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Columbus Dispatch

February 5, 1971
'Moog' Music Is Futuristic
By HERBERT COOK Of The Dispatch Staff

The most popular parlor game in this blossoming Age of Transistors seems to be self-flagellation. We rail against our own exploding technology as though it were evil incarnate, even as we trot off to buy 'the latest stereophonic, stroboscopic supercircuit.
The argument is that transistors, computers, lasers and all their breed of mini-brothers and micro-sisters are dehumanizing the affluent society, ripping us ever farther asunder rather than bringing us together again.
It's hard to disagree when you see a teenybopper fingerpopping down the street in his own world, transistor radio glued to his ear, oblivious.
BUT IT'S well to remember - before we choose suicide by turning all the amplifiers up at once - that Gershon Kingsley is alive and well in the land of Moogs. Kingsley's First Moog Quartet charmed about as diverse an audience as you will ever see in the Ohio Theater Thursday night, courtesy of that shrewd and venerable promoter, Sol Hurok.
When he ended two hours of electronic and musical games with a rousing John Philip Sousa bombardment, the hip and the straight stood side-by-side to applaud. That's bringing people together.
The Moog - pronounce it "vogue" and call it a synthesizer if you want to be letter-perfect - looks like a small telephone switchboard, complete with multiple cables and flashing lights.
Each of Kingsley's four, plus his own "mini-Moog," has its own keyboard.
PLAYING THE keys and using the maze of computer - programmed circuitry behind the switchboard, a Mooger can reproduce electronically almost any sound, musical or non musical.
Kingsley's Moogers produced a lot of both kinds of sound Thursday, giving the crowd, in his words, "a little bit of everything. We wanted to be sure everybody would like at least something."

Everybody did.
IT'S DIFFICULT to evaluate a Moog performance by standard measures. Kingsley himself put it well: "We can say, 'A guy plays Mozart badly or well, or Beethoven.' But when it comes to just sounds, it's a whole new world."
A fascinating world, ranging from imitations of Woody Herman's jazz classic, "Four Brothers," to Handel's "Water Music" to the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" all the way out to some kind of frontier in the weird sonic concatenations of "Reflection-24," composed by quartet member Kenneth Bichel, a Juilliard graduate.
With able assists from soprano Leah Horen, drummer David Brewer and a bass guitarist named Igor, the Moogs produced a sampling of everything from white noise," which sounds like a bed day in a wind tunnel, to high frequency whistles which must have called half the dogs in Franklin County home of a late supper.
"YOU CAN mix these sounds," Kingsley told the audience, "according to your spirit and imagination at the moment." Thursday he mixed them with both spirit and imagination. If electronic music is the wave of the future, Gershon Kingsley is riding the right surfboard.