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Down Beat

October 16, 1969

Four Moogs In a Garden
By Don Heckman

AT FIRST SIGHT you just knew it was going to be an unusual evening. Picture it: the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, one of New York City's few havens of pastoral and aesthetic beauty, the busy tumult of the city muffled by high walls and the branches of overhanging trees. And sitting in the middle of all this bucolic simplicity: four devices of modern technology, covered with jumbles of complicated wire connections, mysteriously blinking lights, rows of switches, keyboards and cables.
They were, of course, the focus of the evening's entertainment- four especially modified models of Robert Moog's remarkable synthesizer. Now, a synthesizer should not be confused with a "synthetic." That is, it doesn't (or shouldn't) produce an artificial copy of something which already exists in nature. At its best, a synthesizer is as much a creative instrument as, say, an organ, which also has special methods and devices for the modification of relatively pure tones. Unfortunately, it's not always that simple.
For this program, the synthesizers were assigned fairly specific functions. One instrument had a double keyboard (since the standard Moog produces only one musical event at a time- that is, each key sounds only when it is played alone- the double keyboard provided a kind of polyphonic capability). A second instrument was attached to a commercial electric organ, with the sounds (necessarily diatonic) from that keyboard modified by the tone-altering circuitry of the Moog. A third machine was a fairly straightforward Moog, but it was pre-programmed (via patchcords and sequencers) to provide low, bass-like lines and sliding, indeterminate pitch sounds. The fourth instrument, in some ways the most interesting, was a "percussion synthesizer"- a set of modules that produced simulations of bass drums, snares, cymbals, etc., the whole thing controlled by both a keyboard and traditional drummer's foot-pedal controls.

Obviously, it all looked great. And there was enough of an air of excitement to all the fumbling around with the instruments, the testing of circuits, the connecting and re-connecting of wires, the television cameras and press reporters to make one think that an event comparable to the premiere performance of Stravinsky's Sacre was about to take place.

Alas, no such luck. Yes, indeed, I was a historic event, certainly one that would have wide repercussions, since it was, so far as anyone knew, the first time an ensemble of synthesizers had played a public, "live" performance.
But the event's historical significance was in no way matched by its musical value. Quite simply, it was a musical disaster. Herb Deutsch's cute little suite demonstrated how badly the superficial gimmickry of pop music and jazz can sound when it is in the hands of composers who possess neither the skill nor the subtlety to make the material come to life. To make things worse, Deutsch, playing the "lead" two-keyboard synthesizer, chose to take most of the solos himself. As a hedge, he apparently had written out his "improvisations" ahead of time, and they might well be memorialized as classic examples of mediocrity on the wing.
Poor Hank Jones, imported by someone whose soul was obviously in the right place, was relegated to comping for Deutsch's depressing flights of egoistic fancy. On the one or two occasions when he got the opportunity to solo, Jones provided the evening's only indication of the synthesizers' true musical potential.

Chris Swanson's pieces (one written, the others spontaneously improvised) were considerably better. But he seemed intimidated by the fact that the synthesizers were set up to duplicate "real" instruments. Swanson's quasi-rock piece was entertaining, but I still prefer to hear an acoustic drum rather than a synthesized drum sound and a "real" electric guitar rather than a synthesized
one. In the improvisations, mostly concerned with dense, textural build-ups, Swanson directed his players into some fairly provocatible sounds. Both improvisations were terminated abruptly (and, for some listeners, poetically) when the power line plugs were accidentally-I assume-disconnected.
So- an unusual evening, indeed. Visually intriguing, technically revolutionary, and musically a mess. Two out of three: not a bad average for a beginning. But I suspect the best is yet to come.