“The ideal situation is to be discovered after you’re dead: because then people will leave you alone to actually do your creative work while you’re alive,” the composer, musician, and software engineer Laurie Spiegel told me last month, as we talked in the fifth-floor Tribeca loft that she’s called home since the early nineteen-seventies. She recalled asking Richard Serra, at a rooftop party, for the secret of his success: “You just say no to everybody all the time,” he told her. “You tell them to go away and don’t bother you because you’re busy working on your work. And they’ll keep coming back more and more and more, but you just tell them to go away.”

A look at Spiegel’s résumé shows how seriously she took Serra’s advice (or how natural it must have seemed). What she has done over the years is work: on her own music, and on programs of her own invention, such as “Music Mouse” for early Apple computers, as well as on consulting gigs for other programs. This approach does pose its challenges, as far as contemporary renown goes—something the composer acknowledges: “I’ve never been self-promotional.” If you’ve heard of Spiegel for the first time this year, it’s probably because you read something about the prominent use of an obscure, early piece of hers—“Sediment”—in the film adaptation of “The Hunger Games.”

If you knew of Spiegel before that boomlet, perhaps you are an avant-music message-board habitué, or else a music student with a particular interest in the twentieth-century reference books that have spotlighted Spiegel’s pioneering work in detail. Thom Holmes’s “Electronic and Experimental Music” and Kyle Gann’s “American Music in the Twentieth Century” both devote multi-page spreads to her accomplishments as a composer and technician. You could have been a Laurie Anderson fan, and picked up the seminal compilation “Women in Electronic Music 1977” to hear Anderson’s songs “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go,” and therefore also heard Spiegel’s iconic piece “Appalachian Grove I.” After that encounter, even the most voracious of crate-diggers would not have found much of Spiegel’s music.

That distribution problem is about to be fixed. The surprise Year of Spiegel continues as her landmark and long out-of-print 1980 LP “The Expanding Universe” is being reissued for the first time on compact disc by the Unseen Worlds label. While the original LP ran at just over forty-five minutes (and had to cheat the long title track of some dynamic range in order to fit all the grooves on side two), the newly expanded “Expanding Universe” sprawls, in its physical form, over two compact discs, with a running time of two and a half hours. What is old on this reissue sounds punchier and punkier than do the ripped-from-vinyl MP3s that exist online. And what’s new on “The Expanding Universe” is as diverse-sounding and alive as any electronic music issued this year, even though all of these pieces were conceived on a computer-analog hybrid system stashed in a Bell Labs hallway from 1973 to 1979.

This device would be Max Mathews’s “Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment” apparatus, otherwise known as GROOVE. It was a hybrid digital-analog mechanism that was big enough to require multiple rooms. (Despite its being too unwieldy to take out for live performances, Spiegel once described it as “the ultimate synthesizer.”) A technical breakdown of the GROOVE setup can become pretty complex, but, in brief, the system was controlled from a room that held a console, a monitor, a three-octave keyboard, and a joystick operated by the user, all of which was separated by a glass window from a temperature-controlled room with a large DDP-224 computer, which was in turn linked up to a digital magnetic tape drive down the hall.

Given that portable synthesizers already existed to serve electronically inclined composers, what was the point of using such an unwieldy system? For Spiegel, it was the combination of a computer’s ability to preserve and repeat complex commands while also allowing for the real-time integration of a human performer’s variations.

Spiegel’s improvisatory sensibility, and her disinclination to repeat herself at a conceptual level, makes all this previously unheard music a delight to explore. “A Folk Study,” which streams below, shows what Kyle Gann has called Spiegel’s “sprightly minimalist style reminiscent of rural banjo-picking.” Speaking of the early innovators in the minimalist field, Spiegel adopts a hint of country argot when identifying some of her less-common guiding passions. “I guess both Steve [Reich] and Phil [Glass] were coming out of African rhythms and Indian music—but we had stuff right here, down home here in the ol’ U.S. And the banjo is a particularly interesting instrument because it has the high string next to the low string like Indian instruments.”

Spiegel, herself a banjo and lute player who studied at Juilliard in the late sixties, performed musicological work for H. Wiley Hitchcock on pre-Civil War American music. In this way, she’s a unique avant-gardist: the sort who sees no tension between American folk forms and the radical experiments of her contemporaries. “I’m just hearing a hell of a lot of music that’s drones and loops,” Spiegel said, when talking about the current experimental scene. “They just start something and then they add another layer and another layer or they just iterate…. And yeah, there are repeating materials in ‘The Expanding Universe’ pieces, but there are also endlessly evolving melodic sequences that don’t repeat, and I’d like to hear a lot more of that stuff.”

The extent of Spiegel’s venturesome spirit as a composer is further revealed on the reissue. In particular, her programming of pitched percussive accents on the polyrhythmic track “Drums,” as well as on the five-minute “Clockworks,” looks ahead to the not-yet-invented world of minimal techno:

“It’s so weird to think of them as new!” Spiegel says about these pieces. “I did this so long ago; its just like for the longest time I just couldn’t even hardly bear to listen to them.” She adds: “I’m less down on how it sounds now,” citing both the fact that “raw analog sounds are back in fashion” and her desire to see her compositional techniques grappled with by critics and composers.

When sitting in her living-and-working space—a museum-like tribute to computer guts of all eras, acoustic-electric hybrid instruments, and books on subjects that range from Bach to coding—I saw how the apartment was built for work first and foremost, and how the living space could stand as a testament to what she calls her ability to “get fascinated” and spend a blissfully uninterrupted chunk of time on her own. Tantalizingly, her apartment also features a wall of filing cabinets that are filled with performance tapes yet to be mined and archived for the digital age. Spiegel told me that the New York Library for the Performing Arts has come calling, though she hasn’t yet had a chance to figure out where her archive might eventually belong.

Looking back now on the pieces composed at Bell Labs around the time of “The Expanding Universe,” Spiegel believes that they probably couldn’t have happened at any of the university-administrated early computer-music systems, which she says, even in their infancy, gave off an “old boy network” air. “I’m very, very lucky that Max [Mathews] thought I was bright enough and had the right ideas and liked my electronic music that I played him and gave me the freedom to do what I wanted.”

To hear Spiegel tell it, the vibe at Bell Labs—at least in the computer-music wing—was collaborative in the extreme. “The technology was really a means to an end…. Those of us in Max’s lab, we weren’t in it for—the lab could do what they wanted to with the technology; if they got patents out of anything that was great. But we weren’t interested in claiming the technology; we were interested in doing music. And I think we were each led by our vision of stuff in sound that there was no existing way to get…. I think of something and want to find it. Or make it if I can’t find it.”