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Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

December 10, 1972
The Moog's in Vogue- And the man who made it all happen is living quietly in Williamsville, hoping he's not really a Dr. Frankenstein
By Theodore Price

During the golden age of Stradivari's superbly crafted violins, more than 250 years ago, Prince Ferdinand de Medici recruited a harpsichord maker for his Florentine court.
Bartolomeo Cristofori developed a keyboard instrument with "piano e forte" (soft and loud) capabilities. Since 1709, that new invention has inveigled its way into every drawing room and sidewalk bistro on earth.
The invention aroused professorial pooh-poohs and public curiosity. Many professional musicians squealed that the contraption of leather belts and escapement action would never match the requirements of "espressivo" performance.
The rest is history. Today a quiet man just 70 miles west of Rochester has been perfecting his own keyboard invention which, thanks to modern technology and faster transportation methods, has circled the earth even faster. In Williamsville. Dr. Robert A. Moog ("It's a simple Dutch name, and I'll settle for pronouncing it like vogue.") labors at the many technical improvements submitted by users of his synthesizer to Moog Music Inc. at the tree-lined end of Academy Street.
He considers himself an amateur musician ("I play the piano and I've composed a couple of fiim scores") and a technologist (I'm not acting as a scientist divining the laws of the universe, but I work as a technologist"). A shy, retiring man whose prematurely gray hair makes him look older than his 38 years, Moog isn't taking an ego train to immortality. Moog seems to be an utterly peaceful man, working with the day-to-day present rather than some grandiose future.
"There are technological innovations like the vacuum tube," he says, "which mean that ten years after their development everyone knows what a radio is.
"But what's important musically is: Where is the Stradivarius of the synthesizer? We are at an early stage of development and it's too soon to tell if the synthesizer is the greatest.'"
Some hyperbolic assessors of Moog's achievement claim his synthesizer must "the greatest event of the century in musical technology." But the successful designer of this series of electronic devices offering a highly flexible sound source is the first man to size up its limitations.
"The synthesizer is basically a solo instrument like a violin or a clarinet," he explains.
"No person can sit down to it and play a string quartet as one can do at a piano keyboard. It just plays one line at a time.
"And even if you overlaid all four lines of a string quartet on a four-track tape, you just wouldn't have the same nuances that the live instruments can create.
"We don't have the ideal instrument yet, so we can't talk about its ideal usage."
Like linguists and sociologists. Moog is deferential about the use of syn- thesizer "Those professional and commercial musicians who have used it... have had a lot to do with its development." he says.
Walter Carlos is a long-standing friend of Moog and the creator of "Switched-On Bach" and the 14-minute "Time Steps," a 5 1/2-minute segment which Stanley Kubrick used on the soundtrack of "Clockwork Orange." Carlos recognizes Moog's performers orientation.

