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ITHACA JOURNAL

APRIL 1970

Electronic Music Will Be Big In '70s
By LEONARD FEATHER (Los Angeles Times Service)

At this writing, Walter Carlos' "Switched-on Bach" being the country's No. 1 classical LP after 65 weeks on the charts, it is safe to conjecture that the Moog synthesizer, and electronic music in general, will occupy a central place in the Music of the 1970s.
What remains problematical is the matter, of how the telephone-switchboardish knobs and jacks of the Moog can be harnessed for non-novelty use.
The synthesizer in its generally available form has an inherent limitation: For all its boundless variety of tonal permutations, it can only produce one sound at a time. The musician who compensates artificially by overdubbing as many times as he wishes for a recording, has to face the public live with only one pair of hands.
Peter Nero, whose far-ranging background as a classical, jazz and pop pianist prepared him for the cross-breedings now at work in music, is no less ready for the electronic challenge. He has even tried out a wondrous device that could solve the Moog's one tone problem.
"I have a Moog in my home that is polyphonic- in fact, it can produce up to 40 tones at a time. Moog hasn't marketed it yet. There's another handicap be overcome: the present models operate by triggers. You just touch a key and bam, no matter how hard or soft you hit it, it releases whatever impulse has been pre-arranged. The quality and the quantity of the sound can't be controlled by your attack, but solely by the way you've set up the machine."
"Just, watch for the first man who can put out a reasonably-priced, polyphonic synthesizer that has a pressure-sensitive keyboard. That'll be the day! He won't be able to keep up with the orders- it'll be the hottest thing since the electric piano," Nero said.
Mention of the latter hot property brought to mind the awesome prediction, now at large in some music circles, that the conventional grand piano as it has been known for the past two centuries may be going the way of the dinosaur.
"Not exactly," says Nero. "Maybe in the long run, say 100 years from today. But I think what's going to disappear is piano players. Electric instruments do too much of the work for you; they make it too easy to think you can play a piano. As with the Moog, there's no sensitivity of pressure required; they're all controlled by switches. The electric piano has a limited range, too; I've yet to see one with the full complement of 88 keys.
"I'm afraid we're producing a generation of cripples. Arrangers in New York keep telling me that when it comes to real pianists, for a record session, a good man nowadays is hard to find. Too many young musicians use electronics as a crutch. Instead of pianists, we're developing what they call 'keyboard' men. We're about to see a terrible decline in the number of people willing to sit down and master this instrument the way Art Tatum did, the way Oscar Peterson has.
"To get the most out of an electric piano, a Moog or even an electric guitar, it's necessary to have a good background in electronics. You must understand the principles of what it is to create a tone, what happens in terms of sound waves. That's why musicians have barely scratched the surface in this sound revolution; they've let the electronic people, the engineers, dominate the scene, because to musicians the technical end of it is still a mystery."

 

Another aspect of the switch-on syndrome, it seems to me, is the sense of planned obsolescence. With electronic inventions encroaching on every field- pop, then jazz and classical- the day may not be far off when conventional instruments will seem passe.
Nero disagrees. "When people find something new they tend to use it at first for the sake of its newness. In due course, the electric piano and the synthesizer will take their place as part of the general scenes 'they can't invalidate what preceded them.
"The violin is still around; it's been with us even longer than the piano, and aside from a few attempts to amplify it there haven't' been any essential changes.
"You can't throw out the natural sound of an instrument like the parlor grand. It has warmth that you just don't hear in an electric-piano or even an organ. I don't think an electric guitar can give you the emotional intimacy of the acoustic guitar. That's one quality no technological development can replace.
True enough; nevertheless, the children of men who saved for years to buy a handsome six-foot Steinway are spending $3,000 to buy their sons a small electric keyboard.
The dilemma confronting men like Nero is symptomatic of our times. Fascinated by innovations of an exploratory age, he experiments with them conscious that the disciplines they require, if not fewer, are radically different from those he learned under a scholarship at Juilliard.
"New courses are needed," he says. "I'm putting one together, and it won't be for piano students - it will be quote a keyboard course unquote."
The ultimate step, and its by no means farfetched, would be mandatory college courses combining music theory with electronic engineering. That, as Peter Nero knows all too well, is the sound wave of the future.