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Chamber music of Morton Subotnick [Friday, May 12, 2006, Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress] Got to hear/see Until Spring Revisited, a work of surround sound and projected images performed on laptops. The beginnings of the piece date way back to the developments of what became the Buchl Synthesizer at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the '60s. An updating of Until Spring (1976) (which then was given to the limitations of the analog synthesizer), it contains some samples from the original work, but most of the sounds, though similar to the original, were newly created. The sounds were loaded into a software environment using the application, Isadora. The sound materials were organized into blocks or "scenes," each containing an array of related material. The ordering of these scenes can be changed at any time and the performance of the sound materials within the scenes were rehearsed, but the work is always in a state of perpetual evolution. On the stage two laptops were performed by Miguel Frasconi, a composer/performer who's worked with Cage, Eno, Hassell, and James Tenney, and who's worked in the Fluxus and Dada movements, and Subotnick. The technique included the playing of keys on the keyboards and mouse movements and vocalizing into four microphones. The sound traveled through the auditorium space through six speakers and a sub-woofer. The third performer was Sue Constabile, a light artist. She performed the visual component of the evening by manipulating handmade and found objects-- papers, fabrics, drawings, watercolors-- captured in real time by a video camera and projected onto a screen at the read of the stage. Textures, surfaces, shapes, bits of texts and lighting danced across the screen in dark, moody ways. Her work seems to inherit equally from the kinetic languages of Stan Brakhage's abstractions, as well as Nicolas Schoffer's lumodynamic sculptures. Taken all together, the evening was full, and seemed to be-- if not totally new (for that listen to Mandarin Movie, Condemek, Damian Catera, Robert Ashley, Joan Labarbara)--an ample (and amplified!) summation of where Subotnick's been and where he's going. Gerald Schwartz