Donald Buchla and David Rosenboom at Music Gallery (Toronto) in 1978 performing How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, Section V (Humanity).

The performance followed the release of the album "Collaboration in Performance" in 1978, recorded at 1750 Arch Records, Berkley, CA. The recording featured two compositions:

And Out Come the Night Ears created in 1978 for piano and Buchla 300 Series Electric Music Box—(released on the CD Future Travel by New World Records in 2007)—,

How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, Section V (Humanity) – composed and performed originally in 1969. The 1978 version was adapted for performance with two Buchla Series 300 Electric Music Box instruments. Conceptually the new version follows the idea of developing a set of cellular patterns in cyclical structures to create emerging forms of melody and rhythm. As the story goes, in 1977-78, while spending the summer in California, Rosenboom had been teaching Buchla to play the piano. Despite initial enthusiasm to learn the analog instrument, Buchla faced a certain frustration with reproducing musical patterns on the piano himself. The engineering mind sought optimization of the task – as a result, patterns from Plymouth Rock . . . were programmed into the Buchla system, releasing its designer from the necessity to reproduce combinations proposed by Rosenboom in a traditional fashion.

Performance photos by Judy Whalen; album cover design by Jacqueline Humbert.