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The Christian Science Monitor

Monday, February 22, 1971
Nine-member Moog quartet in concert
By Roderick Nordell

Gershon Kingsley modestly calls his nine-member First Moog Quartet the Model T Ford phase of in-person performance on those electronic sound synthesizers devised by Robert Moog. Taken in this spirit, there is entertainment and fascination in the program with which the group has been touring. It is more a demonstration than a musical event, and its limitations are disarmingly recognized by Mr. Kingsley who lightly and a bit lengthily talks about what they are all doing up there, including the "technical assistant" who waits like a page turner for any need that might arise.
"It doesn't always come out the way we expect it," Mr. Kingsley told Friday's Symphony Hall audience, which ended the evening, with prolonged applause for a "Stars and Stripes Forever" duplicating the range if not exact tone quality of those trilling piccolos and grumbling sousaphones. And this "live" element adds something to the Moog, which previously has been heard only through the multiple-tape recording processes which are still required to achieve the full range of its effects. In addition to soprano, drums, electric bass, and Mr. Kingsley at a "mini" Moog, there are four musicians with keyboards attached to what look like telephone switchboards.
The interplay of man and machine comes through as each of the latter puts headphones on and off, keeps tuning and retuning, and typically has one foot on a pedal, one hand on the keyboard, and the other hand twisting a dial. One of the Moogs even has twinkling lights on it a la "2001."
Space music
There are some space-music echoes, as the players demonstrate the Moog's four basic sounds-a sighing, whoshing "white noise"; a low-frequency rumble; a kind of clicking; and a kind of twittering, to oversimplify. Through recordings, infinite variations on these can be combined, as listeners have begun to discover through Walter Carlos's "Switched-On Bach," Hans Wurman' s new "The Moog Strikes Bach ... and others, including Mr. Kingsley's own pop "Music to Moog By."

In live performance the combinations are so far comparatively limited, and there are times when the whole thing seems like a wildly glorified electric organ. But the different tones are not simple "stops," Mr. Kingsley notes, but variables that the players have to keep adjusting. It is remarkable to see them at work, possibly a foretaste of some unbelievable new future, if everyone is right who says the development of the synthesizer is comparable to the development of the piano in the history of music.

Children's poetry
The Symphony Hall program, part of the Boston University Celebrity Series, ranged from settings of children's poetry (with "white noise" fitting in nicely) to rock, jazz, Gabrieli, Villa-Lobos, Bach, Rossini, Handel, TV commercials, and more-or-less avant-garde music.
"Four Brothers" caught a slightly eerie version of the four tenor saxes of the old Woody Herman band, but with a more cushiony, less biting sound. Leah Horen's soprano voice was sometimes used to convey words, sometimes as an instrument blending with the others, and sometimes as a sound source altered electronically. Perhaps the most impressive total display of the synthesizers was "Eleanor Rigby," in which moods and Moogs were compellingly matched.
Obviously the synthesizers are moving beyond the point where Mr. Kingsley was commissioned to suggest the sound of running stockings or amoebas feeding on waste matter. At least, as he says, they are machines over which men still have the upper hand, and they do not necessarily pollute the atmosphere.