Ode to an african violet
by Mort Garson
“Sound is a part of nature. It is a fundamental element of our existence. The sounds we can hear in the world, even our voices, are as important as the air we breathe and the water we drink.”
This is why music became such an essential part of our lives.
How many of you are now listening to distensive music to fall asleep or simply to relax?
Electronic pioneer and Canadian composer Mort Garson must have had this same thought while composing Mother Earth's Plantasia, a series of Moog compositions designed to be played for growing plants.
Released in 1976, according to his daughter, Garson made the album inspired by her mother's plants. It was probably one of the first examples of music composed to be functional for something else, rather than being made just for the satisfaction of who composed it. In the future, we would have then experienced many other forms of music compositions of this kind, like movie soundtracks or sound design for art exhibitions.
Garson's musical career as composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and pianist developed in the mid-60s after moving to New York City, a decade he spent on a rapid succession of accompaniment and arrangement jobs.
Among other electronic music pioneers as Wendy Carlos, Bruce Haack, another Canadian composer, and Jean Jaques Perrey, the turning point of his career was meeting Robert Moog at a music engineers' convention.
He was introduced to him while he was writing the music for his 1967 album The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, which includes tracks for each of the 12 signs of the zodiac.
“After meeting Robert Moog, he decided to incorporate his invention into the album, which became the first west coast album to be recorded on the Moog synthesizer.”
Mother Earth's Plantasia had a minimal distribution upon release, only being available to people who bought a houseplant from a store called Mother Earth in Los Angeles or those who purchased a Simmons mattress from a Sears outlet, both of which came with the record.
The album initially remained a hidden gem for early electronic music productions for the unconventional way it was distributed. It became a cult hit in the late 2010s when it was circulated online and is now highly prized among collectors.
The song I chose to talk about is Ode to an African Violet, the most advanced track of the album with its soft beats and Moog synth bass line, which gives the track a modern approach that reminds me a lot of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works. The rest of the album is more ambient, and it's effortless to think about why it was composed this way. The music was composed specifically for plants to listen to it and peacefully grow.
Garson performed the song with the Moog Synth and was helped on production by electronic engineer Eugene L. Hamblin III.
