Theodore Gordon's first book tells us how a handful of practitioners (Morton Subotnick, Donald Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra) realized their singular visions of music in cybernetic contexts. A war time science, grounded in both the mathematics of the European enlightenment and the massive industrial push of the world wars, cybernetics' surprise foray into popular discourse also offered the general public a conceptual model through which to understand what North Americans saw around them: a radical (if wildly heterogeneous) redefinition of the everyday, not just by these electronic means of communication and control, but also by the sweeping aestheticization and ideological apparatus that accompanied this industrial and logistical shift. This science (or its material and theoretical affordances) prompted each of these artists to reconsider in their own way the where and how of human agency amidst amplified and electronic sound. Musically-curious readers will find this monograph illuminating for its clear and critical analysis of cybernetics' influence on 20th century American composition. More general readers interested in the making of our current technocultural moment will find musics—especially those of Oliveros, Lucier and Ra—to be invaluable miniatures of the interplays of power and culture leading to today.

Gordon's introductory chapter introduces the "black box" as a conceptual frame for this monograph. Drawing on history of science, especially its feminist strands and the corresponding concepts (Katherine Hayles' posthuman, Donna Haraway's cyborg, Karen Barad's diffractive readings), he builds on the work of Alexander Weheliye and Kodwe Eshun to problematize cybernetics (15). With these he assembles theoretical tools with which to critically examine the claim that electric means could shift the work of the composer from dealing with instruments and performers to dealing with ideas, "shaping" sound (2) and "painting" music (49). This was Morton Subotnick's hope when he commissioned Donald Buchla to make one of the first modular synthesizer systems: a black boxed composition "machine" which leveraged electronics to afford the artist simultaneously intuitive and interactive freedom within the musical parameters of sound: timbre, pitch, rhythm (25). [2] Each case-study that follows, then, documents a fallingapart of these expectations for "making cybernetic" composition, as each practitioner deals, head on, with the reality of electronics as simply another mediator of expressivity rather than a freeing one. [3] Nowhere is this more evident than in Ra's negotiation of the Minimoog synthesizer: "[A]s far as I'm concerned", Gordon quotes Ra, "the only freedom that I've ever seen that Black people get has been over in the cemetery". (7)[4]  Chapter two focuses on Subotnick's trajectory towards Donald Buchla's "Box" instrument. For Gordon, these developments are best understood as parts in a longer arc which began in the late 1950s via his encounter of Milton Babbit, a Columbia University composer whose more notorious cybernetic music works involved the notorious R.C.A. Mark II "Victor" synthesizer. Babbit's insights on making music with electronics appeared to Subotnick as a tempting solution to his stylistical and artistic issues, unsatisfied as he was with his earlier post-tonal training and works. Projects like King Lear, Sound Blocks, or the soundtrack he was commissioned to make for The Computer and Mind of Man (a six-part computer documentary aired on KQED-TV in 1962) slowly built up his motivation to find alternate means of thinking about sound. Essays like Marshall McLuhan's 1960 Report on Project in Understanding New Media which he'd obtained in 1963 from poet M.C. Richards (41) provided him with some of the language he sought to describe his imagined approach, and the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) gave him an institutional skeleton within which to accumulate the resources required to materialize his vision.

But Donald Buchla—the man which built Subotnick and the SFTMC a modular synthesizer—deserves his own story: chapter two shows how he worked himself within Subotnick's milieu to explore his own, related project. Gordon makes the case that the Buchla Box (the original name of his first modular analog sound synthesis and modification systems) is best understood as "an externalized model of a human black box" (53) which plays with the computational, systematic desires of the player. A valuable summary of Buchla's unique mix of expertises (analog computing, circuit design, assistive and prosthetic electronics instruments, a profound curiosity for the limits of human bodies and their perceptive capacities) and resources (he was well aware of audio research like Harald Bode's 1961 article on modular signal processing and had access to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory's machine shop), this chapter reverses Subotnick's desire for a "music easel" with which to sculpt sound with Buchla's proposition that the mind itself was a black box which could to be wired to non-human analogs to reveal and generate immanent or collaborative structures. As the chapter's conclusion suggests, Buchla's astute weaving of various threads of sixties counter- and cyber-cultures made it relevant much beyond experimental musics.  

Chapter 3 shifts to another SFTMC participant, Pauline Oliveros. Gordon focuses on the tape, live electronic and performance projects of the period roughly 1954-1967, which shaped a relationship to her performing body which would inform the rest of her career. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and spectrographic analysis of recordings, he argues that improvisations with magnetic tape led her to formalize a technique for "emancipating the performing subject by transcending the limitations of indeterminacy, open form, and structured improvisation developed by [John] Cage" and other influential figures of her avant-garde music milieu (98). Gordon presents how her relationship with David Tudor, grounded in a shared accordion practice and a curiosity for constructing musical systems which challenge the boundaries of composer / performer / technical agency, especially as realized in the 1964 Tudorfest events, were foundational in her musical exploration of Hewlett-Packard scientific oscillators. Gordon's clarifying analysis of Oliveros' technical setup at the SFTMC for heterodyning with these devices, and his empirical reading of its musical affordances as observable in the surviving Mnemonics recordings (1965), set a new bar for future analyses of live electronic tape musics.

