Interview With Suzanne Ciani

Excited about this one! Got to catch up with legendary and pioneering musician, sound designer, composer, and five-time Grammy Award nominee, the one and only, Suzanne Ciani! She was one of Synth History's very first interviews, featured in Issue One back in 2020. Our correspondence then was via e-mail, during the pandemic. For Issue Five, I drove up to Northern California and interviewed her in person. Without further ado, a more intimate and long-awaited part II!

If you're in LA, make sure you grab tix to her Age of Reflections performance on December 13th at the First Congregational Church of LA. We'll see you there! Ticket Link.

Suzanne Ciani in her studio by Synth History.

Synth History: When did you first start getting into and making music?

Suzanne Ciani: When I was little, we had a piano in the house. Around five or six I gravitated to it, but it wasn’t an easy, continuous path. I mean, I wanted to do it, but I didn’t like my piano teacher so that only lasted a year. I was pretty self-taught. In high school, I sought out lessons in Boston at the Longy School of Music. Then I went to college and majored in music, and later graduate school where I got a master’s in composition.

All of that was in the traditional music world, but my real learning experience came when I met Don Buchla and I went off into electronics. I was in Berkeley for a while, then moved to LA and worked with film people, then moved to New York, where I actually made money. But getting my artistic music out there wasn’t easy. My first deal was actually in Japan.

Synth History: Oh really? Did you get to go over there and tour?

Suzanne Ciani: I have played there, yeah. Although at that time my first album was Seven Waves, which was actually not performable because it was a studio album, an electronic studio album. But then I realized how important it was to perform, so I made sure that my music was performable, even if it was electronic.

Synth History: Do you approach making an album differently if you envision it being performed live versus being a studio project?

Suzanne Ciani: Completely different. The studio album, you know, is a recording process. You’re composing with all the tools of the studio. What I’m focused on now is live performance, because I believe that what we were missing was the original concept of the analog modular electronic music instrument.

When I worked for Buchla, we didn’t use the word “synthesizer.” It was too much of a defined term. It’s shorthand for saying an instrument makes something electronically. But in my brain, the analog modular is completely separate from a keyboard-focused instrument. So I don’t like the word synthesizer. Sorry about that—I know it’s the name of the magazine! [laughs]

Synth History: [laughs] What would you call it instead?

Suzanne Ciani: I say, “analog modular electronic music instrument,” [laughs] it’s not very shorthand!

Synth History: Maybe that’ll be the title of this issue, Analog Modular Electronic Music Instrument History!

In the first issue, I think I asked what drew you to the Buchla. I want to ask you again now, in person. You said you started with piano, what were your first thoughts when you experienced making music with the Buchla, and what led to that transition?

Suzanne Ciani: I think some early sound experiences shaped me. When I was young, I had earaches and wore earplugs and a bathing cap in the water. I would go into the water in this kind of muffled state. One day I took them out, and the sparkling sound of the water was overwhelming.

I’ve always thought of myself as a composer and was brought up traditionally. In retrospect, the fascination with the Buchla was–without even being conscious of it–that it gave me the possibility of being independent. You could make music on your own. That was a huge power to have. If you were in the classical world, which was the only world that existed for me because I wasn’t a pop musician, you had to go through a lot of infrastructure to get your music out. It was nearly impossible. Orchestras were closed to women. Everything was closed to women back then. There’s kind of a consensus that what attracted women to this field was that it gave them independence from a system that didn’t belong to them.

Synth History: What did people think of electronic instruments back then? I’ve read that some orchestras were afraid they’d lose their jobs. Was the majority of the music world excited or apprehensive?

Suzanne Ciani: When we don’t understand something, the first human reaction is fear. There was a lot of fear. I couldn’t get into the musicians’ union as an electronic musician because it was seen as a threat. I said, “I play the Buchla. I’m an electronic musician. I also play piano. If you want me to join as a pianist, fine.” Eventually I did, and to this day I get a pension from the union. So it’s a good thing that I joined [laughs].

But it was a lonely place to be. People didn’t understand it. If I did a concert or installation, I’d set the Buchla to generate sounds for weeks at a time, and nobody knew where the sound was coming from. It was so abstract. My role became bridging that gap, teaching people. And to this day, I still have that teaching impulse.

Synth History: When do you think electronic music shifted into pop culture and became more accepted?

