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TWA Ambassador

June 1973
Dr. Moog's Sythesizer-A New Music Form or Just Switched-on-Bosh?
By Jason Wallace

Only history can tell if Dr. Moog is to be the Stradivarius of the Space Age or mere1y an immensely popular mechanic for modern musical form. Either way, he cannot be ignored. For Moog, and the electronic synthesizer bearing his strange name, has taught the transistor how to sing, and music may never be the same again. You probably have heard the synthesizer and didn't even know it. If you've ever watched a television commercial (and who hasn't?), the chances are that you have heard a Moog synthesizer. (Remember the tire ad in which a man is driving along a mountain road and an avalanche wipes out the trail ahead? All of that sound track is from a synthesizer.) If you have seen such movies as A Clockwork Orange and Candy, you have heard a synthesizer.
If your children watch Sesame Street, they have heard a synthesizer. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and something called Alice Cooper have used synthesizers.
The synthesizer's greatest triumph so far, though, came with a best-selling record called Switched-On Bach, a dazzling performance by composer Walter Carlos. That work is the largest-selling classical LP album ever made by any artist on any instrument. Who is responsible for this elaborate gadget? Actually, several people, because the synthesizer has been knocking around for years in one form or another. But the man who put it all together best, and who admits being "the first guy to make a buck on it," is a mild ex-professor named Robert A. Moog (rhymes with "vogue").
Today he is president of the Moog Music Company, with home offices near Buffalo, New York. He estimates there are about 5,000 synthesizers in use around the world, and at least 75 per cent of them are Moog Synthesizers, or simply "Moogs," if you happen to be a real aficionado.
The Moog defies all categories of musical instrument. Sound comes not from striking a string, vibrating a reed or forcing air through beautiful brass plumbing. The keyboard merely activates electronic impulses that produce prescribed sounds when amplified. The physical size, as well as its scope of performance, can grow to almost any magnitude. A typical mini- Moog can be less than three feet long with a six-to-eight-inch control panel. Console models can be built to proportions and complexities that cover the entire wall of a sound studio.
Moog sounds can be orchestrated through intricate synchronization of tapes. A Moog cello sound, for example, can be wedded to a tape of a Moog violin sound. The more sophisticated consoles can orchestrate various sounds simultaneously, without tapes.
The Moog plant in Williamsville, New York, and an associated organ company in Chicago, are producing about 500 units a month and expect to increase that figure. Listening to Moog discuss production, you get the feeling that in a few years the world may have more synthesizers than gas stations. How much weird music can the human organism endure?
Moog says there is only one practical limitation on synthesizer production: "That's the size of the musical instrument market. There's something like a quarter of a billion dollars worth of instruments sold each year. When you speak of market potential, that is the limitation."

 

 