"Both Buchla with its programmatic approach, and Arp Inc., which turned to switched controls (no patch cords), were trying to bridge Bob's synthesizer." Moog built a unique synthesizer for Carlos and spent a great deal of time developing a touch-oriented keyboard, according to Carlos.
Moog describes Carlos' latest Columbia album, "Sonic Seasonings," as atonal, sculptural rather than architectural. "There are no notes in it, and it's very meticulously spaced."
West Coast users of the Moog Synthesizer like Bernie Krause are writing pop, white-sound jazz. But Carlos takes it more seriously. "The medium itself is really quite flexible." he says. "It seems that the people who respond most quickly to it are the most unsophisticated listeners, like young people." The major limitation on the Moog Synthesizer, Carlos says, is the difficulty in getting the subtler sounds in the acoustical realm. The ear expects historical continuity with other instruments.
There have been several bandwagons, both academic and commercial, which have shaped the short history of the Moog Synthesizer. "First there were those people who were doing honest-to-goodness experimentation with it-people like Milton Babbit of the Columbia-Princeton studios in New York, the late Myron Schaeffer who worked at the University of Toronto and Lejaret H...er at University of Illinois and now at SUNY Buffalo." said Moog.
At the same time during this first stage there were people working on the lunatic fring , like the choreographer Alwin Nicolais and Raymond Scott of the Hit Parade. In those days nobody was selling commercial electronic equipment. Everyone used equipment made out of bubblegum and bailing wire.
"The first important thing that happened was that electronic music as a proper medium of expression was accepted at places like University of Texas and University of Pennsylvania."
"So universities, one after another, got on the first bandwagon and began setting up electronic studios." Dr. Wayne Barlow, director of the electronic music lab at the Eastman School of Music, recommended to former Eastman director Walter Hendl that the school buy a small Moog in 1968. Since then, Barlow has coached six to eight young composers each semester in use of the equipment for serious musical purposes. Additional modules of Moog equipment have been added to the Eastman system.
"We believe our hardware is enormously useful professionally," says Bar- low. The system now includes 12 outboard generators, which can generate tone clusters of up to 12 notes simultaneously.
Moog speaks unenthusiastically about the first wave of "sound freaks" and "knob twisters" who populated the early electronic studios. ("Damn little good music came out of them.") But he sings praises of the next groundswell of electronic music developments. "Commercial people began to be attracted to the synthesizer. Eric Siday, a former commercial electronic music producer, had been working with old movie and tape equipment. Through the 1960s he spearheaded the use of tasteful, effective music in commercials made with electronic equipment.
"Electronic sound was finally successful enough to be accepted by Madi- son Avenue. However this was an entirely spurious peak in the overall ac- ceptance of electronic music.
"But it wasn't in vain. Out of all those musicians who labored over commercials in 1967-68, some remain very good today."
So far, no "bandwagon" had produced either recordings or a base for popular acceptance.

 

"In the meantime Walter Carlos was working as a full-time recording engineer for the Gotham Sound Company in New York City."
The story of how Carlos spent weeks, months and some years developing the first successful commercial recording, "Switched-On Bach," is now legend. But there were even obstacles when it was at the threshold of the best-seller lists.
"To give you an idea of how tenuous a grasp the recording companies had on "Switched-On Bach," one has only to recall what happened when Columbia had its first press conference in its 31st Street studios," said Moog.
"Columbia decided to release not one but three new electronic music discs. Simultaneously they released "Switched-On Bach," "Rock, and Other Four-Letter Words" and Terry Riley's "In C."
"Rock, and Other Four-Letter Words" was a pretentious, tasteless bag of hot air. About 3,000 records of it sold. I don't know how many Terry Riley sold. But the success of "Switched-On Bach" was stupendous. Approximately 700,000 copies sold.
"Its success triggered a whole new bandwagon syndrome. Everyone had to climb on. Hugo Montenegro, for one, had to make his own electronic album called "Moog Power."
"That phase made us some money in 1968-69."
But still no really valid music was washed in by the second wave.
Then Muzak got on the bandwagon. Soon every elevator and drugstore in New York City was hounded with slick sounds from a whomped-up Moog synthesizer accompanied by a souped-up rhythm section of bass and drums.
"The sound was there whether you wanted it or not. But it soon became familiar and the public was ready to listen to it. All that subliminal exposure brought real commercial acceptance."
Today Robert Moog seems pleased with what musicians like Keith Emerson and Frank Zappa are doing with his brainchild. "It's a more substantial bandwagon now for performers on the stage."
He speaks in reserved terms for the kind of show put on by Gershon Kingsley, whose First Moog Quartet joined with the Rochester Philharmonic in a flashy, though mildly entertaining performance here last season. ("Those four performers do give an audience a good, live show.")
In the organized clutter of his cubicle just off the production floor of Moog Music Inc., you search among filing cabinets and tilted keyboards for an ashtray. "Here, try this," he says, handing you a milkglass coffee cup with a broken electronic switch at the bottom.
On the wall hangs a fading reproduction of a poster out of the past: "Leon Theremin in 'Music from the Ether' at the Metropolitan Opera House."
"There are now dozens of nightclub groups who use instruments like the one behind you there. They just prop up the synthesizer on top of the organ keyboard."
Moog likes the ways the Beatles and Mick Jagger have used the synthesizer. "'Abbey Road' uses it once or twice very tastefully."
He wisks you down a hallway and into the firm's sound studio. Amid dials, switches and mikes, the quiet innovator moves efficiently to the studio turntable and places on it Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Trilogy."
Spiderweb lyricism builds into an intense soundscape. Moog wrapped in an invisible cloak of thoughtful appreciation stares over the rotating disc.
"I'm going to advance this a little bit. Here! Listen! And it's only three guys!"
He holds up three fingers as another texture builds, builds, builds.
Back at his desk, he stares at a tangle of papers and sticks his tongue in his cheek when you ask him about his childhood.
"My mother's father was an artist who fled Poland in 1905 to avoid Prussian conscription. Yes, there's a draft dodger on that side of the family! But there's one on the other side too.