Suzanne Ciani: In the beginning, you had boutique inventors: Bob Moog, Don Buchla, the EMS guys; artist-engineers creating these instruments. Then, when it started to get more momentum, the big guys came in, the Japanese companies: Roland, Yamaha, Korg. They promoted and marketed them heavily.

Don never did that. He hated it if you bought one of his instruments [laughs] He thought if he pleased the consumer, he had failed. His aim wasn’t to give people what they wanted. The big companies, though, designed for the public. That reduced things to a lowest common denominator, designing for a mass audience.

Synth History: Do you ever think about that when you’re making music? I think as musicians sometimes you wonder, “Am I making this for myself, or am I making this to please [an audience]?”

Suzanne Ciani: I’ve never wanted to please anyone but myself. Don Buchla was the same way. I think that’s what gravitated me towards the Buchla, or maybe that influenced me. I remember being on the board of NARAS with Carly Simon’s sister. She told me, “Carly and I were both given budgets to do albums. The only mistake I made was failing, not because ‘I failed’ but because I failed without doing what I really wanted. I failed by doing what they wanted.”

Your strongest voice is yourself. My attitude has always been: if someone else can do it, let them. I’m supposed to do what only I can do. You know, even so in commercial work, sometimes I had to step outside my personal genre. I had to do R&B, country-western, you know, whatever for Coca Cola. I realized you can take a good melody and dress it in anything: jazz, rock, orchestral. Once you’ve got a good melody, you can present it in any way you want, like changing your clothes. I learned a lot doing commercials.

Synth History: Do you think working on commercials gave you more freedom in your own music?

Suzanne Ciani: Yes. You need money to fund your creative work. But even in commercials, I had a lot of independence, because nobody knew how to do what I was doing. They couldn’t tell me what to do because they didn’t know how!

Synth History: I love that clip of you on Letterman, where you’re demonstrating all your gear and he asks something like, “What do you do with all this stuff?” and you say, “Well, this is what I do for a living!”

Suzanne Ciani: Exactly. That was telling. People had no idea what this equipment was.

Synth History: I love when you did that rising sound on the show, the one that feels like it goes ‘up’ forever.

Suzanne Ciani: That was something I learned when I did computer music at Stanford. There was a way to generate a tone that could rise forever and you emphasize the higher harmonics as you rise, so it feels endless. It’s an illusion. I did that on a Prophet 5. To this day, I don’t know if I could do it again!

Synth History: I recently went to a Korean BBQ place in LA and they had the Xenon pinball machine. When was the last time you played it? And what was it like composing the sounds for Xenon?

Suzanne Ciani: The last time I played was in Italy. They gave me a machine, but I never had room for it. So my cousin in Benevento said, “Well, send it to me.” I said, “OK, well if you pay for the shipment!” So she has one there now.

The project appealed to me a great deal because I love technology. It was this exciting frontier, the edge of the future. The chip I used was brand new. It was a challenge, the ideas of optimizing the abilities of that little chip. I had a Synclavier, it cost $200k, and the way I did that job was that I replicated—inside the Synclavier—the limitations of that little chip, and designed. Without that, I couldn’t have done it.

Synth History: What are some of your studio go-tos besides the Buchla?

Suzanne Ciani: I have a new best friend: the Animoog. It’s compact, light and great for touring. I’m a minimalist now. Everything has to be portable. The Animoog amazes me. I remember playing Sonar Festival in Spain—I hit a bass note on the iPad and thousands of people roared. That’s the beauty of electronic music: it’s amplified, it has a volume knob, it can shake the rafters.

Synth History: What do you like most about it?

Suzanne Ciani: At first, I used it as a melodic partner for the Buchla. Recently I collaborated with Actress, a London artist who works with computers and beats. We figured out how to synchronize the iPad with his computer and with analog instruments. What I had been doing was less exacting, but I could put a Buchla pattern on and figure out what the tempo was and then put that tempo in the iPad and it would work pretty well. But if you’re doing something that’s more beat or dance-driven, you need a lock. No delay, you need to really be able to dial in the synchronization. I have the recipe for how to do it and if your readers are interested I can share the recipe.

Synth History: If you could give advice to your younger self, would you and what would it be?

Suzanne Ciani: Honestly, I never listened to advice. But I’d say: don’t feel pressured by time. The business used to make you think you had to succeed by a certain age. In my day, if you were over 40, you were done. Now you see people performing into their 80s and 90s. 

Synth History Exclusive.

Interview + photos by Danz.