$4 an Hour for a Buchla: Harvestworks and the Public Access Synthesizer Studio
In 1977, when synthesizers were rare and expensive, a New York studio rented them to any artist for $4 an hour. That studio became Harvestworks, which has now supported more than 14,000 artists.
In the late 1970s, synthesizers were rare and expensive. In New York, one studio rented them by the hour. The Public Access Synthesizer Studio, Studio PASS, offered public access "for just $4 an hour," with a Buchla 100, an EMS Putney, a Moog oscillator bank and a Bode Frequency Shifter, recorded straight onto cassette decks. It was the seed of Harvestworks, the nonprofit established in 1977 by Gregory Kramer and Gerald Lindahl. The name was the plan: sow many artistic projects and "harvest the innovation from each of them."
Studio PASS began at 16 West 22nd Street in the Flatiron District. By 1986, Keyboard Magazine counted a Fairlight, a Roland Super Jupiter, an E-mu Emulator II, a Yamaha TX816 rack, Apple IIe and Macintosh computers, an Otari 8-track recorder and video recorders, along with the services of a staff engineer. In 1987 the studio moved with the rest of Harvestworks to 596 Broadway in SoHo, where it still is. Bob Moog and Suzanne Ciani have sat on the board.
The studio grew a scene around it. In 1983 Joseph Nechvatal, Claudia Gould and Carol Parkinson, who would lead Harvestworks for 37 years, launched Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, which Harvestworks sponsored. Tellus #1 carried Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham and Barbara Ess with Barbara Barg; later tapes covered Just Intonation, Fluxus and, in 1987, Video Art Music, with Woody Vasulka. That same year Harvestworks had its first major show, Soundwave, at the City Gallery at 2 Columbus Circle, and in 1992 the first user group for the programming language Max was set up there.
Nearly 5 decades on, Harvestworks says it has supported more than 14,000 artists, moving from analog synthesis to digital audio, virtual reality and immersive media. Studio PASS survives as the sound studio of its TEAM Lab (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music), and this year, marking 50 years, the organization launched FIELDWORKS, a journal that digs through its archive. The founding belief has not changed: "technology should serve creativity, not limit it."
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