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Ithaca Journal

August 17, 1969

Moog Concert Is Enjoyed
By Patricia Nordheimer Journal Staff Writer

Ithacans discovered Robert Moog, the Trumansburg man who switched-on Bach, as some 300 on-shore listeners plus about 30 boatsful gathered Wednesday at the Stewart Park pavilion for the latest in the Summer-Ithaca series of music-by-the-lake.
A good number of individuals had the foresight to bring their tape recorders to capture some of the performance.
Jazz tromponist J.J. Johnson was in the audience listening too, up to this off-the-track community to hear what the machine that is the most avant of the avant in modern musical instruments, the Synthesizer invented by Moog, can produce, when put through its paces by its originator and some of the composers who are working with it.

There were many firsts.
It was the first time the Moog synthesizer has been used here for presentation of a whole performance of a concert before a live general audience.
It was the first time most non-university Ithacans- other than the school children who caught it on education television- had a chance to see the Moog synthesizer, off the cover of the Switched-On Bach album.
It was the first time a whole of composers who work with the synthesizer have gotten together to play in one concert.

The audience both grew and shrank.
Some squirmed at the premiere performance of Ford foundation composer-in-residence David Borden's tone poem set against a tape of Sen. Edward Kennedy's explanation to the people of Massachusetts about what he did when he drowned the car that killed campaign-worker Mary Jo Kopechne. The music was very much Cecil B. De Mille, a la 1984. You could hear the choking, and the conscience voices, and the pre-dawn sweat.
And all of it, except the Kennedy statement, was made by the vibrations of the machine-percussion, horns, sweet strings, woodwinds.
More difficult yet to listen to was the tape piece for a chamber by John Weiss, with very few changes in pitch, almost no discernable melody or rhythm - a subtle play on variations in the color of tone, and in volume. Little children complained it was loud and too long; teenagers let themselves be enveloped in it, surrounded and washed over by it, judging by the rapt absorption
visible on their faces; some adults moved away, but the listeners stayed quiet, and motionless.

The audience turned on to the synthesized jazz interpretations by Chris Swanson, whose "Oh baby", "My Girl", "Yea Blue" and another Beatles encore first set feet tapping, hands silently clapping and bodies and heads swaying with the rich rhythms partly pre-set on the machine and added to by Swanson playing a melody line against it. He used one hand synthesizer console keyboard like an organ, playing what sounded like everything from Jamaican steel drums to the brilliant tromone Swanson used to play with the Stan Kenton band a few years back. Moog predicted that the upcomming Swanson switched-on Jazz record will do for Jazz-pop what "Switched-On Bach did for the classics.

 

 

After the music was all over, the audience swarmed the pavilion porch stage, for photographs of Moog and the machine, the composers, autographs of the Bach album, and a close look at the array of black boxes, tape decks, mixers, volume level meters and light-flashing patchboards, detaining thee concert givers for more tha a half hour before they could pull out the plugs and go home.
Half the world of new musicians had come to Moog's Trumansburg door before last night, when his neighbors 15 minutes away finally found him.