to its re-emergence in the “analog revival” of the 2010s. In addition to documenting the genesis of the instrument, this chapter also offers a critique of the instrument’s libidinal economy in the neoliberal synthesizer marketplace. 
Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People


Article

‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation

Contemporary Music Review Vol. 40, Issue 4, 2021

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pauline Oliveros developed new techniques for improvising with new electronic instruments, which she described using language and metaphors from cybernetics and information theory. First using just a tape recorder, and later using a series of tape recorders connected to an unstable pair of oscillators, Oliveros created what she later called a ‘very unstable nonlinear musicmaking system’ (Oliveros, Pauline. 2016a. “Improvising Composition: How to Listen to the Time Between.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian H. Siddall, and Ellen Waterman, 75–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). By positioning herself as only one member of an instrumental system that facilitated the self-regulating flow of sound as signal—operating as air pressure waves, electrical waves, psychoacoustic phenomena, and even human consciousness—Oliveros began to reconceptualize the role of her body in musical performance. By the early 1970s, Oliveros began to embrace the new kinds of musical performance and musical subjectivities produced by this system as a part of her exploration of gender in music, positing the concept of ‘androgynous music’—defined as music that is simultaneously ‘linear’ and ‘nonlinear’. Oliveros thought of her performance practice as one that could destabilise socially constructed musical identities of composition, performance, and listening, and also integrate different modalities of interacting with musical ‘signal’. This article maps Oliveros’s cybernetic, improvisatory practices with her earliest electronic systems, showing how her performance within these systems laid the groundwork for her later theorisations of technology, gender, and the body.


‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation


Interview

Tom Erbe Interviewed by Ted Gordon
Organised Sound, Volume 27 Issue 1, 2022


In this interview, Tom Erbe reflects on his three decades as a developer of computer music software and hardware, both freeware and commercial. Tom met with Theodore Gordon on 8 December 2021 and discussed the beginnings of SoundHack and its roots in experimental music studio practice and hacker culture, ideas behind the design of sound processor interface and the shift from experimental software development to Eurorack modular hardware design.

Tom Erbe Interviewed by Ted Gordon



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Buchla Easel Improvisation

Since 2016, I have been improvising with the Buchla Music Easel, initially in the service of my research into the work of Don Buchla, but subsuquently as a practice of self-inquiry, autoethnography, and autoanalysis.

 



Collaborations with Marcia Bassett

Since 2019, I have been collaborating with Marcia Bassett to explore and perform live improvisation with Buchla Music Easels (among other instruments).