With chapters 4 and 5 Gordon shifts his focus to the East Coast. "Alvin Lucier and the ambiguity of sound and signal" focuses on projects from the second half of the 1960s (Music for Solo Performer, Vespers, Signatures, Music / Composition for Amplified Lip, Computer Piece). Against a strand of scholarship which would situate Lucier's canonical work in sound as purely physical rather than culturally mediated phenomena, Gordon's meticulous historicizing of his lesser-known, unfinished projects and experiments makes evident that the fabric of Lucier's practice is the symbolic and the cultural as much as—if not more than—an imagined "real". The black box here isn't exactly the objectivity of physics revealed through sound and electronics, rather, his technical tools and performers become second order systems in which the actors of any given piece are put in technical and operative view of each other and the audience for poetic, didactic, and relational performances of sound.

In chapter 5, "Sun Ra and the Minimoog: Freedom, Discipline and Opacity" Gordon provides valuable new insights on Ra's unlikely path to a prototype Minimoog (a Model B) in 1970, the result of a visit to the Moog factory which is described in vivid detail (170-172). With unrealized racial and cultural tension thick enough to be cut with a knife, the material result—Ra's acquisition of a ramshackle, unapproved experiment with "a mind of its own" (179), resurrected circuit boards and mismatched components—lead to poignant discussion which almost rivals Alexander Weheliye's and Katherine McKittrick's analysis of the 808 (2015). Unlike Gordon's technical analysis of oscillator-combinations for Mnemonics in chapter 3, here the analysis is built around an engagement with theorists and their ideas: Sylvia Wynter's "new genre of human" (184), Édouard Glissant's opacity (185), Fred Moten's "animative materiality" (186), Louis Chude-Sokei's "'grammar' of dominance" (187) and Sadiya Hartman's "scenes of subjection "(188) to help readers grapple with Ra's own understanding of discipline, freedom, and precision as realized through his music generally and this black boxed instrument specifically. Gordon concludes: "Ra and his Minimoog did not conjure sonic or political freedom; they produced opaque sounds and a politics that saw discipline, precision, culture and beauty from what Ra called 'the kingdom of bondage,' referring to ancient Egypt." (189, citing the 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise).

Gordon's book fits within a contemporary revisiting of cybernetics which has been ongoing in anglophone academic-artistic milieux since the mid 2010s. [5] His crystal clear deconstruction of the muddy mix of pragmatism and utopianism which defines each of his five vignettes maps out how, exactly, creativity was realized in sound and electricity under the influence of socially constructed cultural, economic, racial, and gender tensions which defined America over (roughly) the course of the Vietnam War. Music, then, was yet another ground for the negotiations of these tensions. The Composer's Black Box is certainly, as its subtitle claims, about "making music in cybernetic America" and it provides valuable documentation of how the surplus production, epistemologies and tensions of the Cold War were processed and memorialized, with stark contrasts and meaningfully different perspectives, across this wide range of musics and their attendant technologies. But perhaps more importantly, Gordon's tone is not nostalgic: built between his bookends of Alexander Weheliye and Sun Ra, he shows how cybernetic dreams of freedom through communication technology always break down into exercises of control. This is an eerily relevant topic—-amidst the returns to power of various technofascisms—which makes his book timely and potent beyond music studies.

Notes

[1] This review is dedicated to Don Buchla and Pauline Oliveros, whose generosity I experienced in profoundly different but still unforgettable ways.

[2] Although Gordon situates Robert Moog as his figurehead for this, the claim goes back to at least Feruccio Busoni's Sketch of an Esthetic of New Music (1907, translated in English in 1911, see p.33 on). See for example, Paul Theberge's correspondingly named Any Sound You Can Imagine or Joel Chadabe's Electric Sound (both 1997). On the ideologies of electronic music equipment see, for example, Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett's recent Gear (2025). Telling, here, that Subotnick admitted fiftyseven years after releasing Silver Apples of the Moon (1967-2024) that he had been "terribly disappointed" by the Buchla 100 system he had effectively commissioned a few years prior (Composer's Black Box, 18-19). More generally, as Christina DunbarHester's stated in her article-length examination of music and cybernetics: "I could not find an explicit link between the source material [of cybernetic musicians] and people or ideas that were known to be 'cybernetically active.'" The cybernetic imaginary is often only loosely realized in diy live electronics and synthetic sound (2010, quoted in Composer's Black Box p.201, fn. 41).

[3] Parallels with the broken promises of contemporary statistical inference products could yield fruitful comparison, see for example Emily Bender and Alex Hanna's The AI Con (2025).

[4]Here the parallel between Ra's quoted remark and Edouard Glissant's concept of the generalizing universal is also tempting, see Poetique de la Relation p.156 (1990), or Rhimi (2021).

[5] Although this book is entirely new writing, Gordon wrote the dissertation whose work served as a foundation in period roughly 2015-2018. Consider, for example: Frank Pasquale's Black Box Society (2015); the School for Poetic Computation's Cybernetics conference (November 2017) and the Cybernetic Library which accompanied it; the 2019 Recursions event at the University of Edinburgh and the Resonance special issue on cybernetics and music which came of it (winter 2021); Yuk Hui's recent edited volume Cybernetics for the 21st century: Vol. 1, Epistemological Reconstruction (2024). Christopher Haworth's own book on the Cybernetics Culture Research Unit and its musical influences is also upcoming.