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New York Times

Sunday August 24, 1969
Is Everybody Going to the Moog? - By Donald Henehan

ROBERT A. MOOG wouldn't mind at all going down in history as the Adolphe Sax of electronic music, or even as its Antonio Stradivari. And it could happen. The Moog music synthesizer that he developed in his Trumansburg, N. Y., studios is coming to stand in the public's mind for all music synthesizers. Like the perfecters of the saxophone and the Cremona violin, Moog is giving his name to an instrument, willynilly.
The 35-year-old engineer(Ph.D., Cornell, 1965) and one time piano student (Manhattan School of Music, prep department) is, of course, happy to be an instant celebrity. He is also a bit disturbed. "Sure, I like the idea of my name becoming a generic term for the synthesizer. But I don't like the fact that cruddy records are being put out with my name attached." He can't prevent it legally, either, he said. "You have to prove you have been damaged. Besides, where the big record companies are involved, it's not in such good taste to complain."

Moog will make a rare appearance as a performer Thursday night in the Museum of Modern Art's Jazz in the Garden series, with Chris Swansen and Herb Deutsch ("they're both jazz-oriented musicians"). He plans to have ready for demonstration his newest Moog model, one he hopes will go a long way toward making the voltage-control system, on which his synthesizers are based, usable by any good musician. The model, still unnamed, has register stops somewhat like a large organ, permits more precise tuning, and adds a touch-sensitive manual to the present model's 51/2-octave keyboard and other input control devices. Touching the manual changes voltages and hence varies sounds according to the speed or force exerted by the player's hands. Touch sensitivity has been a feature of the other major synthesizer now commercially available, developed by Donald Buchla on the West Coast. Buchla recently was bought out by CBS Entertainment Industries, which had plunged deeply into electronic instruments.

"But in the museum concert our emphasis will be on music, not on techniques," Moog declared during a New York visit not long ago as he sipped at a beer in a midtown steak house. He sounded slightly bitter for a man whose name is becoming a generic term.

Record companies, quick to recognize the commercial potential both in the Moog system and in its piquant name, have rushed into the marketplace with pop disks of varying quality. Some current examples: "Moog Espana" (RCA), "Moog Power" (RCA) and "Music to Moog By" (Audio Fidelity). So far, no one has put out "Abbott and Costello Meet the Moog" or "I Was an Underground Moog for the FBI."
Without wishing to discourage use of his name, and certainly not the use of his machines, Moog wishes more thought were going into synthesizer recordings. "Most of the composers using the Moog miss its point completely. They don't think of the instrument as a medium of wide capability. They just use it to embellish." Of the pop people, he regards Gershon Kingsley, the Broadway composer, as probably the most proficient ("Music to Moog By").

 

 

On all sides, however, Moogish music proliferates. The Beatles' George Harrison recently put out a disk of synthesized sounds. Rock groups that own their own Moogs include the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Byrds, the Monkees and the Beach Boys. One record company, Nonesuch, has commissioned and released a series of works that employ the Moog and other synthesizers. But Moog contends that most of what is produced is inferior stuff, principally because "there are maybe 25 people in the world who have the necessary competence in both physics and music" to exploit the Moog's potential.

Moog worries a little about the medium's future, and a lot about its present. "Electronic music is at its awkward growing stage, its young-adult period. People will have to settle down now and learn what can be done.
That takes a long time. Just having made it big somewhere else, on the piano or
the drums, won't do anymore."

A few composers are learning, however. The technical sophistication in some recent Moog music can startle even an expert. Vladimir Ussachevsky, one of electronic music's pioneers, visited the Trumansburg studios not long ago, according to Moog, and listened to a jazz-pop tape done by Chris Swansen. Ussachevsky insisted that Swansen must have brought tapes of live instruments with him and merely added Moog sounds to them. "I said, 'No, no, it was all done right here,'" Moog recalled. The visitor remained skeptical: "How about that trumpet player-what kind of mute is he using right there?" The developer of the Moog replied, perhaps a trifle smugly, "That's what is called an envelope generator."

