Suzanne Ciani

In April 1974, Ciani began a nineteen-year stay in New York City, travelling only with clothes and her Buchla synthesizer. Among her first activities was a solo performance at the Bonino Gallery in conjunction with the opening of a Ronald Mallory exhibition.[17] Ciani became a session musician,[18] but soon struggled to maintain a steady income.[9][17] She once accepted a concert performance at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan, but when she was denied a four-speaker quadraphonic sound setup, she refused to perform. She also spent three years on the venue's renovation, but "that didn't work".[19] At a solo show in April 1975, Ciani learned that Vladimir Ussachevsky had attended and recommended her to a grant. She later wrote that she was "homeless and happy" at this time and moved from the loft of art critic Robert Hughes to the floor of Philip Glass's basement recording studio.[17] By 1976, Ciani had secured a National Endowment for the Arts grant.[17]

In 1974 Ciani founded Ciani/Musica. Inc. to produce jingles for advertisements for companies such as Coca-Cola, Merrill Lynch, AT&T and General Electric. She enjoyed the opportunity to work for such companies and enjoyed the creative freedom because few people understood what the Buchla could do as it lacked a keyboard.[20] The sound of a bottle of Coca-Cola being opened and poured was one of Ciani's most widely recognized works and was used in radio and television commercials in the late 1970s.[21] She is also responsible for "logo" sounds pertaining to Energizer and ABC.[22] Such was the demand for her services, that at one point she was doing up to 50 sessions a week.

Ciani performed as a guest artist on various albums from 1976. The first was the same-titled album by the Starland Vocal Band, including the "swoosh" sound to "Afternoon Delight". At the time, Ciani thought the work was just a "song about spaceships".[15] In the following year, Ciani provided sound effects for Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, a disco version of the Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope soundtrack by Meco. Ciani scored Lloyd Williams's 1975 experimental film Rainbow's Children, a 1986 documentary about Mother Teresa, and for the soap opera One Life to Live. She also composed the 1976 Columbia Pictures and Columbia Pictures Television theme jingles.[23]

In 1979, Ciani was commissioned to provide sounds to the pinball machine game Xenon, which featured her own voice fed through a vocoder.[24] This marked the first female voice heard in a pinball game and Ciani had never played pinball before the project arose. In 2013, she was inducted into The Pinball Expo Hall of Fame for her work on the game. Ciani then sampled her voice onto a sound chip with the aim of selling it for use in other applications, including elevator announcements. The US federal government approached her to design sounds for flight simulators.[25]

In 1980, Ciani demonstrated several of her sound effects on national television with an appearance on The David Letterman Show.[26] The producers agreed for her to perform her own music with the show's house band, but they cut to a commercial break when they started to play.[25][27] That same year, she also appeared in on the syndicated PBS Children's TV show [3-2-1 Contact] demonstrating her synthesizer. [28] Ciani's television work in the 1980s included an Atari commercial and work on a proposed "negative vocoder" with Harald Bode, but development ceased following Bode's death in 1987.[25]

Ciani scored the soundtrack to Lily Tomlin's film The Incredible Shrinking Woman which marked the first solo female composer of a Hollywood film.[29]

In 1982, Ciani released her first studio album characterised by electronic and new-age music. She later said that making albums was something that she had always wanted to do, calling it "my destiny".[30] She started on her first, Seven Waves, in 1979 which saw an initial Japanese only release.[2] Ciani reasoned this to the difficulty American record labels had in selling an electronic album by a female artist that lacked vocals.[25] In 1984, it was released in the US by Atlantic Records. Most of the album was produced using an MC-8 and MC-4 sequencer, a Prophet 5 synthesizer, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine.[31]

In 1985, Ciani received a Bronze Lion award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.[32]

Ciani's 1986 album The Velocity of Love, released by RCA Records, features the title track which became her best known song. It marks her first piano recordings for many years since focusing her work on the Buchla.[7]

In July and August 1987, Ciani performed her first live solo concerts in 15 years.[33]

In 1987, Ciani signed a deal with Private Music, which released a number of albums from 1988 to 1992, including re-issues of her first two albums.

