Archives - 1969
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New York Post
August 29, 1969
Moog Music Blows Fuses At Museum
By Ron Dobrin
Four thousand people still haven't gotten over it.
When they gathered for the jazz concert last night in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art there were no instruments there only three strange looking things that might gave been telephone switchboards and one that most definitely must have been a computer.
Was the museum starting a computer dating service?
Then it began. Weird space sound, strange wails mixed with conventional musical sounds came out of these machines. It was the first concert using the Moog synthesizer in the live performance of jazz.
One of the switchboards played melody and sounded like an electric organ. One played percussion and the other sounded like a bass. The computer like thing played chords.
The four Moogs were played by two quartets as a part of the museum's summertime weekly series, "Jazz in the Garden".
One group played Herbert Deutch's four part work, "Stage one", "Space Walk," "Blues for Lunar Landscape," and "Peace." The other played Chris Swansen's "ooh Baby."
The inventor of the Moog, Robert A. Moog said he considered the evening a success, even through a fuse blew and a plug was accidently pulled twice stopping the music. The evening proved that musicians and electronic engineers could word together, Moog said.
But he added that "electronic music is at its awkward growing stage, its young adult period."
No one argued.