Avant Composer-Artist Sets CTV Firm

Billboard Jul 17, 1971

LOS ANGELES – Electronic music composer Ruth White has formed a film company for cartridge television properties.  Her first four efforts compose a 16 minute EVR cartridge for Motorola called “Garden of Delight for Kids No 1” and include “Hush Little Baby,” Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Space Trip”, and “Adventures In Underland.”

Miss White anticipates expanding each of these films into a series for the CTV medium.  Her background includes four years of playing the Moog (she bought the third one on the Coast from Robert Moog and 15 years in the educational recording field, the latter through Rhythms Production, and two Limelight albums.

She says she is pulling elements from her two worlds for the CTV market, producing educational, entertaining films.

On “Hush Little Baby” she changed the words of the Southern folk song and worked with artist Gary Lund who did animation. For “Hickory Dickory Dock” she worked with artist John Wilson who did the drawings for animation.  On “Space Trip” the short utilizes live action, special effects, and paintings.  “Adventures in Underland” uses stop action and was done with Cascade productions, a local commercial house.  The two companies are planning to develop this particular story into an expanded adventure.

Miss White has a project on drawing boards to use quadrasonic sound in a CTV film, using pop music names.  This film will run the length of a single record.  “There are ways to marry the record industry to the film industry.”  She says, “Using means which haven’t been used, like quadrasonic sound and sophisticated visual techniques which are tossed at us on TV”.

Cartridge television films had better be on a par production-wise with the things we see now free on television, she emphasizes.

Although she has been using a synthesizer on her first CTV films, Miss White doesn’t believe all music has to be far out.  She does plan to crease visuals for an LP she recorded for Limelight in 1967 called “Seven Trumps from the Tarot Cards.”  She also recorded the LP “Flowers of Evil” for that same Mercury subsidiary.

“That’s one end of the spectrum” she says, “‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ is another.”