Although emphasizing electronic music in her recordings, her solo piano album Pianissimo, from 1990, became her best-selling album. Ciani ended her contract with Private Music with the compilation The Private Music of Suzanne Ciani, in 1992.

In 1991, Ciani released Hotel Luna, the music for which was inspired by her travels to Italy to learn more about her Italian ancestry.[34]

In 1994, Ciani founded her own independent record label, Seventh Wave. Her husband became the label's president.[19][34] All of her subsequent albums have been released on the label.

Her 1994 album Dream Suite was recorded in Moscow with the Young Russia Orchestra, and was Grammy-nominated. 1999's Turning featured her first composition with lyrics, in the title track, sung by Taiwanese artist Chyi Yu.

In early 2006, Ciani's Silver Ship won in The 5th Annual Independent Music Awards for Best New Age Album.[35] Ciani was also an inaugural member of the Independent Music Awards' judging panel to support independent artists.[36]

Ciani performs in a new-age jazz group, The Wave.[12]

In 2014, she started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary movie on her life as an electronic music pioneer. The campaign was successful, and the award-winning[37] film, titled A Life in Waves, had its premiere on March 12, 2017 at the South by Southwest Festival, did the festival rounds and is now released on DVD.

In February 2015, Ciani was one of three Wellesly College alumni to receive an Alumnae Achievement Award.[30]

In 2016, Ciani released Buchla Concerts 1975, formed of two live performances in New York City in April 1975.[17] She was asked to release some archived material and following its release and "All of a sudden I was in the public eye with the electronics again! I wasn't aware at all about what was going on; it felt strange. [...] There was this whole renaissance going on when I came out".[11] Buchla then convinced Ciani to purchase a Buchla synthesizer from him following his decision to sell his company, but she left it for a year before she started to use it.[11]

In 2016, Ciani released Sunergy, a collaboration using Buchla synthesizers with the musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, as part of the RVNG Intl. FRKWYS Series.[38]

In May 2017, Ciani became the first female to receive a Moog Music Innovation Award at the annual electronic festival Moogfest.[1][39]

In June 2018, Ciani and producer KamranV released LIVE Quadraphonic, a live album documenting her first solo performance on a Buchla synthesizer in 40 years.[40][41] The show took place at Gray Area in San Francisco on March 5, 2016, presented in four channel quadraphonic sound.[42] It marked one of the first quadraphonic vinyl releases in over 30 years[43] and used a matrix recording system developed by Involve Audio in Melbourne, Australia, based partially on the QS matrix system. The vinyl LP saw a limited physical release of 227 copies, each costing $227 with a custom designed QS-compatible quadraphonic decoder, also developed by Involve Audio, included in the package.[43][44]

In June 2019, Finders Keepers Records released a previously unreleased album by Ciani that she recorded in 1969 entitled Flowers of Evil. It features a recital of Élévation by French poet Charles Baudelaire with Ciani performing on a Buchla synthesizer.[45]

Studio albums

• Voices of Packaged Souls (1970)
• Seven Waves (1982)
• The Velocity of Love (1986)
• Neverland (1988)
• History of My Heart (1989)
• Pianissimo (1990)
• Hotel Luna (1991)
• Dream Suite (1994)
• Pianissimo II (1996)
• Turning (1999)
• Pianissimo III (2001)
• Silver Ship (2005)
• Logo Presentation Reels 1985 (2012)
• "Help, Help, The Globolinks!" (2017)
• Flowers of Evil (2019)

Live albums

• Suzanne Ciani and The Wave Live! (1997)
• Logo Presentation Reels 1985 (2012)
• Buchla Concerts 1975 (2016)
• LIVE Quadraphonic (2018)
• Live Buchla at Machines in Music (2018)

Compilations

• The Private Music of Suzanne Ciani (1992)
• Meditations for Dreams, Relaxation, and Sleep (2002)
• Pure Romance (2003)
• Lixiviation (Ciani/Musica Inc. 1969–1985) (2012)