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Tonawanda News Frontier

September 9, 1972
Multi-charmed music to soothe the space-age breast
By John Kulda

AT THE END of a winding, roughly paved road in the Village of Williamsville, surrounded by wheat fields, and an old, low profile warehouse, is the electronic nerve center of a world-wide revolution that is changing the art of musical composition.
The Moog music synthesizer probably the most talked about development in the field of music since the appearance of the piano over 200 years ago - is being developed and constructed at Moog Music Inc., at the foot of Academy Street in Williamsville.
What is the Moog (it rhymes with 'vogue') Synthesizer? A basic definition, but one that's far from doing the Moog justice is that it's an electronic musical instrument that takes the individual components of sound and puts them together in almost any conceivable, and many inconceivable, sounds.
It is a medium of musical expression in itself. It is electronic music, but not just one type of music. Rather, it includes all types of music- from the traditional right through the whole range of folk, popular, western, rock and avant-garde.
THE WORD "SYNTHESIZER" does not mean synthetic. The sounds it makes are real. They are not meant to imitate other musical instruments. The sounds
produced by the Moog are synthesized- each sound is made from its component parts and assembled into its own unique qualities.
Perhaps Moog received its greatest boost in 1969 when "Switched on Bach" by Walter Carlos, performed on a Moog synthesizer, became the biggest selling classical LP album in the history of recorded music. The Moog played many of Bach's compositions- all on one instrument. It provided the music of a whole symphony orchestra.
Moogs have been bought by such performers as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and the pop pianist Peter Nero- just to name a few.
The "orchestra in a box" was the brainstorm of Robert A. Moog, a musician-turned-physicist with a PhD. in engineering physics from Cornell University. He has been actively engaged in electronic music instrument design since 1954 and is now president of the company.
THOUGH "MOOG" HAS almost become synonymous with the musical synthesizer, Dr. Moog did not invent it. The original model was invented by Radio Corporation of America. One of the earliest is probably still in use in some studios, but that is where it must stay. A typical size would take up as much room as an old fashioned upright piano. Dr. Moog has made his synthesizer small enough to transport in a briefcase-style carrier. "Most of the Moogs are being used during live performances, and also in schools in music education," said Dr. Moog. "Even symphony orchestras have used the Moog in their performances.
But its abbreviated size does not impede the sounds that the Moog
can make, because Dr. Moog's synthesizer can produce a cosmos of sounds ranging from the lowest to the highest pitch, from sound that imitate other musical instruments, to bird sounds an other sounds of nature, and to whole score of sounds that seem out of this world, symbolic of the space age.