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The Atlanta Journal And Constitution

March 19, 1989
Synthesizer Pioneer Robert Moog Still Keeps a Hand in Music Biz
By Tom Campbell
Special to the Journal-Constitution

The next time you play with portable music keyboards in a department store or hear an electronically created movie or TV sound-track, think of the man who made it all possible: Dr. Robert A. Moog, a 54-year-old Flushing, N.Y., native now living in Leicester, N.C., near Asheville. In the late 1960s, he in- troduced the Moog (rhymes with "vogue") synthesizer, the prototype of the portable keyboard. Musicians such as Walter Carlos (creator of the album "Switched-on Bach") and Keith Emerson (of the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer) made Moog a household word.
Whatever happened to Mr. Moog, who 20 years ago created the first live-performance synthesizer?
The Moog Music Company is no longer manufacturing instruments but its founder is still active in the industry, as a columnist for Keyboard magazine and as vice president of new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems Inc. in Waltham, Mass. Mr. Moog was in Atlanta recently for a demonstration of the Kurzweil 250 synthesizer.
Mr. Moog met Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reader- which reads printed text aloud, making it possible for blind people to "read" non-Braille print- at the first public demonstration of the Kurzweil 250 synthesizer in 1983. "Even at that time [with a prototype], they showed that they had a superior way of reproducing piano sounds, string sounds and so on," Mr. Moog says.
Mr. Kurzweil offered him a job in 1984, and Mr. Moog has worked there ever since. "I do a little bit of everything," he says. "Almost by definition I have more experience than anybody else in the place, so I'm brought in on a variety of projects. Some are market research, some are technical research, and some are promotional."
Mr. Moog is quick to point out that he is not, as he is often billed, the inventor of the synthesizer. "There are a lot of things that have been called synthesizers," he says. "The earliest that I know of goes back to the 1920s. Ours was the first that achieved any sort of commercial success."
As a child in Flushing, Mr. Moog studied music before he discovered electronics. He took piano lessons from a neighborhood teacher and attended the Manhattan School of Music. "I can still read music, but I fall far short of being able to entertain people," he says with a laugh.
Should a young person today still learn an acoustic instrument first? "It depends on the musician," he says. "If you learn to play the piano, you have this model in your mind of doing something in real time with somebody listening. But there are a lot of people with musical inclinations who don't want to get into real live performance in front of an audience. They like to sit back and think, carefully craft something, and spend six hours on getting three seconds of sound."
As a student at the Bronx High School of Science, young Robert Moog began experimenting with electronic instruments. "As a teenager, I used to build very simple electronic music instruments as a hobby," he says. "I just never grew up, I guess." At age 15, he built his first of many Theremins, an instrument named after its inventor, Leon Theremin. The Theremin, which makes a tone that is modified by a performer's hands waving through the air above the instrument, created the eerie sound effects for many science-fiction movies of the 1950s and '60s. The Beach Boys also used one on their hit "Good Vibrations."
Mr. Moog financed his college education by making Theremins to order. From 1954 through 1961, he sold enough of them to put himself all the way through school, including completing a Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell.
After college, Mr. Moog continued selling Theremins, as well as a musical amplifier kit that was a commercial failure. In 1964, he met composer and Hofstra University instructor Herb Deutsch, who wanted a custom-built electronic music instrument. Mr. Moog built oscillators, amplifiers and filters for the musician. "Out of that collaboration came the basic ideas for the Moog synthesizer," he recalls.
Mr. Moog made more electronic sound devices, mostly for musicians composing on tape, during the next five years. In 1969, he produced his first live-performance instrument.
In 1970, Mr. Moog began selling his synthesizer commercially. Business boomed, and his Moog, Minimoog and other synthesizers became a major force in rock music. Although the company did well during the next several years, its founder left at the end of 1977.
"That's the way this business goes," he continues, pointing out that the founders of industry giants such as Fender, Arp, Sequential Circuits and Oberheim all left their companies as well. "The sort of personality that starts something crazy, like a product for which there is no market, is not the same personality that can manage the company through rough waters, keeping it profitable in the face of competition."