| Excerpt from interview in Computer
Music Journal , 17:2, pp. 17-22 (Summer 1993) by Earl Dumour
Dumour: Tell us about your musical background.
Roberts: I went to music school in New York City,
where I was born and brought up. At the age of 15, after taking piano
lessons from miscellaneous private instructors for nine years, I finally
reached a place where I learned something, a school that is now known
as the Manhattan School of Music. I started there in 1927, stayed
there until 1933, when I graduated with a diploma in piano. That's
also where I met my wife, Janice. I had several piano teachers, the
last and most important of which was Rudolph Gruen. Of course, I had
all sorts of classes in ensemble playing, theory, and counterpoint. I
studied composition under Hugh Ross and Quincy Porter.
The same year I also received my master's degree in
physics from Columbia University. At that point it became necessary to
decide about my future career. Was I going to be a musician or a
physicist? I decided that professionally I'd better be a physicist. I was
a moderately good pianist, but not really good enough for the concert
stage. It looked as if I would have to resort to teaching piano.
Physics sounded like more fun that that, and I think it has been. One
of the strongest arguments for going into physics was that I could
still keep up with music as a physicist, but I couldn't keep up with
physics as a musician. Ever since then, I've been a composer.
...
Dumour: How was your musical work viewed by your
colleagues at the Argonne National Laboratories?
Roberts: Usually you'll find among scientists a
great number of people who are very fond of classical music. I had lots of
sympathy and admiration. The man who was in charge of scientific films at
Argonne, George Treseel, asked me to write computer music for his films.
So I did that. I wrote the title music for a short film called Link
that had to do with the analysis of bubble chamber photographs. He then
asked me to write the music for the full-length feature film they were
doing called The Many Faces of Argonne, which I wrote for
conventional instruments; it was recorded by members of the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra. That film won an award later that year at a film
festival in Belgium.
...
Dumour: One of the most difficult pieces of
equipment to find in the early days was a digital-to-analog converter.
Roberts: Yes, they were rare and expensive; an
8-bit DAC cost several thousand dollars...
...
Dumour: Much of your music has a humorous edge.
Roberts: Yes, especially the songs. I've written
about a hundred of them, mostly about physics. One the more popular ones
is called Take Away Your Billion Dollars. It was written after
World War II when the government was trying to entice physicists to accept
large amounts of money to build big laboratories as a result of the
success of the atomic bomb project. Many of us were not sure this was a
good idea...
|