Weird music? Moog gets a pained expression. The synthesizer, he ex- plains, is a legitimate musical instrument. And like any instrument, its lim- itations reflect those of the performer. "The musical concept is the same," he says. "A good musician will make good music on the synthesizer. A poor musician will make poor music. Dr. Moog grew up in the Bronx, and for most of his 38 years has been fascinated by music and electronics. After high school, he went to Columbia University, getting his engineering degree in 1957 and moving to Cornell for further study via a fellowship.
"About 1960 my fellowship ran out, my wife got pregnant, and I tried to think of some way to make money, Moog recalls, "so I designed a theremin kit. Working out of a three-room apartment, we sold $50,000 worth of theremin kits in a year."
Remember the theremin?
During the 1940s, when Ingrid Bergman was tormented by fear and anguish in all those movies, she was accompanied off-screen by a wavering, eerie sound that occasionally terrified and always signaled disaster.
That was the theremin, and Moog had built his first one in high school. It was a box loaded with hardware to produce a couple of electric circuits. The operator moved his hands through the resulting air waves, producing and, hopefully, controlling the sound. The theremin never made it big because few people could play it well.
During this period, Moog was working with musicians who sought freedom from the limitations of conventional instruments. From that work emerged many developments later incorporated into the synthesizer.
Moog is quick to explain he didn't invent the synthesizer but merely developed its potential.
He opened a production plant in Trumansburg, New York, near Cornell's home in Ithaca. The firm, then known as R. A. Moog, Inc., even managed to sell a few synthesizers.
"By 1967, all the advertising agencies in New York City began to use the electronic sound. All the record producers on the West Coast began to pick up on what was going on," Moog says. "Meanwhile, we were having a hell of a time. We were out of money and going very quickly into hock.
"But it was in 1968 that it really hit the fan. All the commercial musicians began ordering $10,000 synthesizer systems. We fell behind in our orders six to nine months. We had about 45 people working at Trumansburg. I applied for a Small Business Administration loan and got it.
"Just when we got control of everything, the bottom dropped out of the market. We had enough back orders to tread water, but we were unable to reduce our debt, and we were unable to raise capital."
Enter Bill Waytena, a venture capitalist from Buffalo and a former member of the Bell Aerospace team. The Moog company obviously needed help, and Waytena saw the almost limitless possibilities of electronic music. The result was a merger, with Moog moving everything to a similar plant in Williamsville about 11/2 years ago. Today, Waytena is board chairman and Moog is a presi- dent without administrative worries.
Sitting in a tiny office at his Williamsville plant, Moog runs a hand through bushy, prematurely-gray hair and muses about the Trumansburg disaster, the Williamsville triumph.
"I'm not a businessman, I'm an engineer. Ego-wise, I guess it was nice to be the boss back at Trumansburg. But it was a source of agonizing frustration to be a boss and be out of control. So now they've kind of taken all the administration off my shoulders, and I do my part in designing the products."

 

Touring the production line, Moog shows great pride as workers assem- ble a staggering array of wires, switches and other gadgetry into units that ultimately become a synthesizer. He leads visitors from the produc- tion area into a small studio crowded with what look to be leftovers from a control room at the Houston Space Center. Around the room are control panels bristling with knobs. Beneath each panel is a piano keyboard half the size of a normal one.
Moog sits at one keyboard, flips a switch, adjusts some controls, then begins playing. At first, the sounds are similar to those of a small electronic organ. Then they change to a space age conglomeration of bleeps, shrieks, grunts and swooping glissandos that leave the listener in a no-man's-land between agony and ecstasy.
Then Moog jumps up and moves to a turntable, selects a record and plays it. The song is Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade, and you would swear it is the original. Until Moog tells you it is pure synthesizer.
He chooses other records, and after a few minutes has convinced even the most skeptic there really is no apparent limit to the kinds of sound a synthesizer can make.
Moog then moves to a strange-looking board that has what appear to be four drum practice pads on it. This, he says, is a new instrument, not even on the market yet, but one that will open up unlimited horizons for drummers. A young fellow standing nearby grabs drumsticks and begins beating a tattoo on the pads. Instead of the normal thumps, each blow produces a distinct musical tone.
Moog explains that the force of each blow determines how high or low the tone will be. The result is devastating. If there is a Nirvana for per- cussionists, it is here.
Back in his small office, Moog sur-veys the future:
"Today's electronic organ is as different from a pipe organ as a movie is from a book, and it's going to change even more because of the synthesizer. Somewhere in the future, maybe two or three or four or five years from now, there won't be any difference between most synthesizers and most or- gans. The two will come together.
"Even now, the market is huge. We have about 150 dealers in this country, and we also have outlets in England, France, Italy, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Belgium and Japan.
"We have a dealer in Houston who sells an incredible number of syn- thesizers. We asked him once what he was doing with all those instruments, and he replied: 'If you got a band in Houston, you ain't gonna work unless you get yourself a synthesizer.'
A happy situation, indeed, for a man who would have almost welcomed bankruptcy in Trumansburg. But how does Moog regard the new lifestyle that takes him on flying trips to other parts of the world?
"Life was very simple in Trumansburg. We had our little farmhouse and it was very quiet. I was always fixing something around the house."
But you get the impression Dr. Robert A. Moog really doesn't miss that bucolic scene. He's too busy watching the results of his lonely and some- times frustrating research blossom into an instrument that is revolutioniz- ing the world's music.