Suzanne Ciani could be my grandmother, and maybe yours too. No other interview of mine has been preceded by so much genuine interest in my career plans, how I'd liked school, whether I had a girlfriend - an inversion of the usual interview dynamic that would've been uncomfortable in almost any other scenario. Then again, Suzanne Ciani doesn't exactly go by the book. She was around at the very dawn of the synthesizer era, a wild enough frontier in and of itself even before considering that she was practically the American scene's only female participant. Throughout the 1970's, she gave occasional performances but focused primarily on commissioned sound work, providing an audio dimension to things like the news and Coca Cola. She moved to more traditional album work throughout the 80's and 90's, but today enjoys the complete creative freedom accorded to icons of a genre.

Fittingly, we met at this past May's Moogfest, spending an hour or so in a Durham, NC hotel lobby/art gallery. Despite the largely retrospective nature of the conversation, she was just as focused on the present - on several occasions she paused, fascinated by some synthesized element of the hotel's poppy lobby soundtrack.

I had a nice experience on the trip down here listening to The Velocity of Love. What made you decide to start making albums alongside commissions, and what in particular drew you to the new age sound?

There actually was no new age when I started recording! They really started with that category around my third album. But my second album, The Velocity of Love, did help to define that category - there were radio stations that took on a new age identity and played the title track in particular, which was a big hit on radio. It gave some substance to the category, even though I never spent too much time thinking about it.

I think my music came from the synthesis of my classical roots with the ten years that I had spent in pure electronics with the Buchla. I came upon a very personal formula for myself that was electronic and classical at the same time. So my first album, Seven Waves, is orchestrated, can be written out on a score paper, but is primarily realized by electronics in various ways.

How would you have classified your music at the time? Did you see yourself as belonging to any broader group?

There was no category, it was just… personal. I was using machines to create a sense of calm and safety. I was living in New York City, and it was the antidote. A lot of the inspiration came from my visits to the Caribbean, flying right down into the islands. It was transformative for me to be in these magical places. The waves were always important to me - people don’t always realize that those are synthesized waves. I made one large piece, Seven Waves, where the waves connected each section, and it took me like two years to make that album.

What were your musical experiments or experiences like prior to discovering the synthesizer? You just mentioned some classical training.

I grew up playing the piano. We had a nice Steinway in my home, which I would play for hours on end - Chopin, Mozart, Bach. That’s where I grew up. After that, I studied music in high school, I went to the Longy School of Music once a week. I went to college and majored in music, and then followed that with a master’s in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s while I was there that I met Don Buchla, which shifted everything from classical to electronic.

I saw an appearance you made on the David Letterman show quite a while ago, which was fascinating because of the technical depth versus late-night appearances that a musician might make today. Letterman also obviously felt like he had to bridge some sort of gap between the audience and the idea that your appearance was a musical performance. Did you ever run into skepticism about the synthesizer’s worth or legitimacy as an instrument?

When I started out, nobody understood what these machines were at all. There were a handful of designers - Don Buchla, Bob Moog, Peter Zinovieff and some others in England - who basically started everything. They were artistic inventions by particular people, and the public didn’t know anything about it. That’s why I would have to be very didactic, in a way, because I was trying to educate the listeners just so they could understand what they were seeing. There was a huge gap! I’d play something and people would stare, wondering where the sound was coming from. Where was the tape recorder? There simply was no a concept of electronic music at all, which is why I’m so enjoying coming back to it today where it’s taken for granted that everyone knows what it is. There’s an audience, whereas in the early days a lot of people couldn’t even hear it as music. That was a big frustration for me in the pure electronics work with the Buchla - I wanted to communicate, and my solution with my first album was to return to melody, to make something that was both electronic and traditional.

With Letterman it was about the sensationalism. To have this girl moving knobs and dials - nobody knew what that was. I had a big studio in New York, but the equipment was incredibly expensive. This was before people could have home studios. One of my instruments alone, the Synclavier, cost $200,000. To record that first album cost over $100,000, just to be with the technology in those early days.

So the studio would serve as not only a recording space, but also the only place that you could access that sort of instrument?

No, they didn’t have it in studios. You had to own it yourself, and then you brought it to the studio. There was one place that you could rent it, called the San Francisco Tape Music Center. It was founded by Mort Subotnick and a few other people, and they moved it to Oakland. You could go in there for $5 an hour and rent time. They had an early Moog, and early Buchla from the 100 series, and a lot of spare parts.

Did any sort of community spring up from that space? I imagine you’d see the same few people in there repeatedly.

I rarely ran into anybody, really. It wasn’t a hugely popular thing. There were a few people - a woman named Maggi Payne, who’s still there. By the time I got there, Mort Subotnick had already left and they were supported by grants. But did I get to share it with other people? My main community evolved around the Audio Engineering Society. Every year there would be a meeting in New York, and you would go there and meet all the players, the designers and the people interested. Eventually that grew into the NAMM show. That’s the big place now where the whole community collects, now in LA. You’ve got to get a badge that a manufacturer gives you, but it’s huge - the entire music and music technology industry.

