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The Detroit News Saturday

June 6, 1992
A new musical instrument may change the world - or flop
By Nancy MALITZ
This occasional column looks at issues in the arts.

CHICAGO- A new electronic musical instrument was born last weekend. Like the androids in sci-fi movies, these synthesizers are getting more human all the time.
The promising instrument, unveiled at the University of Chicago with a new piece written especially for it by composer John Eaton, is called the Multiple Touch-Sensitive Keyboard.
The name needs work. But Eaton has understandably flipped out over the idea of an electronic keyboard plus computer that responds to human manipulation.
Far from producing a cold, flat, unchanging synthetic tone, this one responds differently depending on the force you use, like a piano does. Its sound changes again if you alter the finger pressure while the note's still sounding, like a violin will. It will do vibrato if you move your finger back and forth on the key. It can change color and croon with tiny decorative flourishes like those you hear on an Indian sitar.
In fact, this keyboard will respond to any five things you command it to do, simultaneously, all governed by finger movement on the keys. No wonder Eaton's first piece for it is called Genesis. For synthesizers, it's the beginning of a new era. The best synthesizers and their computer sidekicks will
become the instrument of the future and in the hands of virtuosos, they'll become pliant, expressive extensions of ourselves.
The inventor of this Multiple Touch-Sensitive keyboard is Robert Moog (pronounced like rogue), a famous name in the history of electronic music. The first Moog synthesizers came out in the mid-'60s, long before we had computers or digital technology or compact discs.
Electronic music in early days was in the hands of the academics. It was called 'Musique concrete' in France, where the style was to capture all sorts of natural sounds on reel-to-reel tape, then cut up the tape and reassemble it in unrecognizable snippets.
Meanwhile, the Germans were experimenting with oscillators and other signal generators, producing purely electronic sounds. Americans were combining both methods. But the whole thing was strictly at the universities and had nothing to do with pop music.
Moog, now 58, became a household word in 1968, when Wendy Carlos made her first million-seller Switched-On Bach recording using a specially tricked-out Moog that the inventor helped with. Rock musicians saw the potential right away, even though the Moog would only play one line of music at a time and required laying down multiple sound tracks through an elaborate process. Still, a single musician with enough time could build up an awesome piece of music, and in 1970, when Moog came out with the fully portable Minimoog, it was seen as the most important development in the commercial music industry since the electric guitar.

 

At a time when technology was developing quickly, Moog's company was purchased by Norlin Industries and run into the ground. In the mid-'80s, Moog went to work as chief scientist for another famous synthesizer maker, Kurzweil. The Kurzweil 250 was an improvement over the original Moog, with a wide range of sounds built into it. Stevie Wonder got the first one.
But that company also ran into problems, and when digital technology came on big in the late '80s, it was the Yamaha DX-7 that emerged as the new standard.
Will Moog's Multiple-Touch-Sensitive keyboard replace the Yamaha in the commercial industry? Not soon. It's too complicated, and its real potential may take years to explore.
Eaton got his first instrument in February. The situation was a little like being handed a violin without a teacher, instruction book or any prior knowledge of the instrument or its music, then being invited to write a piece for it to perform in four months' time.
The violin is at least 450 years old. It wasn't until 1756 that Mozart's father wrote a treatise suggesting it was really better to hold it under your chin than against your chest, so it wouldn't fall down when you tried to play hard passages. Bach, likewise, is credited with the bright idea of using the thumb after a couple centuries of four-finger keyboard playing.
So you get an idea of what lies ahead for synthesizers. We need dozen Eatons and another Wendy Carlos and maybe a Paganini or two, and then we'll really be somewhere.
Eaton, 57, a winner of the MacArthur "genius" award, has made a specialtty of the microtonal realm of pitches "between" the piano keys. He has considerable synthesizer experience, more than most composers. Yet faced with this new instrument, he had to spend four months, seven hours a day, to develop a single, five-minute work.
Everything had to begin from scratch. He knew he could command each key to respond five different ways, but what should those five ways be? He created dozens of preset commands, like stops on a pipe organ, so that the possibilities became virtually endless. Then he chose tone colors from a computer generated palette, composed the music, and, not incidentally, learned how to play the thing.
Not all new instruments make the grade, of course. The octobass, a 14 foot-long instrument developed in 1849, was invented to go twice as low as a string bass, and it fizzled. Schubert wrote a sonata for the arpeggione, a cello-guitar hybrid whose decline was as meteoric as its rise. Even the glass harmonica bit the dust, despite the fact that Benjamin Franklin invented it and Mozart and Beethoven both wrote pieces for it.
But our global sound palette does change, and fairly often. Mozart brought clarinets into the orchestra, Beethoven ditto for trombones in his famous 5th. Jazz composers and Ravel, with Bolero, made a permanent place for the saxophone in the contemporary sound world.
The synthesizer has been with us for more than 25 years already. May it live long and prosper.