"That maternal grandfather was a romantic painter who did scenes of amorous men and women in classical garb in stereotyped poses.
"He made his living painting pictures in the new theaters going up in Toronto. His wife gave birth to seven children before she died at age 33. The oldest was my mother.
"He expected my mother to become a pianist. You see, at the time the great pianist Paderewski was the national hero of Poland.
"Well, she didn't make it. So I had to make it. And I had piano lessons when we lived in Flushing, Long Island, until I was 16 and had to stop."
His father was the technological influence matching his mother's artistic aims for him.
"On my father's side of the family, my great grandfather fled Germany to avoid the draft. My grandfather was a paint salesman in the hardware business. But my father went one step further and became an electrical engineer.
Moog remembers many "good times" shared with his father in the basement shop beneath their Flushing house. "It was while I was still practicing piano three hours a day that I began building radios, and later, one-note organs.

Moog says he never really enjoyed practicing, but did like the "little bit of prestige it brought to me." The director of the Manhattan School of Music once told him he could become a concert pianist if he wanted to put his mind and hands to it. "But I did not want to."
So, since Bronx High School of Science days, I have lived and breathed electronics. By the time I was 19, I already had my own family business in that basement, where my father and I made theremins." (The theremin is an electrophonic instrument of two oscillators and a loudspeaker.)
After studies in engineering and liberal arts at Queens College and Colum- bia University, Moog went to Cornell Graduate School After he received his Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell in 1965. Moog became a partime teacher there for three years.
He, his wife and children moved to a country farmhouse in Trumansburg, 1O miles north of Ithaca. Times were lean, but Moog and his wife held out for long- range hopes.
"When I got my Ph.D., and the prestige and money-earning power it brings, I said to my wife, 'Well, I'd like to stay with this little business.' And she said, 'You'd better get that out of your system'"
Some years the Moogs grossed only $4,000 out of the converted furniture store-sound lab in Trumansburg. "It was tough. But my wife always figured it was something I must do."
"It" was a system of generators, modifiers and controllers designed to permit the building up of sounds in a general and logical way. "It" resembled a computer control panel with an attached keyboard.
Between 1964 and 1969, the Moog Synthesizer stormed the imaginations of serious classical and pops musicians everywhere. In the U.S. alone, more than 200 Moogs, costing between $4000 and $10,000, went into use. Colleges and conservatories comprised about half of the users.
Today, the Moogs have moved to Williamsville, a town of 2,000 about two miles north of the Buffalo International Airport. "We're just another small business here," Moog said. "but the advantage of being here is that the Buffalo electronics distributors send around their men each week to tell us about the latest improvements in their products. We didn't have that in Trumansburg.
The new Moog Music Inc. is a merger with the former MuSonics Inc. formed in 1970 by William L. Waytena to design and manufacture eletronic music instru- ments. Waytena has been a merchandiser of portable synthesizers for schools.

"My duties in the company," Moog said, "are not administrative, but tech- nical and aesthetic."
About three years ago, two competing companies (Buchla and Arp) came into the picture. And Moog is aware that organ companies are going to develop a living room model. He's resigned to the competition because the only copyright he holds is for a single circuit.
He knows many of the limitations of the Moog Synthesizer are the limitations of the user. The most dangerous part of the automobile is the "nut" behind the wheel. The Moog can, depending upon how it's used, be a music machine or a mutilated monster.
"Like any instrument, it can produce bad music when played by a bad musi- cian. There are a couple of records I've heard that make me feel like a Franken- stein."
All this Cristofori of Upstate New York wants is "fifty years of expert use."