Who did you think of as the audience for your music? Did you give much thought to radio before Seven Waves came out, for example, or was it very much an inward-facing community where your colleagues were both the performers and the audience?

Honestly, I never thought about where it would fit in or what it was for. I did do some live Buchla concerts on the radio, one of which was on WBAI in New York and ended up being released by Finders Keepers Records in England. It’s an archival recording of a live Buchla concert from 1975, taken from the radio. Otherwise, things didn’t get recorded very much - I have two recordings of live concerts from that whole period. It was a different era: recorders were big, and there was no digital, no computer recording or storage.

My sense as an artist was that if I could realize my own artistic voice, then it would translate to an audience. All humans share a lot, and if you can access your own… integrity, vision, it will communicate outwards on its own. I certainly hope to communicate. I was frustrated in my first ten years that nobody seemed to understand it. I wanted a record deal, because in those days you couldn’t make anything yourself. A record deal was the only pathway out of your inner world, musically. So I worked hard at getting one, but I actually almost completed my whole first album before getting a deal. After six of the waves, I got a deal in Japan and finished the last one.

It was a milestone, you know, for me to have an actual physical record. Record deals are good and bad; on my second album, I was very protective of my work, I wouldn’t let the record companies own it. I would license it to them, but I said these are my children. They’re not up for adoption, and besides I don’t know who you are or how long you’ll be around. My next five albums I don’t own anymore, but in 1994 I returned to being independent and have ownership of all my music since then.

On the topic of music as a form of communication, nowadays there are obviously dozens of channels through which you can get immediate feedback - finding out whether your work is having the desired effect. What form would that take before, say, Twitter?

Before we had a President that Twittered! I still can’t believe that [laughs]. I think the main markers and measurements were radio charts - they’re what started the category of new age. It allowed structure in the music business, a place where you could go to find my album in the store. Otherwise you’d go in and say hi, I want the Suzanne Ciani album and the owner would have to work through well, does she sing? Is it classical? Is it jazz? I don’t know. Once you had that organization, you had Billboard measuring what was getting the most airplay, what was doing the most sales.

The Velocity of Love struck a nerve. I was as surprised as anybody, you put something out and you never know what’s going to happen. But that was like a brush fire. At the same time, at the same exact moment, the company that I had signed with, RCA, was bought by BMG. The guy that I had signed with, who had been with RCA for 25 years, was thrown out in a day. The new person at BMG wouldn’t even talk to me. Here I had this big radio hit, but absolutely no support.

What form would record label input, if there was any, take? What sorts of things would a label want or ask to control?

Well I was recording independently and licensing, so I didn’t have any absolute commitments. I was asked, by some major labels, to do things like Switched On Vivaldi or something, but I never took those deals. I wasn’t interested in that. I had complete artistic freedom, although I would receive some input from Japan - they said that I couldn’t do just six waves, that it had to be seven because six was considered an unlucky number in Japan. Then when I was with Private Music I’d get a little bit of feedback, they might say hey, repeat that chorus if you don’t mind. My independence has always been the most valuable thing to me, and I think you need that. As an artist, your responsibility is to be true to your inner direction. Younger artists will contact me and they’ll say here’s a piece I wrote - I think it’s pretty good, but you could help me make it better. No, that’s their job. They have to please themselves, and if something bothers them then they have to fix it. The artist is the ultimate arbiter, and if they’re not happy with the work then nobody else will be.

Going back to the idea of a baseline public familiarity with electronic music, do you find that you feel compositionally liberated with a kinder audience in mind?

Totally. I feel totally liberated. I’m going back now to what I was doing in the 70’s, which was improvisation on the Buchla. It has nothing to do with my studio albums, of which I’ve done fifteen. I feel like an action painter now, it’s very liberating. There were no opportunities or outlets back then. I play in quadraphonic; it’s absolutely essential that I be in that spatial design. I had a concert planned in New York City in the mid-1970’s at Lincoln Center, and I asked for the four speakers and they said we can’t do that! And that was that, I never did the concert. And I realized that the traditional music world just wasn’t set up for electronic music. I spent several years trying to get the theater redesigned for electronic music, but I wasn’t successful. Venues are still not completely set up for spatial music, but we’re at least getting more consciousness of it because movie theaters have it.

I’ve always thought that was interesting - the movie theater as an access point for lots of people who don’t otherwise involve themselves with active or extensive consideration of spatial sound or questions of fidelity. Given that you’ve got specific ideas about the physical space that your performances have to occupy, which I assume extends to your recordings, how do you resolve the tension between the normalization of electronic music versus the decreasing control of artists over how their music is consumed via electronics?

My next project is actually to release some quadraphonic albums of live performances, so I’ve been running around the world collecting these performances and want to choose a couple of them and release them in quad. I’m not sure how - whether it’ll be vinyl, which I’m not sure is possible. What I sense is happening now is that we’ll have a return to audio fidelity. We’ve been through the dark ages and now we’re in the middle ages of quality, with people starting to realize that we need to go backwards a little bit. One of the things that they’ve unearthed is this fascination with analog as a distinct medium from digital. Nobody seemed to care about quality - when I did my last album, Silver Ship, in 2005, I recorded it at 192/24. That was the absolute best we could do - the computer was choking, it was so much data. And then of course you release it, and people listen to it on earbuds and download it over and over. We don't need to have a fetish about quality. There were periods in the history of audio when high fidelity really came in and guys sat in their music rooms with their speakers and their hi-fi stuff and would never leave. But I think there’s a place for it. We have convenience - you can run and listen to music, but you should also have the option of having a beautiful quadraphonic or greater spatial setup in your home.

