Hello Larry.
Please tell me where you were born and a brief history about how you came to the music business.
I was born in New Jersey and spent most of my years growing up in the town of Livingston before leaving for college. I¹ve been experimenting with electronics and with sound since I was a child-- it has always fascinated me. I studied violin and piano as a kid and also slowly learned the electronic arts of recording and audio design in the same years. The critical mass where electronics could be used to make music came for me about 1967, when I was in my teens, around the same time that the first full-blown, expensive Moog synthesizers began to appear.
I mostly designed an built electronic sound devices for my own use, but in 1971 I got a commission from Rick Wakeman of Yes to build some of my custom modules for him. Soon after I was beginning the embryonic work that would become the first Synergy album.
My music teachers were mostly private tutors in my early years. Later I abandoned formal music education for a while during the height of the Beatles popular years in the 1960s and played bass and guitar in several semi-pro bands. Later, at college I returned to formal training in composition.
After college I tried to get a record deal as a member of a band, but the band broke up over the usual personality and direction issues and I dove back into making solo electronic music. Within a year I was under contract to Passport Records to make the first Synergy album.
What types of music and performers influenced your musicality?
My influences are widely varied. Classical from the earliest forms through 20th Century modern are all included. I can easily jump from Beethoven to Bartok, Bach to Stravinsky in my tastes. In pop, for me the overwhelming influence was the Beatles and all of the British bands, followed by the psychedelic artists of the 1960s. By 1970, much of my absorption of pop and rock influences was set.
As mentioned above, the Beatles were *the* defining influence for anyone who came of music age during the 1960s. Of course I came into that era with a healthy dose of exposure to rock, a lot of classical music of all ages, but particularly 19th century and some early 20th century, and as a kid in the 1950s and living so close to New York, exposure to Broadway musicals. Combined with the formal musical training that I got, it was a pretty good grounding in the craft of songwriting and composition.
The later rock eras like the peak years of psychedelic music in the late 60s (Jefferson Airplane, Byrds, etc.) and then the beginnings of the UK progressive rock scene from about 1970 onward (The Nice, later ELP, Yes,, etc.) also intrigued me. That was of particular interest to me because of the use of electronic instruments in the mainstream (following Wendy Carlos' "Switched On Bach" in 1967-68)--which is what was I was already beginning to do myself.
In 1975, your first album- "Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra," how did you go about the composing process on this wonderful recording. Has your compositional process changed through the years?
That album evolved out of writing that I had stored up for several years, though some pieces and parts were written nearer the beginning of the actual recording in 1975. Some of the earliest segments of Legacy were done for a composition project in college in the early 70s. Other parts were from works that I wrote with my short-lived band (some of the Warriors themes). And others were written in my work room on a 4 track recorder during late 1974.
I worked out the various parts and arrangements, and the sound patches on the Moog, by doing a trial run of the entire record on the 4 track at home. I had the leisure of going back and fixing and changing parts without eating up expensive studio time. Everything was documented, and a master click track was made for each piece. Then, in the studio, the timing click was transferred to 16 track tape and I rebuilt the entire record on much higher-quality gear. The original demo version still sounds a lot like the finished real record, except that it's a lot noisier from all of the track bounces and ended up in mono.
The process evolved in two stages. First I got true pro-level recording gear at home so that the demo tracks became the "real" recording--or at least the start of it. I'd still need to go to 24 tracks to finish up the recording and I needed the studio console and outboard gear for mixing, but overall the process was similar.
Then in the mid 80s, I started writing and tracking using MIDI sequencers--first on an Apple II computer and later (and still) on Macintosh. Now the sound patches and the performances were stored as digital control data and the polished performances could be recorded to digital tape (Sony 3324 machines) and later direct to hard disk (ProTools and Mark of the Unicorn Digital Performer).
If you were stranded on a desert island (With a CD player and batteries), and you could have any ten albums, what would you choose and why?
Tough question because I don't find myself listening to music nearly as much as I did before I was in "the business". When I've spent 14 hours in the studio day after day trying to be creative and still meet a deadline, when I have a chance to get away from the projects on vacation or in the car I tend to listen to talk radio.
That being said, I'd probably want 5 Beatles albums and and 4 Beethoven symphonies:
Abbey Road
Revolver
Rubber Soul
Beatles For Sale
With the Beatles
Beethoven symphony #9,
Beethoven symphony # 6
Beethoven symphony # 5
Beethoven symphony # 3
Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto.
They're what I learned from and what I never get tired of hearing.
