Archives - 1971

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The Post-Crescent

February 4, 1971
Electronic Wonders
Moog Presentation Successful, Unique

Since Gershon Kingsley is not only an accomplished composer and arranger but an unpretentious and likeable master of ceremonies, Monday's recital by the First Moog Quartet was a pronounced success.
Undaunted by subzero temperatures, a substantial crowd at the Lawrence Memorial Chapel received the efforts of Kingsley and his men of electronic music with rapt attention and unstinted applause.
Actually, as Kingsley himself took pains to point out, the evening's entertainment was less a concert than a demonstration of the possibilities of that electronic wonder, the Moog, with its computer-like instrument board and electronic console.
Filled With Sound - In a program that ranged from Lennon and McCartney to John Philip Sousa, and from signing winds to twittering birds, the Moogs- suplemented by drums, bass and soprano Leah Horen- proved their well-publicized versatility by filling the chapel with sounds of a variety and intensity that could surely have been provided in no other way.
Miss Horen, a slim and unassuming young woman with a voice of enormous and almost effortless range, excelled with Paul Simon's "Sounds of Silence" and "Miracles," a collection of children's poems, but was at her best with a demanding song by Villa Lobos.
Moogian Kenneth Bichel took over the rostrum to conduct his own composition, 'Reflection 24," and Kingsley demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the medium with a series of brief scores for television blurbs, climaxed by an overwhelmingly complex and colorful abstract film, visuals for which were filmed under control of a computer at the Bell System Laboratories.
Program Highlight - A computer-designed film, backed by an electronic score, perhaps was the highlight of the evening in terms of non-human creativity. It was good to know that human hands were required to turn on the projector, at least.
Curiously enough, despite the cleavage of the centuries, Baroque music is particularly well suited to Moogian interpretation, because of its monophonic nature. Handel's "Water Music", performed by the quartet against the recorded background of a symphony orchestra, was ideally matched to the capabilities of the electronic devices, as was Bach's 'Fuga in G Minor".
Diverting Evening - In all, it proved to be a diverting evening, as valuable for what it suggested for the future, as for the entertainment it provided.
One hopes, however, that in the future the Moog will not be devoted entirely to television commercials and melodramatic serial films, but will be exploited for its own sake, and for the sake of expanding the frontiers of electronically-based music.