Ernie Mor­gan

First of all I must con­fess feel­ing ex­tremely hon­ored to be al­lowed to fea­ture those long lost record­ings on a myth­i­cal orig­i­nal Buchla 100 ana­log syn­the­sizer.
Orig­i­nally from Ok­la­homa, Ernie Mor­gan had done his Mas­ters at Mills Col­lege in Elec­tronic music.
He was in the Psych Pop group The Straw­berry Alarm Clock.
He then came to UCSD in 1971 and worked with the Buchla syn­the­sizer there, as well as play­ing sax­o­phone, and study­ing com­po­si­tion with sev­eral peo­ple there. He worked with Pauline Oliv­eros and Roger Reynolds, and even col­lab­o­rated as WEB trio along with Bruce Rit­ten­bach and War­ren Burt…
In 2021 War­ren Burt sent his music to me with this in­tro­duc­tion:

About 2 and 1/2 years ago, I re­ceived an in­quiry from my web­site.
It was from a woman named Mary Mor­gan, and she said she was the widow of Ernie Mor­gan, who had just passed away. As Ernie was a vet­eran surfer, I wasn’t sur­prised when she told me that Ernie had had a heart at­tack while surf­ing and died on his board. She said that she had got­ten in touch with me be­cause Ernie had told her that only “The Scar­let Aard­vark” would un­der­stand the music he made with syn­the­siz­ers when he was at UCSD from 1971-74 and 75.
She had done a web­search for “The Scar­let Aard­vark” and came up with my name and web­site (I won­der if Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent has this prob­lem…) and was won­der­ing, was I the afore­men­tioned Scar­let Aard­vark and did I know Ernie?!

Orig­i­nally from Ok­la­homa, he had done his Mas­ters at Mills Col­lege in elec­tronic music. Mag­gie Payne re­mem­bers him well. He then came to UCSD in 1971 and worked with the Buchla syn­the­sizer there, as well as play­ing sax­o­phone, and study­ing com­po­si­tion with sev­eral peo­ple there – I be­lieve he worked with Pauline Oliv­eros and maybe Roger Reynolds. I thought Ernie was a very good com­poser and we even col­lab­o­rated as WEB trio along with Bruce Rit­ten­bach…
Some teach­ers on the fac­ulty didn’t like Ernie’s mu­si­cal vi­sion, and I think it was in late 1974 that he left the pro­gram – I’m not sure of the de­tails at this dis­tance, but he wasn’t happy – he might have failed his oral exams, but again, I can’t re­mem­ber. In any case, ap­par­ently, he went home and took all his reel to reel tapes and made a wooden box, and put them in the box and nailed the box shut and for him, that was the end of his in­volve­ment with new music or elec­tron­ics. He later taught el­e­men­tary school for many years in North San Diego County and also played with The Straw­berry Alarm Clock. Time passes.
Ernie is 71 in 2016. He is a ded­i­cated surfer, and while surf­ing off Ocean­side, Cal­i­for­nia, had a heart at­tack and died.

Mary won­dered if I would like to have the reel to reel tapes, to see if there was any­thing of in­ter­est on them. 3 large card­board boxes with reel to reel tapes and pho­tos and pro­grams from UCSD came in. The pro­grams alone are a trea­sure trove of mem­o­ries. She also sent me $1000, which I used to pay Mel­bourne en­gi­neer Michael Hewes to tran­scribe the tapes to dig­i­tal. While tran­scrib­ing the tapes, Michael is very im­pressed by them. I had a
lis­ten, and after 45 years, I, too, was most im­pressed. I had re­mem­bered that Ernie’s elec­tronic music was highly val­ued by my­self and a few other col­leagues at UCSD, but the stuff was in­deed ex­cep­tional. I had also com­mu­ni­cated with John Bisch off and Mag­gie Payne, of Mills Col­lege, who both knew Ernie in his Mills days, and both re­mem­bered him fondly and said they had very good mem­o­ries of his music. One of the pieces was es­pe­cially im­pres­sive: “Be­gin­ning IIb was from For Sea, and Ever Shall”. This is about 80 min­utes long and it’s from I think 1974, and was, I think, to be one of the pieces for Ernie’s PhD. It was made on the Buchla (a 12 panel sys­tem de­signed by Robert Er­ick­son) at UCSD, I think, al­though maybe Ernie mixed in some stuff made on the Moog there, or other syn­the­siz­ers. But I think it’s mostly Buchla.
I have added a cou­ple oth­ers, mostly shorter, but also using the B100, so here is a trea­sure trove of pre­vi­ously un­known Buchla work from both the Mills Col­lege and UCSD stu­dios for you to enjoy.

Be­gin­ning IIB from was 4 Sea, and Ever Shall

Re­peat­ing loops which con­tin­u­ally change tempi and chang­ing tim­bres as well. A sense of end­less vari­a­tion, yet also a sense of con­stancy – and then, over time, the ranges of change, as do the kinds of tim­bre changes. You think it’s going nowhere, and then, un­ex­pect­edly, it does change. And then the ear­lier rep­e­ti­tions, or frag­ments of them, do come back in, if only for a mo­ment.
I get the sense that a kind of re­peat­ing pat­tern is man­u­ally con­trolled, and the tem­pos are ir­reg­u­larly chang­ing, fol­low­ing both a kind of reg­u­lar logic and a kind of ir­reg­u­lar rep­e­ti­tion. And after a while, the kinds of rep­e­ti­tions do change, both for longer and shorter times. Best maybe to not fol­low the changes ex­actly, but in­stead to drift with the changes as they change both in short-​term changes, and with more long-​scale changes.
One of Ernie’s re­cur­ring ti­tles for a se­ries of pieces of his was “Mono-​Melodies.” These sort of mono­phonic melodies, which also change tempi over a very wide range, pro­vide in­ter­est­ing va­ri­eties of ges­ture and tex­ture – yet they al­ways seem to re­turn to vary­ing kinds of re­peat­ing melodies. It’s a long piece – 77 min­utes (here ap­pear­ing in 2 parts be­cause of BC size re­stric­tions), but it seems to go a lot faster than that. This piece was writ­ten by Ernie as one of the port­fo­lio of pieces for his PhD.
It’s been one of my fa­vorite pieces of his since I first heard it back around 1973.

A+B=Com­par­i­son: LAST DANCE
B+A=Com­par­i­son: LAST DANCE

These two pieces seem to be struc­turally re­lated. I get the feel­ing that one melodic and tim­bral se­quence is used in two ways – with two sig­nals in­ter­mod­u­lat­ing each other, you get two vari­a­tions – A mod­u­lat­ing B and B mod­u­lat­ing A from one set of ma­te­r­ial. This, of course, might be too sim­ple a de­scrip­tion – Ernie seems to be hav­ing lots of vari­a­tions of change in his ma­te­r­ial. But the range of vari­a­tions is fairly wide. And both pieces seem to be in two sec­tions. So in ad­di­tion to all sorts of short-​time-scale changes, there seem to be two larger scale sec­tions in each.
These kind of struc­tural changes seem to be one way that he seems to build larger struc­tures into his ma­te­r­ial.
A com­bi­na­tion of chang­ing kinds of ma­te­ri­als with re­peat­ing (or semi-​repeating) riffs. Lis­ten­ing in a cu­ri­ous way: how ARE the ma­te­ri­als chang­ing and yet not-​changing but re­peat­ing?
As John Cage said, “We give exact at­ten­tion.”

War­ren Burt / 2022