How was it to work with musicians/bands such as Nektar and Peter Gabriel? Are you still in touch?
Uh, I guess it was okay. Seriously, they were both great experiences, although somewhat different in their dynamic. Peter is very hard to stay in touch with because he is so busy, but I hear from him through Christmas cards, through friends and the unexpected meeting at a show or tech conference. The Nektar guys I'm much more in touch with and there are preliminary plans underway for a reunion concert in the early summer 2002.
What kind of work have you been doing for the Walt Disney Company?
The Disney project is now complete. It is 3 hours of new music in various forms that is heard in the Port Discovery area of the DisneySea theme park in Tokyo. This is an Epcot style park except that the themes are all nautical. My music is heard in one of the half-dozen villages wherever you are; on the rides, on the street, in the restaurants, gift shops, train station. It's part of the coordinated environment. Working with Disney Imagineering is more like scoring a movie that unfolds live every day for the visitors instead of the kind of Muzak background music that it might have been art other theme parks. The park opened in September 2001.
I understand that the music is supposed to be available on CD from Disney at some point, but I haven't been informed of when.
What is your favorite book? Movie? Do you have any hobbies/interests outside music?
No single books come to mind, though if I'm not reading technical manuals and music tracts, then I gravitate toward history and biography (Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, or David McCollugh's biographies). 2001: A Space Odyssey probably remains my favorite movie. Outside of music I do a lot of work with electronics and electronic design. I actually have US Patents on optical audio transmission devices used by the hearing impaired. The same basic core technology that goes into creating musical sounds is used in transmitting speech.
I'm also involved in historic preservation and I work with government agencies here in New Jersey regarding preservation issues. And I've done photography for years. I still have my darkroom although almost everything has been digitally for the last few years. I also collect some antique electric light bulbs from about 1880 to 1910.
You have customized keyboards, developed systems for the hearing disabled, been involved with the birth of MIDI, what is next in terms of keyboard technology and your personal technological visions?
I think that the creative tools have been in place for quite a while. They just keep getting smaller and cheaper, and as the software evolves, more efficient creative tools. For some performers, there will always be a stand-alone keyboard of some sort as their main instrument. But for me, I've seen my live touring instrument rig shrink from something that needed a small truck down to something that can be put in the trunk of a sports car. And it keeps getting smaller. Using synthesis software, I'm able to do much of what I used to do with refrigerator size tape machines and walls of synthesis modules in a studio all inside of my Powerbook laptop. Except for the actual keyboard, it's a pretty impressive 10" x 12" 1" package. If I'm in pure writing mode where "playing" isn't the objective, I can even dispense with the keyboard and use the mouse to make my sonic assignments. I'm sure that the capabilities will continue to rise, costs will go down, and the real task will be how creative the composer can be with these tools, not how much equipment he can afford.
What is (or was) your most satisfying career highlight so far?
They never really stop, and there have been number one records, really large concerts and TV appearances, but I still like the first-time thrill of recording and participating in the release of the first Synergy album in 1975. Everything that has happened since then is some kind of outgrowth from that.
What are you working on now? Have you exclusively done commercial work since your last Synergy album? Do you plan to put on any new Synergy albums in the future?
At this moment I'm preparing for a live Synergy performance at the Alfa Centauri festival in Amsterdam in March 2002, getting ready for the spring and summer tour with the Tony Levin Band (the new CD with my fellow Peter Gabriel bandmates which we recorded during the summer of 2001 will be out in Feb. 2002), and working on the possibility of the Nektar reunion this summer. I am also creating more sonic identifiers for the new American radio network XM Satellite Radio. This is 100 new direct broadcast radio stations beamed from satellite across North America which began in late 2001. I am creating the sonic elements that will tie all 100 formats together with unified electronic sound logos.
I haven't done all that much commercial work in my entire career--it just seems that way sometimes because some of the projects are high profile. But most of the creative work has been musical--artists like Annie Haslam, David Bryan or Joy Askew, and the last few years of recording and touring with he ex-Peter Gabriel Band back together again as the Tony Levin Band.
I'd like to do some new Synergy music. I had even started the new project, but the Disney project required so much new material that I ended up shunting a lot of what might have been new Synergy music over to Disney. By running time, the Disney project was nearly the equivalent of three new CDs. Now I'm committed to live work through the summer of 2002, but the live Synergy show in Amsterdam might generate new recordings of classic Synergy material in some shape--possibly a limited release CD.
Thank you Larry, best wishes.
