Talk:Suzanne Ciani

More templates needed.
I added two music templates. There should be templates for where Ciani was born, and for where she works now. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:53, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
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Dubbing
I’d like to make the case for removing “America’s first female synth hero” from the following sentence in the opening paragraph: Her success with electronic music has her dubbed "Diva of the Diode" and "America's first female synth hero".'

(Bear with me — I realize it’s (a) cited and that (b) “synth hero” isn’t and doesn’t purport to be an objective designation.) Its specificity struck me as (unintentionally, hopefully) incendiary, however, given that Wendy Carlos’s foundational synthesizer work (including composition, invention, recording, and having established public interest) predated Ciani’s own and the particular ways which some might fail to extend similar recognition to her for reasons wholly unrelated to music or technology.

The cited article (Kate Hutchinson, Guardian, 2017) doesn’t in turn cite its claim (“dubbed variously as the ‘diva of the diode’ and ‘America’s first female synth hero’”), but I was able to trace the latter back to the title of a 2012 Dazed magazine print article (Tim Noakes) which begins “In 1968, the same year that Wendy Carlos and her Moog synthesiser helped reinvent the sound and image of classical music [...]”. It goes on to describe her first encounter with a synthesizer as a student.

Ciani’s first commercial jingle work employing synthesizers was for Macy’s in 1969. Her first released record (Voices Of Packaged Souls, 1970) was tape music / musique concrete (if I recall correctly), though she did use Buchla synths on Flowers of Evil, which was recorded in 1969 despite not being released until 2019. She did not become publicly notable as a synthesist until about ~5 years later, to the best of my knowledge, at which point Wendy had already recorded and released seven records — one of which had been the best-selling classical album of all time — and had invented most of the “recipes” still used today for synthesizing timbres corresponding in character to individual instruments of western orchestras. To be clear, I love Ciani’s work and very much recognize her importance to synthesis — I’m just trying to capture something about the timeline which makes the “first” designation appear odd to me in itself. But there is another dimension here.

That the article whose title (Suzanne Ciani: America’s first female synth hero) seems to have originated the phrase (i.e. the “dubber”) temporally contextualizes its description of Suzanne’s first encounter with a synthesizer in terms of Wendy’s Switched-On Bach having just made a big splash makes it clear that ... well, let’s say it makes it clear that its author wasn’t ignorant of Wendy’s work or its impact. I can’t claim to know what his intentions were; I can only say that I believe it’d be reasonable for someone to find his framing insensitive or to suspect that it was pointed. That it does this in its very first sentence — that “Wendy” is the seventh word in an article whose title proclaims “America's first female synth hero” to be someone else — intensifies this impression. The inarguably subjective “hero” portion of the description comes across as if it were a carefully placed fig leaf, inadvertently or not.

This is why I think its (indirect) quotation here within the opening summary paragraph is in poor taste. Perhaps a case can be made for including it elsewhere in the article, but the first paragraph blesses it with an impression of face-value neutrality that I don’t think it merits. Again, the phrase doesn’t seem to predate the Dazed article title and so far as I could tell its use there was only “promoted” to a “dubbing”, so to speak, by the cited Guardian article. To me, “her success [...] has her dubbed” would seem to suggest a certain unattributability of a designation, but here it appears we can readily identify the “dubber” as a single specific author in the recent past (who is not cited).

Removing it myself as a drive-by didn’t seem like a good idea. The reasoning above is too specific (and to many, subtle), so it might have appeared pointless and invited reversion absent a more extensive explanation than an edit comment would have permitted. Fortunately, this is a strong article which likely has a dedicated editor or two shepherding it along who’ll see this comment and will consider what changes, if any, they feel are called for in light of it. (If that’s you, thanks for reading.)

--Bhathos (talk) 17:51, 27 May 2024 (UTC)