The electronic pioneer, Moog said, was not so much footed by the realistic sound of the trumpet as "by the way the notes moved around- Ussachevsky knew you
couldn't do such things on a synthesizer." Finally converted, the composer observed, "I guess electronic music has reached the stage where you can't tell it from live music. I guess, that's good." Moog said he sounded dubious, though.

The RCA Mark II synthesizer that has been used by Ussachevsky, Babbitt and
others in the Columbia-Princeton studios on West 125th Street is run by punching tape on a typewriter-like keyboard. It grew 10 years ago out of what Moog calls "an economic motivation - RCA meant it to do what 20 live musicians could do." It has never been able to do any such thing, he said, "but the Moog, which was designed for no traditional purpose, turns out to be suitable for that."

In fact, the Moog has turned out to be so suitable for synthesizing traditional instrumental sounds that the musicians union, inevitably, took action to switch the blinking thing off. "For a while last year the union banned the Moog and similar instruments, such as the Buchla, in recording studios and advertising agencies. Nobody was to use them without union permission." But, last spring, the interdiction was lifted. "The union refused to let the case be tested in court and dropped the whole matter. I thought it was a big joke, myself." The union is worried, Moog feels, "because they don't understand what the synthesizer is all about, they're worried that a guy like Walter Carlos can come in with a finished tape and even musicians can hardly tell it from a live recording."

 

For all its sophistication, however, the Moog still does not simulate certain musical sounds persuasively, most notably massed strings. Walter Carlos, whose "Switched-On Bach," in Moog's view, "took Bach where he never was before," has another record ready for release. This one will again draw on the Baroque (-Vivaldi and the like). "He wanted to do a Romantic record this time- Tchaikovsky, maybe - but apparently it didn't work out. To synthesize the sound of one violin may be possible now, but to get the richness of 20 or 30 strings still seems beyond the synthesizer's capabilities."

 

For a fellow whose name rhymes with both "rogue" and "vogue" (it's Dutch in origin), Moog is anything but roguish or voguish. Gray-haired in spite of his youth, he weighs out his words with the caution of a State Department press officer. Like most revolutionists, he seems all too aware that anarchy may lurk around the next corner.
When he was 14 years old, in his native land of Flushing, Moog happened on a magazine article about the Theremin, an early electronic instrument (you may remember Gregory Peck's being spooked by its eerie tones in "Spellbound"). Moog
forthwith built a Theremin "because it seemed an interesting thing to do at the time." Then he built others, sold them, and formed his own company at the age of
15. He was subsequently graduated from Bronx High School of Science, Queens College and Cornell. Last year the R. A. Moog Company grossed half a million dollars and became the biggest industry in Trumansburg, bigger even than the lo-cal supermarket.

Now, besides expanding the live-performance capabilities of the Moog, its developer wants to branch out in two directions: computers and education. "A whole group of electronic people is working at the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N. J., on the computer idea. I've been down a few times. Emmanuel Ghent is there full time. Babbitt and Ussachevsky are in on it, too. We're at the point now where the same generating part of the synthesizer that's used for live performance can also be controlled by computer. We can either eliminate human input altogether, or hook human input to the computer." Putting a computer into the system would liberate the composer from having to remember all the thousands of steps he may have gone through to produce his sounds. The computer would file and retrieve what he had done, making for less lost motion and time, as well as for great accuracy and subtlety in constructing tones.

The other direction for the Moog is as a teaching device. Currently, Moogs are used by pupils in a grammar school (the Masserman School in Philadelphia), in high schools (North Hollywood High and a Seattle program for gifted students), and in several hundred colleges here and abroad.

The Royal Conservatory in The Hague has a Moog, and so do the Columbia-Princeton studios, the University of Adelaide in Australia, the University of Jerusalem and the National Design Institute in India. Moog believes the number will grow rapidly as, responding to musicians' demands that they be given an instrument that they can play without having a physics degree, the synthesizer grows into an accepted device for composing and performing. "A whole new line of standardized instruments must be developed so that conservatories can be set up." His habitually pursed lips allowed themselves a small smile as he contemplated the heads' vision of a world in which every living room had its baby-grand Moog.

Even now, however, synthesized music can no longer be shrugged off by traditional musicians as a mere vogue, as it was not long ago. Nothing is so powerful as a fad whose time has come.