Suzanne Ciani (1946) grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, near Boston. She graduated in music in 1964 from Wesley College (an exclusive all-girls school) and then in composition at Berkeley (graduating in 1970), became fascinated with electronic instruments, and joined Don Buchlas lab in Berkeley, one of the first engineers to build synthesizers, completely abandoning the piano.
Unlike what Morton Subotnick was doing at the time, Ciani employed the electronic instrument with fine feminine sensitivity, avoiding the more gruesome effects. After several live performances in art galleries and museums around San Francisco, and music for ballets, in 1974 she moved to New York, where she met musicians of the stature of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, and Richard Landry. She thus witnessed the development of revolutionary musical genres, from free jazz to minimalism. Employed by an advertising company to create TV commercials, she quickly became successful with her Buchla, working for Coca-Cola and many other corporations.
It was only in 1979 that she decided to compose an album, Seven Waves (1982). Inspired by the ocean, with the idea of electronically recreating the motion and sound of waves, Ciani used only electronic instruments (including a vocoder to incorporate her voice).
The album contains seven pieces she calls Waves, free melodic fantasies for electronic instrumentation that flow gracefully and sinuously. The depth of her music is orchestral, but each piece is performed entirely by her: the "orchestra" is a state-of-the-art electronic laboratory, consisting of a sequencer, a rhythm generator, a Buchla, a synclavier, a lyricon, a vocoder, a harmonizer, and various processors. A grand piano still dominates the complex composition and production apparatus. Far from being mere experiments to follow, the seven "waves" exhibit a formal perfection that borders on mannerism.
The most melodic ones (such as the first and fifth) are also the least pretentious and the most immediate, sometimes recalling the electronic watercolors of Tonto's Band. The more descriptive ones (like the third and sixth) dive into layer upon layer of synthetic sounds. Sometimes the effect is strongly hypnotic, as in the simulated waves of the third.
The strongly hypnotic effect of these compositions became dominant starting with Velocity Of Love, the album that revealed her to the wider public. If Eighth Wave and the Latin funky Malibuzios still draw on more kitschy elements, the more mature compositions, with the obvious rhythms removed, then move slowly and lazily through imperceptible ether, spinning languidly and sensually in their magma of emotions, giving rise to small symphonic poems such as Lay Down Beside Me and History Of My Heart.
The title track, with its melodic piano theme, in fact opened a new phase, in which the reference model is more the orchestra of Richard Clayderman. The album Neverland was the purest expression of this, with its brief impressionist sketches, especially the title track and Tuscany, peaks of her melodicism, and the domestic melodramas of When Love Dies and Mother's Song, painfully autobiographical. The work is sealed by Lumiere, the first nightmare of her career, which seems to emerge directly from her unconscious.
With History Of My Heart Ciani continued to present brief intimate impressions for piano and electronics (Inverness, Eagle), but without the tender sensitivity of her beginnings.
On Pianissimo she performed the best pieces from Neverland and History Of My Heart on grand piano (without electronic accompaniment), and on Piano Two those from Velocity Of Love, often achieving results superior to the originals. With these albums, Ciani finally reconciled with the instrument of her childhood.
After Hotel Luna, composed in Italy, which shows the same weaknesses as History Of My Heart, Ciani returned to live in California, and with Dream Suite she seems to finally begin a new career. The album is the most classical of her career, starting with tributes to the greats of the past: Meeting Mozart, the poignant and even more Mozartian Megan's Dream, and the Beethovenian Full Moon Sonata.
The orchestra is more than a simple arrangement; it is, more than the piano, the soul of the compositions. Ciani takes as reference the piano concertos in the style of the 19th century. Each piece is not a complete concerto, but a movement of a concerto. Thus flow very tender adagios (Andalusian Dream), dancing scherzos (Lime Marmalade Reverie), stormy allegros (Sogno Agitato). The triumphant finale ('Til Time And Times Are Done) closes the concerto in a metaphysical vertigo, still in the spirit of Teutonic romanticism. Ciani has overcome the uncertainties of her crisis years and has recovered her sensitivity in a more mature context, embracing her mission as a unique and austere artist.
Throughout her career, her strength has always been counterpoint, which greatly amplifies her happy melodic intuitions, the classical-style airs that form the backbone of her compositions. Her "technological" background allows spectacular leaps forward in arrangement, resulting in elegant and majestic harmonies, with a formal perfection bordering on mannerism. Her sonic streams of consciousness give rise to relaxing and catchy music, both erudite and easily accessible.
Over time, Cianis music has undergone a natural evolution, from the emotional exhibitionism of her early years to the subdued impressionism of her later works. Far from both the apocalyptic landscapes of electronic new age and the festive watercolors of solo pianists, Ciani has established a private and enchanted style of analyzing her emotions and translating them into sound.
The emphasis on syncopated dance rhythms and AOR arrangements makes her ballads more accessible to a rock audience, but severely limits their lyrical scope. Ciani has simply formalized the standard of light music and salon kitsch in the electronic era.
She continued her venture into new-age music with
Pianissimo II (Seventh Wave, 1996),
Turning (Seventh Wave, 1999),
Pianissimo III (Seventh Wave, 2001),
Meditations for Dreams, Relaxation, and Sleep (Seventh Wave, 2002),
Pure Romance (Seventh Wave, 2003),
and
Silver Ship (2005).
But she never repeated the magic of
Seven Waves.
Ciani also had a low-profile career as a pioneer of electronic music, having
met Don Buchla in the 1960s and learned to play the synthesizer (one of the
first women to do so). In New York she worked with both art galleries and
cinema, as well as companies who needed sci-fi sounds for their products
and/or adverts. It was a commercial enterprise, but one that involved
creating sounds never heard before.
Lixiviation (B-Music, 2012) compiles some of these experiments.
Flowers of Evil (composed in 1969 but released only in 2019) was a musical adaptation of Charles Baudelaire's prose poems of 1857.
Voices Of Packaged Souls (1970 - Dead-Cert, 2012) consists of a dozen mood pieces performed on a vintage Buchla synthesizer for an art installation of 1970.
She also scored the soundtrack for Giancarlo Menotti's sci-fi play Help Help The Globolinks (1968), premiered in 1980 but released only in 2017, and scored the soundtrack for the Hollywood film The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981).
Other archival recordings showed up on
Fish Music (2017), which collects music composed in 1971 for the opening of a shopping mall in Illinois,
Buchla Concerts 1975 (2016), which collects pioneering concerts on
the Buchla synthesizer,
and
Logo Presentation Reels 1985 (2012), which collects sound effects created
for commercials and videogames.
After a long hiatus, Ciani returned with Sunergy (Rvng, 2016),
a collaboration with fellow Buchla synthesist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, 40 years her junior that resulted in three lengthy ambient suites:
A New Day, Closed Circuit,
Retrograde.
