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Kansas City Star

March 18, 1969

Musical Magic In Electronic Device
By John Haskins

"I sing the body electric," sang Walt Whitman, a century ago. That was all right for those times. Now the tune has changed, and so has the means of making sound, we walk on the distant moon, we invent machines to do our singing for us and we sing the body electronic.
One of those singing machines is the Moog Music Synthesizer, an intricate assembly of voltage-controlled oscillators, amplifiers, filters and control-voltage generators capable of creating synthetically almost any musical sound known to the human ear-and some that are not.
Robert A. Moog, inventor of this sophisticated device is in Kansas City this, week to lecture at the Jewish Community Center tomorrow night and at Park college Thursday night. His topic is listed as "The Esthetic Implications of the Electronic Music Medium.
Remote ancestor of the Moog Synthesizer was the electric Theremin, which was played by the free movement of the performer's hands in the space surrounding its antennae. Moviegoers with good memories will retail the eerie sound of the instrument from the score Miklos Rozsa wrote for "Spellbound,' in which a theme played on the Theremin spooked Gregory Peck out of his gourd at judicious intervals.
In France the keyboard controlled Ondes Martenot was used to good effort by composer Olivier Messaien and others, for exotic accents in avant-garde works. Both theremins and Ondes Martenot were designed to be used as soloists with conventional instruments; the music synthesizer is designed to be its own orchestra complete unto itself.
Later, while studying for a doctorate in engineering physics at Cornell, he was persuaded by composer Herbert Deutcsh to build a music synthesizer. Cornell awarded his Ph.D in 1965 and he has been up to his ears in electronic music ever since operating thriving business in Trumansburg, N.Y., where a staff of builds and improves upon design.
The direct ancestor of the Moog Synthesizer is the R.C.A. Mark II, developed in the 1950s by the engineers of the Radio Corporation of America. A bulky affair, it still does service at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. Moog's design is a sophisticated miniaturization of that pioneer model, reducing the bulk to about the space requirement of and old fashioned upright piano, a fact which has had much to do with its popularity.
Popularity among a group of young avant-garde composers is one thing; general popularity is quite another. That general popularity came to the Moog Synthesizer with the issuance earlier this year of a recording by Walter Carlos. His "Switched-On Bach" consisted of an entire concert of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, played on the Moog Synthesizer. The cover had a fetching picture of the periwigged old gentleman turning away from the Moog keyboard with a nearly apoplectic expression, and whatever may have been the musical assessment of reviewers, the album made an instant hit with a wide general audience.
There is nothing like a best seller to establish popularity, and with it, imitation. Soon Moog became generic term not a family name, on a variety of recordings. Examples: "Moog Power", "Music to Moog by", "Moog Strikes Bach..to say nothing of Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Paganini and Prokofieff."

 

 

What can one do with Dr. Moog's great gizmo? It takes years to become a virtuoso on the synthesizer, he says, but one can get some kind of results within a month. The synthesizer produces reasonable facsimiles of most of the standard musical instruments, but it cannot produce the sound of a piano, a cymbal, or a Chinese gong, because the sound frequencies of these instruments are too complex.
Moog does not worry about such deficiencies.
"I am not out to reproduce old sounds but to make new ones" he says. "The fact that the machine can sound like a violin or a flute Is merely a by-product. If a composer wants flute music he can hire a flutist. We aim to give the musician as complete control over sound as he needs. Like any instrument it can produce bad music when it is played by a bad musician."
Magnetic tape recordings just after World War II opened the door to our first generation of electronic composers and supplied the need for such instruments as the Moog Synthesizer.
For the first time in history a composer was able to store previously produced sounds, and through tape editing to physically shape and arrange them into a musical composition. The composer for the first time in history was not dependent upon a performer to transmit his musical ideas. He could use any sound that could be recorded or electronically generated, preserve it on tape in the sequence he desired, and release the completed sound structure at the punch of a button without depending on another agent to bring his music to life.
If this sounds a little on the inhuman side, it is, but wait, the end is not in sight. A group of electronic composers is working out a system which would tie a computer into the generating part of the Moog Synthesizer that is used for live performance.
Says Dr. Moog: "We can either eliminate human input altogether, or hook human input into the computer."
What he means is that putting a computer into the system would liberate the composer from having to remember thousands of steps he took to generate his sounds.
When he considers how this marvelous music-making machine is being used by several commercial exploiters, Moog sometimes feels that he is a kind of musical Dr. Frankenstein but he feels certain that the serious composers dealing with vocabularies in electronic music ultimately will develop those vocabularies for languages in a brave world. And his synthesizer will be there.
Meanwhile, if you find little Johnny is fooling around downstairs in the workshop while he should be practicing the piano, let him alone. That is precisely the way Dr. Moog got his start.