His Specialty Is Music With a Byte : Music: Composer Morton Subotnick’s computerized ‘Key to Songs’ will be given its premiere with the L.A. Philharmonic on Thursday.

Composer Morton Subotnick is demonstrating a sequence from “The Key to Songs,” his new orchestral piece premiering Thursday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

After a few strokes at his computer, he moves his hands over to the piano keyboard. Down go several piano keys. Out come sounds of voices, vibraphone, marimba and zither.

It’s state-of-the-art sound from the Los Angeles-born pioneer of electronic music. California Institute of the Arts founding professor Subotnick has been weaving technology into musical composition, recordings and performance for three decades. His latest work is 30 minutes worth of music written for two Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) grand pianos, computer--and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“I’ve done a few things without technology, but basically I really love using it,” says Subotnick, who will be 59 next Tuesday. “I find myself more excited in working on a piece when there are multiple aspects to it, and it’s not just writing notes.”

His CalArts studio clearly reflects his departure from traditional composition. It duplicates the studio at his Santa Fe, N.M., home where he writes his music, and it is a jumble of sophisticated computer and sound equipment. Over at the worktable where one might expect composition paper, there’s a portable computer destined this week for the Music Center.

Joining the Philharmonic, conductor David Alan Miller and two pianists onstage at the Pavilion will be a computer operator who Subotnick describes as a high-tech page turner. “He or she won’t be doing anything except baby-sitting the computer,” Subotnick says. (The composer doesn’t know yet who that operator will be, but says he prefers musicians “because they don’t panic. A regular operator might get stage fright.”)

The computer program for “Key to Songs” triggers music made up of digitalized and modified voices and instruments. Use of the piano’s keys and pedals determines such things as instrument, notes, rhythm and loudness, and some notes continue on for several seconds when struck. Subotnick has orchestrated the piece so real instruments come and go with these “enriched” and “super real” sounds.

“The Key to Songs” is based on a 1933 novel in collage form by surreal artist Max Ernst. It originated as a chamber piece in 1985 at the Aspen Music Festival, and this later version was commissioned by Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman as an orchestral piece for the Philharmonic.

“Songs” is the first work in a three-work trilogy and is subtitled “Music for an Imaginary Ballet.” It has been choreographed now three different ways by three different ballet companies, and Subotnick hopes his audiences will create their own mental ballets as they hear it. “It’s an imaginary ballet, not my imaginary ballet,” the composer says. “It can be theirs or anyone’s.”

The trilogy, whose other two sections are “And the Butterflies Begin to Sing” and “Only Hummingbirds Have Alibis,” premiered in full at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival last July. It will be performed in Cincinnati and New York next season, he says, adding that he is now negotiating for a Los Angeles performance in 1993. Given that he was born and raised here, says Subotnick, he “definitely” wants to do the trilogy here during his 60th birthday year.

Looking back on his career, Subotnick notes with amusement that he “got into music by accident.” He had a bronchial condition at age 7, and the doctor suggested a wind instrument to help his lungs. The boy chose a clarinet because he thought, by its name, that it was the instrument he’d seen Tommy Dorsey play in the movies, and when his parents brought home the clarinet and not a trombone, “I was too proud to say I made a mistake.”

Within four years, he was playing the clarinet in public, and he concedes he was “sort of” a child prodigy. A high school teacher introduced him to the contemporary music of Stravinksy and Schoenberg, taking him to concerts. Subotnick also wrote music for the school orchestra while learning to play several more instruments there.

At 18, the young musician left his studies at USC for a spot playing clarinet with the Denver Symphony. He finished college in Denver while playing with the symphony, went off to the Army and graduate school and kept on composing.

Little of that early work still exists. His first day of college, he burned everything he’d written until then, destroying it page by page in the fireplace of his parents’ home in Tarzana. When he left Denver a few years later, he again destroyed the past, this time in a campfire outside Boulder, Colo.

“It was kind of a purification ritual, like shedding a skin,” he says today. “I felt I was moving forward and becoming something. I wanted to be a composer, but felt I could only be a composer if I had a unique voice.”

Subotnick’s journey to electronic music took another 10 years or so. It wasn’t until he’d written his first electronic piece, “Sound Blocks,” which premiered in 1961, that he “began to get this clear vision of who I was. It had to do with using the materials of our time to extend the expressive possibilities of music.”

He added computers to his repertoire after a residency at Paris’ Institute for Electronic-Musical Research in 1980, then developed concepts for interactive software during a residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few years later. Since 1985, he has continually collaborated with recent CalArts graduate Mark Coniglio, a composer, musician and computer “whiz kid.”

The two men work together at CalArts’ Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, a research body Subotnick co-founded last year. Among its projects is a computer program teaching children to compose with computers.

The program offers children “access to composerly thinking,” the composer says, “not just pounding on a piano but actually editing, balancing, hearing contrasts and being able to understand how music flows through time.”

Coniglio is also working with malleable sensors that could be worn by dancers and other performers so that computers could read their body movements. The sensors will allow performers to control everything from lighting to sound, Subotnick says.

Subotnick will make use of that technology in his next piece--one section of a four-part media opera called “The Misfortune of the Immortals,” which is planned for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993. The opera concludes with Subotnick’s piece, “And to All of Us a Theatrical Death.”

“The piece is a warning about the use of technology and distancing ourselves from our lives,” the composer says. “Yes, we will be able to do all this, but is it the right thing to do? If it extends the human potential, it’s one thing. But if it replaces it, we’re in trouble.”