It certainly seems like consumer interest in audiophilia outstrips the actual incidence of highly-refined hearing among the general public. That is interesting, though, because I suppose returning to analog mediums would make the physical form of a release a little less negotiable. Apparently there was a brief spate of dashboard phonographs, but releasing something exclusively on vinyl gives you a pretty good idea of how and where your music will be listened to.

I was also listening to Lixiviation, a compilation of mostly commissioned work, and wondering about how you’d possibly approach composing something like the theme for Inside Story. How do you go about fulfilling a request for, essentially, a sonic signification of the news?

That’s exactly what it was. You know what the purpose is, and for me it was always kind of like a poetry of interpretation. By that time, I had a lot of control. I had the Synclavier, so you could go in there and do microsurgery on things, slice and dice and re-compose them. There’s a lot of that, like the typewriter being used as the rhythm and maybe a camera click sound. You have to ask, what is the sonic universe of news? The countdown… taking all those elements and weaving them into a musical statement that has the energy that you want to communicate. That was my big strength, actually - the poetry, what came to be called sound design. The idea that you could interpret and represent a concept with sound. And they loved it! I remember afterwards someone knocked on my door and they had sent me this huge can of caviar.

I’m not totally sure about the chronology of your compositions, but listening to it is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy - that mix of elements went on and became the default template of a news break theme. It’s incredible that you were able to have a hand in what would become the universal sonic representation for breaking news. For something like the Atari recordings that lacked specific source material, what exactly were you being asked to interpret or translate into sound?

You know, the people that came to me were usually quite open to something that they didn’t quite understand. The promise was that it would be new and exciting, and given them some kind of distinction. They didn’t know what was going to happen - I had kind of cornered the market, which media in particular appreciated much more than record companies. It was advertisers, people who had to communicate sonically, who were interested in it. They didn’t know what it did, but they knew if it worked. I remember I did People magazine and there was a big question mark about it. They wanted a meeting beforehand where I would tell them what I was going to do, and I couldn’t [laughs].

Or even if you could express it, it wouldn’t necessarily translate.

Right. And so there was a risk involved - sometimes you’d go in and you would play something on the piano as an example. That would have almost nothing to do with the sound they were going to get. It was highly intense in the studio, not quick stuff. You can ask my engineer - she suffered with me for years.

I guess there’s a lot of pressure when you’re not working on a radio single or something like that, something with transient popularity. If someone reacts poorly to a sound they might end up hearing it for the rest of their lives regardless.

Right, it’s short. I love that. I did one sound that was a third of a second for a telephone company, which I think is still on the phone.

How were you able to get started in the business of sound design?

I found a book, called the Redbook, which had a list of all the big advertising agencies. My first advertising job came while I was still in graduate school. My boyfriend was from Milwaukee, and his neighbor did commercials for Macy’s. They had a Christmas package of ten spots for Macy’s, and he talked this guy into letting me do the sound. I had such a good time doing it, all at the Tape Music Center. It wasn’t legal to do commercial work there, actually, but nobody was ever there. I did some other work in those days at the public radio station, KPFA; my first recording, Voices of Packaged Souls, was done at a radio station. So there were places you could get your work done.

Was the synthesizer community small enough that anyone who found their way there was welcome, or did you ever experience it being a total boys club?

I think I was lucky, in that there weren’t even enough guys doing it for it to be a true boys club. It always was to some extent, and I was oblivious for awhile. There are some telling stories from when I was working for Don Buchla. We were assembling circuit boards and I wanted to know what it all meant. You couldn’t study it then, there were no musical electronics textbooks or anything and they didn’t even have manuals for the synths. I asked Don if he would give us some classes, and after the second one I was told that women weren’t going to be allowed any longer, but don’t take it personally. However, I was the only woman there!

What I understand in hindsight is that it wasn’t that they didn’t want me, Suzanne, in the class, but that men are more comfortable with men. They just don’t want the discomfort of having to deal with an alien presence. We love Suzanne, but we just don’t want a woman in here. That kind of thinking was there when I was on the cover of Keyboard magazine, as the first woman. Were there other women working? I think so, but women have been more invisible than appropriate. Now that they’ve uncovered some of the origins of music tech stuff, they’ve found a lot of women. Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, for instance. I’d never heard of Delia Derbyshire; we didn’t know about each other. If women can just be visible, we’ll start to feed off of that. You need your own group: women are comfortable with other women the same way that men are comfortable with other men, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m going to be giving a class at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and we’re thinking of doing a class for women. Maybe some of them are a little uncomfortable when they’re a minority, the one or the two in a room. We still haven’t solved that balance yet, but once we get it it’ll take care of itself. You just need to set the pendulum moving.