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SUNDAY POST-DISPATCH

SEPTEMBER 7, 1969
Moog Music Is Here To Stay
Golden Chance for St. Louis in Powell Hall Proposal
By FRANK PETERS

THE MOOG SYNTHESIZER, whatever else you may think about it, certainly came along at the right time and in the right place. It has the right name, too; the annotator of one of its best-selling records remarks shrewdly that the Moog would be a lot less savory if it were called the "Jones" or the "Irving Spidorsha." Record makers acknowledge the space-age impact of the name by including it in their titles: "Moog Espana," "Music to Moog By." The Moog's first and, so far, greatest record has made a million-copy composer out of Johann Sebastian Bach, far outstripping Mozart and his piece now known as the Elvira Madigan Concerto. "Switched-On Bach" is nearing the end of a whole year of best-sellerdom in both the longhair and pop markets.

The Moog has made the breakthrough that electronic music has been waiting for all these years - out of the studio into the public consciousness. Our aging century is strewn with the wreckage of electronic-music devices, starting with the Telharmonium, an authentic tone-generator complete with harmonics that someone built in 1906, before there were even amplifying tubes and loudspeakers. The Aetherophon, Theremin, Ondes Musicales, phototone and a dozen others had their day in the sun, right up to the sophisticated Syn-Ket of our own decade, but none took root. One class of electronic sound generator took the imitative bath to success in roller rinks, undertaking establishments and cocktail lounges - the "electric organ."

There are more than 200 Moog Synthesizers in the world today, nearly all of them sold in the last two years, and new ones are being bought as fast as universities and studios can scrape up the purchase money. An elementary school in Philadelphia has one for pupil use. So does the University of Jerusalem and the National Design Institute of India.

THERE IS ONE IN ST. LOUIS busy turning out commercials and sound tracks; its owner, a producer, does not want to publicize his Moog because requests to show the instrument off, lecture about it in schools and the like are already getting unmanageable. The universities are talking about pooling their resources to buy a synthesizer and install it in the vacant top floor of Powell Symphony Hall, where time for its use would be apportioned among the contributing schools. A committee from the schools is studying this plan. It would take more than the purchase price of the Moog; a full-time technician might be needed to maintain the instrument, and frequent additions and modifications to the equipment would be required, for 'as the Synthesizer's creator, Robert A. Moog, freely admits, his instrument and electronic music in general are at best in their early adolescence. Despite the vast popularity of Moog music, little has trickled down through the press to tell just what the Synthesizer is and how it has overcome the liabilities of other sound generators. The Synthesizer in fact has no mystery ingredients or "little black boxes"; all its elements have been known for years, even decades, and have been embodied in all sorts of acoustic devices, down to cheap radios. Moog's big contribution has been to organize these elements into a compact, very flexible system for altering a given tone at the operator's will.

 

The Synthesizer is complicated the way chess is complicated, in the astronomical number of combinations that are possible. The foundation tone is generated by an oscillator, which supplies the tone with an option of three odd wave shapes as well as the normal undulating sine wave; these other waves give the effect of illusion of added harmonics although none are really present.

To lay on harmonics - the Overtones that give character to the sound of any musical instrument - you add oscillators, no bigger than books on a shelf (the St. Louis Moog has nine of them). All of them are tunable in pitch through the audible range, with the knobs you see in the photos.

THE OSCILLATORS are just a beginning. From there the tone may be run through a dozen devices - filters, tremulants that affect either pitch or volume or both at any desired rate or amplitude, "'sequencers" that break up the tone into episodic series. The most striking is the "envelope" device that controls the attack and decay of a sound. This is what lets the Moog generate percussive effects - sounds that rise to a sharp peak of intensity and then fall off - as well as the flat, dead beeps commonly associated with electronic music. The "envelope" can make a Moog tone snap like a harpsichord note, as "Switched-On Bach" so effectively demonstrates. There is also a white-sound supply, another book-size component. White sound is the hash of high frequencies that sound like wind in the trees, of the defroster of an expensive car. Built into a note of Moog music it gives the airy bite that an organ pipe produces when actuated, or that can be heard fleetingly in the attack of a trumpet note.

