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St. Petersburg Times

September 28, 1969

Science Put Him In Moog To Compose Electric Music
By Mary Nic Shenk

Your child, the scientist, may grow up to be a composer. Hilton Jones did. He recently joined the music faculty of the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa to teach composition.
He is a scientist a physicist, in fact. But above all, he is a musician,
It all began when he was 3 and wrote some short songs. Yes wrote them.
Next thing he knew he was blowing on a trumpet. Then pounding on a piano.
Then writing some incidental music. About this time he became fascinated with science class experiments.
And suddenly it all came into focus. He found he could synthesize his two loves - music and science - and pursue them, as one at The University of the Pacific. Result? An electronic composer. His instrument? A synthesizer.
Jones, at 24 is Florida's first official, trained and truly 21st Century musician. He has worked with the granddaddy of electronic music - world renowned composer-musician Karl-Heinz Stocklausen.
At USF, Jones will build an electronic studio. One of his most important instruments is the new Moog (sounds like vogue) music synthesizer. It's a panel-type contraption that resembles a telephone switch-board and contains a group of separate, pre-selected modules, called electronic instruments. The modules can function alone or in combination.
Thus the name "synthesizer". Through a complex series of circuits, the synthesizer attempts, and usually succeeds, in simulating known musical sounds and producing new ones.
Massed string sound has been its notable failure. "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," according to Robert Moog, the instrument's inventor.
The name "Moog" is rapidly becoming a generic title for the electronic music synthesizer. Robert Moog doesn't really object; publicity means more orders for the synthesizers from the 35-year-old musician-engineer's Trumansburg, N.Y. home. Moog holds patent for some major components of the synthesizer.
The importance of an electronic instrument like the Moog is the composer's accessibility to more elements of tone production and control than the usual musical instrument can offer. "You manipulate circuits to produce the sound you want." Jones explains. "You determine the tone's attack, decay change in timbre (quality), pitch fluctuation, noise, en-harmonics, overtones". All these tone shapes are programmed on the Moog.
Sequence and timing of the notes are controlled by the playing of a keyboard.
Jones will specify what tone shapes and controls he wants in the USF Moog.
Standard Moog prices range from $3,000 to $14,000. USF is budgeting about $10,000 for its total electronic studio.
Although particularly gifted and highly trained in the field of electronic music, Jones has no intention of limiting himself to that style of writing. "Electronic music caught on because people could accept novel sounds and
rhythms. There were no pre-determined ideas. But electronic music for its own sake is not important. And there's too much poor electronic music being recorded and bought.

 

Jones was opposed, for instance, to the overuse of a sequencer (repeating type of electronic instrument) which can continue programmed sounds indefinitely with slight variations or alterations. "Pieces like this can be developed into whole records from just one basic idea," Jones commented. "This is cheating, like Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples". Jones spent three weeks on a 20-minute electronic work which he considers one of his best.
Will Moog take over the music of the future, like Hal, the emotional computer, almost did on the Jupiter mission in "A Space Odyssey? Not if Jones has anything to do with it, because he also wants to expand the horizons of conventional instruments.
"Conventional instruments can do more than they are doing now", he said. "There are other ways to play winds and strings to get new sounds with more varieties of overtones and microtones, just by changing the mouth position on winds and finger positions on strings. Good players can learn to do this and you can revolutionize conventional instruments and voices and combine the two."