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The National Observer

Monday July 21, 1969
Symphony by Synthesizer-Mr. Moog and His Music Monster
By Herbert Kupferberg

TRUMANSBURG, N.Y.-A former furniture store on the main street of this rural upstate New York community has become one of the world's busiest centers for the proliferation and dissemination of electronic music. The remodeled, two-story establishment is the headquarters of R.A. Moog, Inc., manufacturers of the Moog Synthesizer-or, simply, the Moog-an instrument that some authorities believe is going to transform the art of musical composition.

Not everyone in music regards the coming of the Moog with unalloyed Joy. For every composer or listener who welcomes it as a device that can open up new artistic frontiers, there is another who despises it as a contraption that produces bleeps and blips instead of music, that robs the creative process of its spontaneity.

Nevertheless, in the last five years the Moog has made astonishing progress among serious musicians of both classical and popular persuasions. Some 200 Moogs, costing from $4,000 to $10,000 depending on the model, are now in use in the United States, about half of them in colleges and conservatories.

For TV and Sound Tracks- The Moog's ability to produce almost any sound known to man-and some so far unknown-has brought it into wide-spread use as a supplier of music for television commercials; it has also provided the sound tracks for Candy and other Hollywood films. Moogs have been bought by such performers as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the pop pianist Peter Nero. But the Moog's biggest break-through undoubtedly has come in the best-selling Columbia record called Switched-on Bach, on which electronic composer Walter Carlos gives a dazzling demonstration of the synthesizer's ability to make things like the Brandeburg Concerto No. 3 seem wildly modern and fascinatingly fresh.

So who's Moog? Robert A. Moog (pronounced to rhyme with "vogue") is a musician who turned physicist, a city boy who went to live In the country, an academic type who has built up a $500,000-a-year business practically overnight. He is utterly devoted to his music machine, which in appearance resembles a huge computer control panel with organ keyboard attached. And his prime objective is to make music, not money, though he certainly has no objection to cash.

Mr. Moog is 34 years old, has prematurely gray hair, and talks in the analytical, dispassionate manner one somehow expects of a scientist. He says he has been attracted by electronic musical instruments from boyhood, tinkering with parts in his basement when he should have been upstairs practicing the piano. His former scoutmaster in Flushing, Long Island, remembers that when the rest of the troop built toy racing cars, Bob Moog concocted an electronic measuring device to time them.

At the Bronx High School of Science he chose as his project the building of a theremin, an electrical musical instrument played by passing one's hands over its antenna, something like importuning a crystal ball. By the time Mr. Moog was a student at Queens College he was not only making theremins but selling them to the eventual tune of $50,000. While studying at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in engineering physics, he met an electronic composer named Herbert Deutsch, who interested him in the idea of building a music synthesizer. It was Cornell that also led him and his wife, Shirley, to the town of Trumansburg, 10 miles from Ithaca, where they now live in a farmhouse with their three young daughters. Says an associate of Mr. Moog's unusual choice of a site for his home and business: "A city boy kind of likes honest country, and this is honest country."

Though Mr. Moog made the synthesizer famous, he didn't invent it. The original device was developed in the 1950s by the Radio Corporation of America, and one of the early models, the bulky Mark II, is still in use at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. Mr. Moog hasn't exactly reduced the synthesizer to suit case size-a typical model takes up about as much room as an old-fashioned upright piano-but he has made it relatively convenient to house and practical to use.

The sound of a Moog begins with a generator, which produces electrical vibrations or fluctuations. Actually, Mr. Moog describes his synthesizer as "a system of instruments," each doing on thing toward shaping a given sound. Amplifiers, oscillators, mixers, filters, and tape recorders all contribute to the eventual sound, with the performer controlling its nature not only through the keyboard, but also by manipulating a series of controls and interconnections. "It takes years to become a virtuoso on the synthesizer," Mr. Moog says, "but you can get some kind of results within a month."
The synthesizer's cosmos of sound encompasses reasonable facsimiles of most of the standard musical instruments; bird songs and other sounds of nature; and weird, other-worldly glissandi symbolic of the space age. A few things have proved beyond its capacity. It cannot imitate a piano, a cymbal, or a Chinese gong; the sound frequency patterns of these instruments are too complex.

Mr. Moog doesn't worry about these deficiencies. "My objective," he says, "is not to reproduce old sounds but to make new ones. 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. Actually, I don't know the potential of the instrument myself."

He acknowledges that not all the sounds emanating from his machine are music to his ears. "Like any instrument," he agrees, "it can produce bad music when played by a bad musician. There are a couple of records I've heard that make me feel like a Frankenstein." Among the good records he cites are a work called Tragoedia, by the avant-garde composer Andrew Rudin on the Nonesuch label, and, of course, Walter Carlos' Switched-On Bach. Both composers are under 30, an indication of the Moog's fascination for a younger generation of musicians.

As noted, there are other synthesizers in the field-the Buchla, for instance, for which another young composer, Morton Subotnick, has written two impressive electronic works called Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull. But Mr. Moog believes his machine has far more musical potential and versatility. If, that is, he can find players who can operate the machine properly; he says a proper performer must "be a musician and have a rational mind." And if he can encourage composers to write good music for it. In its Trumansburg plant for the past year, R.A. Moog, Inc., has maintained on its payroll a composer-in-residence, a young man named Jonathan Weiss, whom Mr. Moog describes as a "major talent."

Is he the Beethoven of the Moog? "Well, call him the Paganini," Mr. Moog smiles. "He composes tone-color sculptures lasting anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes that are really remarkable. He's going back to college this fall, and we're looking for another composer-in-residence. But you don't find them every day."

Perhaps even more significant than Mr. Weiss on the 30-man Moog staff Trumansburg is the presence of another young man named Ray Updike. Mr. Updike is the first Moog repairman in history. Until recently Mr. Moog himself had been periodically stopping by his clients' establishments to answer complaints or to make sure that their music machines were oscillating happily. Now he can send Mr. Updike, and with the opening of a service department, the Moog may at last be said to have entered the American main stream.

-HERBERT KUFFEEBERG