Everything on the synthesizer is relative. The keyboard is just another plug-in control. By governing the voltage fed to the oscillators it gives the semblance of twelve-tone order to the proceedings, but even its scale may be compressed or otherwise distorted. One may "play" the Moog by turning knobs or by fingering a variable resistor like a violin string as well as with the keyboard.

The synthesizer has no "memory"; one cannot preset combinations to produce, say, an oboe sound. That would take a computer, and a computer would raise the price of everything enormously. The combinations are put together with patch cords like the ones on old telephone switchboards. It looks crude but it is the only practical way to keep hundreds of thousands of combinations at the fingertips.

THE MOOG IS MONODIC - it generates one tone at a time. Since every tone has to be programmed with the patch cords and knob settings, not to speak of the time spent in browsing around for the desired combination, it may take an hour to get ready to play a few measures into one track of 'a tape recorder and another hour to set up the accompanying few measures of another sound for a parallel track on the same tape. The famous Bach album took a year to put together.

The multitrack tape recorder is a necessary, and expensive, concomitant of the Moog Synthesizer. "Switched-On Bach" used eight channels on an inch-wide tape. A new album, "Switched-On Rock," uses 16 tracks. The recorders cost more than the Moog. A university may buy the essential Moog components for as little as $5000, but 'a good eight-track tape machine, which already seems headed for obsoleteness in Moog terms, costs more than $10,000. Besides, a synthesizer studio must have a control switchboard, amplifiers and speakers, plus handy accessories like an electronic metronome to put guide tempos on one track of the tape.

 

IT IS EASY to detect the Moog's deficiencies as a concert instrument, and a number of journalists have done so. But that is beside the point; the notion of million-dollar super-Moogs set up in symphony halls, imitating orchestras like so many Wanamaker organs, is frivolous. The point is that electronic music has finally gained a common denominator, a fairly standardized learning and teaching instrument whose results may be duplicated and developed from campus to campus. The backwardness of electronic music until quite recently is hard to overstate, and Moog, a modest, genial fellow by all accounts, may be too kind when he says electronic music is in its young-adult period. The pattern has been for scattered experimenters, mostly composers with scant electronic knowledge or technicians with scant musical knowledge, to hole up in their studios like alchemists, emerging now and then to brandish some shocking new sound effect, grab a headline or two and retire for more private knob-twiddling.

Under this system, a field in which everything is acoustically possible has instead been obsessed by cliches that by comparison make the Alberti bass seem a fountain of creative youth- speeded-up tape, siren wails, and above all the beep, which has the irresistible advantage of catering to Webernian melodic-leap patterns (for the intellectual) and sounding like radar and such-like symbols of up-to-dateness (for the boobs in the audience).

There have been exceptions, of course. In St. Louis Robert Wykes produced a fine percussion study in four-way stereophony. It takes two good percussionists, two goad loudspeakers, and regrettably for its future as an export item-Wykes himself at the controls of his equipment. The Moog Synthesizer cannot confer mobility on this particular piece, but if composers will learn to use the synthesizer and the common language it affords, a sort of electronic-music marketplace will be created, in which the good compositions may be sorted out from the bad by performances around the country. Recordings, offer such a market place theoretically, but in fact home reproducing equipment-,at its very best, two channels with a wide frequency range-clamps a low ceiling on the possibilities of electronic music. The concert hall will have to remain in use if the potential is to be realized; one cannot imagine getting Cinerama out of a home TV set, just as Stockhausen's "Carre" or the above- mentioned piece by Wykes are inaccessible on a home stereo reproducer. It must be remembered that top-notch reproducing equipment is as vital to the Moog as its oscillators.

THIS IS WHY THE POWELL HALL electronic-studio proposition is so attractive: It would bring the city's composers, teachers and students together in a laboratory with a 24-hour schedule, linking them moreover by closed circuit to a major orchestra and a major concert ball. An investment of, as a rough estimate, $50,000 plus $15,000 a year maintenance outlay would give St. Louis an electronic-music center that might, if nurtured intelligently, bring international eminence to the city's music community. At a time when the Symphony itself is fighting for financial survival and a hundred other institutions have their hands out, it will not be easy for the universities to find the money; it is not even certain yet that they will unite effectively to look for it. But that is where the future is, if concert music has a future at all, and the admission price at this stage is not big.