Archives - 1969
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Newsweek
February 3, 1969
MUSIC - Electric Bach
By Hubert Saal
It seems like a mismatch between musician and instrument. Twenty-nine year-old Walter Carlos, slender and delicate, with long brown hair, looks like a Bellini portrait of a Renaissance prince. His instrument, the Moog Synthesizer, a 5-by-5 homunculus with dials for noses, tiers of blinking eyes and small gaping mouths fed with a cross patch of wires, looks like the pop portrait of a zany telephone switchboard.
On this electronic instrument, Carlos has recorded "Switched-On Bach" (Co- lumbia), which has sold 75,000 copies and last week not only became No. 1 on Billboard's classical chart but hove into view on the pop parade. The record's success is a surprise. Who wants to hear automated Bach in which a heartless machine substitutes for stout-hearted men? And the record jacket with its slapstick portrait of the great composer seems to suggest a kind of P.D.Q. Bach put-on. But distinguished Bach interpreter Glenn Gould calls "Switched-On Bach" "the record of the year ... no, the decade."
The music is a potpourri of Bach, including three "Two-Part Inventions," two longer "Preludes and Fugues" and the "Brandenburg Concerto No. 3." Something like shell shock results from the first hearing. Music usually played on a solo keyboard is parceled out among many voices, each with its own strange timbre and sonority. It sounds as if a group of Eskimo icebreakers, Ozark ka- zooists and Egyptian bandsmen had recorded on a windy day in the Congo. Clarity: But it's apparent that Carlos, with the aid of Benjamin Folkman (it takes at least two pairs of hands and feet to control the monster), is rarely trying to imitate conventional sounds. He's tapping the synthesizer's capacity to cough up any kind of sound, in ways which, however odd to the ear, will be faithful to the spirit of Bach. And it is faithful, in the pulse of its rhythms, the color of sonorities and the clarity of polyphonic lines. Carlos has his own ideas about Bach. He takes the "Two-Part Invention in F Major" with a whooshing rush. The "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" is as innocent as William Blake's "Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?" Sometimes, to be sure, there is a lack of warmth and spontaneity and occasionally the rhythms seem to be dictated by Rosie the riveter. But in the Brandenburg, instead of Bach's nine strings and continuo, Carlos is able to employ a fascinating kaleidoscope of color and brightness. And in the cadenza of the second movement, Carlos unleash- es the machine in a wild sonic ride through sullen seas and hurricane winds, while savage creatures seem to whisper and cry, transporting the baroque back to the gothic and forward to romanticism.
"There's nothing automatic about the synthesizer," says Carlos. "It's an instrument. The important thing is that a human being is in control. It should sound terribly expressive and human with all kinds of shadings and nuance."
A synthesizer is just another device for producing electronic sounds, just like tape recorders or the theremin, or anything that is plugged into an electrical source and uses loudspeakers. In 1955, RCA built the first synthesizer, essentially a compact electronic studio, capable of transforming and combining sound waves through complicated controls, such as filters, mixers, patch chords and gated amplifiers. Robert A. Moog's small-scale synthesizer, like another synthesizer designed and built by Donald Buchla, is designed not only to be used by the composer but as a performing instrument. The Moog costs anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000. "The Moog," says Carlos, "is the only instrument in the world on which 'Switched-On Bach' could have been done. It has a chord generator that is basically 48 separate little synthesizers. And its keyboard has a touch that's not only sensitive to speed but also to how deeply a note is pressed. It lets you play expressively."
Carlos, himself a composer, set out in the record to demonstrate the validity of the instrument. "We chose Bach because he's basically linear and contrapuntal. The synthesizer is a monophonic instrument and has difficulty generating vertical chords. Bach wouldn't care. His attitude was, if you haven't got a violin, play the music on the flute. Also I happen to love Bach. Love was necessary.
The record is a splicing of sounds that were painstakingly pieced together through trial and error over a three month period. "We tried to make music according to Bach," says Carlos. "We had a score in front of us. For every phrase, every line, sometimes every chord, we had to decide on and work out color and performance and all that that implies. We had to be pianists, orchestra, instrument maker, conductor, acoustician and engineer."
Pioneer: Carlos is singularly equipped for the task. Born in Pawtucket, R.I., he began to study piano at 6, studied both music and physics at Brown University and took a master's in music at Columbia, where one of his teachers was the pioneer electronic composer Vladimir Ussachevsky. For the last three years, Carlos has worked as an engineer in a New York recording studio.
And now his "Switched-On Bach" has made the Moog Synthesizer a household word. Designer Moog, who manufactures his synthesizers in Trumansburg, N.Y., gives Carlos all the credit. "He used techniques that have been available for years-but used them better." Moog believes it's too early to think of the syn- thesizer as "the Steinway of the future," as Gershon Kingsley, another electronic composer, calls it. Carlos agrees with Kingsley. "In 50 years or less something like the synthesizer will be the most popular instrument. Just like the piano, music will be composed for it and a child brought up on it will find it relatively easy to play."
It's not easy now and, until computers with their memory banks come to assist them, synthesizers cannot give concerts. "If I had to do the same album over, it would take just as long," says Carlos. "There's no way of remembering how the sounds were made. That's why I can't wait for the computer. I've forgotten so many beautiful sounds that I'll never hear again."
