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Modern Hi-Fi and Stereo Guide

May 1974
Electronic Music Pioneer-Robert Moog
By Robert V. Weinstein

"As far as I know, there was no one else manufacturing equipment especially for electronic music composition in 1964. By the middle of 1965, we had about a dozen customers."

If we were to hurl ourselves into the future and try to isolate just one important innovator in the history of modern music, the first name that would have to be mentioned would be that of Robert A. Moog.
The Moog synthesizer is in the vanguard of electronic instruments, capable of producing a wide assortment of sounds that are both imitative and electronically created. Just a short time ago; the first generation of Moog synthesizers were regarded by many as space age contraptions that were believed to only para1lel the tickings of our technocratic age. Some randomly associated all electronically conceived sounds as Moog music. The image of this Orwellian monster caused many music lovers with a strong bent towards the traditional to cringe in horror.
But now it is a well accepted fact of life that the Moog synthesizer is a sophisticated accoutrement for the contemporary composer and musician. For both
rock and serious music lovers, the name Moog is synonymous with change, artistry and foresight.
Down a windy street in one of the small suburbs Buffalo, New York, Robert Moog works in a reconverted, one-story, wooden factory. With a staff of about a hundred technicians, carpenters and musicians, the 39-year-old inventor can be found developing his next generation of synthesizers.
With a Ph.D. Degree in Engineering Physics from Cornell University, Moog had the proper credentials to expand music via technology. As a boy he studied piano, but by his early teens, he knew that his expertise resided, in the engineering field. Approximately ten years ago, while he was still working on his doctoral thesis, he started working on his first synthesizer with a staff of three people.
In 1964 the synthesizer was relatively unknown. The few serious composers who were writing electronic music had developed instrumentation that was only
suitable for their own purposes. Sparked by encouragement and interest from a couple of composers, Moog went about the complex, technical task of developing his own synthesizer. In its early years, when Moog was practically hand crafting each instrument himself, the synthesizer came under heavy attack from some musical circles. A few purists accused Moog of building an instrument that produced a bastardized sound and that lacked the purity of tone of an acoustic instrument.
When asked about early criticism, Moog threw his hands into the air in despair and said: "That is just a lot of bullshit," he exclaimed. "Who on the face of the earth is entitled to call anything an artist does, bastardizing. .An artist is an artist precisely because he works beyond rationality, beyond what the average person can conjure up. The artist goes into the area of intuition and inspiration. People have said the synthesizer bastardizes sound but they couldn't be more wrong."
Moog traces the productive beginnings of the electronic musical age to the 1960's. During that period music, concrete (utilizing natural sounds),and electronic in general, began to gain a strong foothold in experimental circles. As Stockhausen, Vladimir Ussachevsky and other composers became involved with
electronic music, musicians and the entire musical community realized that electronic music, opened up a vast new sound panorama for them.

"When I entered, the field," said Moog, "composers were already experimenting with tape and various methods of producing both real and simulated
sounds electronically. But as far as I know, there was no one else manufacturing equipment especially for electronic music composition in 1964.
"At the Audio Engineering Society, where I first exhibited my instrument, I got the following orders. The first order came from the choreographer Alwin Nikolais and the second customer was Eric Siday. Siday is a commercial musician. At the time he knew very little about engineering. But just through intuition and foresight, he saw what electronic instruments offered the musician. That was the beginning for me. By the middle of 1965, we had about a dozen customers."
The universities about the United States furthered Moog's objectives by expressing an interest in his work. "At that point," he said, "we not only built the synthesizing equipment but we offered the service of putting a whole studio together. This was a service that was never offered to a university before. We began to set up some pretty big studios. One of them is right here at the University of Buffalo. Studios began to pop up all over the country."'
The acceptance of electronic instruments was a gradual process. From the university, the synthesizer made its way to Madison Avenue, to be incorporated
in slick and novel advertising campaigns. "It didn't happen overnight," recalls Moog. "When Walter Carlos did his Columbia recording of "Switched-On Bach," and the rock musicians began to incorporate the synthesizer into their music, people were ready to listen. People simply had to get used to the sound of the synthesizer. Walter Carlos is an extraordinary man. He virtually did the "Switched-On Bach" by himself with little backing. He built his own studio. It
turned out to be a fantastic success.
"The opportunists in the record business jumped on the bandwagon. They thought it was the gimmick of 1968 and 1969 and the way to make a fast buck.
During that period they were releasing Moog this and Moog that and some of them were just God awful, I mean really dreadful. That soured the whole commercial music business. And around 1970 and 1971 virtually nobody was making synthesizer recordings."
Remembering those difficult years, Mooq's expression turned reflective. He thought for a moment or two, recalling the chain of events which once again established the market for electronic music. His thin lips slowly began to smile. "But then, enter Keith Emerson (Emerson, Lake & Palmer)," said Moog. "Keith Emerson was a very determined young man. Just as Alwin Nikolais and Eric Siday, who had no engineering experience, were able to draw music out of the
synthesizer, Keith Emerson approached it with the same fierce determination. He did it all out of intuition. He plowed through it. He did things by rote and by
experimentation. He worked very hard at it. At the beginning he only played a few licks on the synthesizer. Every year he used the instrument more and more. And now his act couldn't exist without it."'
Moog said it was a series of developments that led to the development of the synthesizer. Research, he explained, had been going on for some time in this
area. "It is really not right to think of the synthesizer as something that has been invented from scratch" he said. "The thing that I did, if I did anything, was to integrate a whole series of important developments in electronic music into an entire, system that a musicians could use to make sounds from beginning to end.
"For instance there was an article by Harold Bode in 1961 in which he described a modular system. It wasn't a complete modular system. It didn't contain voltage control oscillators but it did contain a voltage control amplifier. He described different kinds of sound he could produce. My first system was modular.