FEATURE:
Our Friends Electric
PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson
Dr. Robert Moog at Ninety: An Ultimate Synthesizer Playlist
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ON 23rd May…
it will be ninety years since Dr. Robert Moog was born. He helped shape music in a way few others have. A hugely important and influential figure. He was an American engineer and Electronic music pioneer. Dr. Robert Moog was the founder of the synthesizer manufacturer, Moog Music. He was also the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer, the Moog, which debuted in 1964. That was introduced on 12th October, 1964. Think about all the songs that feature the Moog synthesiser and how it shaped music - especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps not as synonymous today as it was a few decades ago, there is no denying the impact the Moog synthesizer made. Its inventor was born on 23rd May, 1934, so I want to commemorate the upcoming ninetieth birthday. I will end with a playlist of songs that feature the distinct and iconic Moog synthesizer. Before that, from the Moog Music website, here is some background and biography concerning a pioneer and key figure in the history of music technology:
“Bob’s innovative spirit continues to inspire us each day here in the Moog Factory, and we are forever grateful to be a part of this creative legacy.
It might seem like hyperbole to say that Bob Moog was destined for electronic instrument engineering.
But his lifelong curiosity with circuitry, especially the type that yielded sounds, proved prophetic. As he told Torsten Schmidt in a 2003 interview, he “got off on electronics” as a kid, especially electronics that made sound.
“And when I say electronics, it was not the electronics of today,” Moog said. “Back then, electronics was one or two vacuum tubes, a couple of resistors, capacitors and these big, fat transformers. You could put the whole thing together on the kitchen table, it was a hobby.”
Moog’s father, one of the first amateur radio operators, helped nurture Bob’s love of circuitry and sound. Instead of playing baseball, as he recalled, Moog messed around with electronics.
Born in 1934, Moog was chronologically well-positioned to get into electronic instruments. The vacuum tube, which had been around since 1906, had just revolutionized radio and film, and had already been incorporated into electronic instruments like Lee de Forest’s Audion piano (1915), Theremin (1920), Maurice Martenot’s Ondes instrument (1928), and Friedrich’s Trautwein’s Trautonium (one of the inspirations for Moog’s Subharmonicon). And by the 1930s and 1940s, audio oscillators, filters, envelope controllers, and basic effects units were in existence.
A teenage Moog attended Manhattan School of Music until the age of fourteen, an education that would later help him communicate well with musicians in the development of electronic instruments. As he recalled in a 1974 interview with Keyboard magazine, it was there that he received ear training, sight singing lessons, and instruction on the basics of music theory. He also attended the Bronx High School of Science during his teen years, and visited an area of Lower Manhattan to find parts for his electronic experiments. In 1958, Moog graduated with a B.S. in physics from Queens College and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Columbia.
By age 19, he and his father were building and selling theremins. In his foreword to Albert Glinsky's Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Moog described the Russian inventor Leon Theremin as the person who “virtually single-handedly launched the field of electronic music technology.” So dedicated to the Theremin was Moog that Radio News magazine actually published his design for the electronic instrument while still in college.
“I was actually making Theremins for a living,” he told Keyboard. “So from then, which was in 1954, through my entire college career, I made Theremins, and enough money to get through graduate school [at Cornell].”
“Electronic organs were just coming out at that time. I remember spending whole days at the Baldwin Organ display room in New York City: Listening, imposing myself on them, being a pain in the ass,” Moog recalled. “It had controls that were not too different from today’s synthesizer. You changed attack, switched filters in and out, switched in different octaves; all in all, not a bad instrument considering the time.”
After a failed attempt to market a musical amplifier kit, Moog serendipitously met composer Herb Deutsch in November of 1963 at the New York State Music Conference, where Moog was demonstrating his Theremin music kits. Deutsch had been using the Theremin for ear training, and the two immediately began discussing the possibilities of having synthesis at your fingertips at home.
“More or less in my spare time I built two voltage-controlled oscillators and two voltage-controlled amplifiers, and some kind of controller that could turn the sounds on and off and change the pitch and rates of modulation,” Moog said of this first modular synthesizer. “It might have [amounted to] a couple of doorbells. When Herb [Deutsch] came up . . . he just flipped when he heard what my breadboards could do. By the end of that session and the one that followed, together we had come up with the basics of a modular analog synthesizer.”
Moog Soon developed a modular synthesizer prototype...
Moog soon developed a modular synthesizer prototype, which he gave to Deutsch. It included a keyboard and two boxes: one equipped with two oscillators and an envelope generator, the other with Moog’s first iteration of his analogue filter concept.
A year later, in 1964, Moog demonstrated his modular synthesizer at the Audio Engineering Society convention, and began taking orders. Within a few years, Moog’s R.A. Moog, Inc. (the predecessor of Moog Music, Inc.) produced the Moog Modular Synthesizer models I, II, and III. And it was during the mid-1960s that pop culture began catching onto the sonic possibilities being explored by Moog, Don Buchla, and other synthesizer engineers.
The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz was one of the first musicians to bring the Moog Modular system into the popular music realm on the band’s 1967 album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. It was also around this time that Moog’s modular system was shown at the Monterey Pop Festival. Paul Beaver began incorporating the Moog modular sound into his film scores, starting with The Trip in 1967. A year later, Wendy Carlos, who had studied at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (to which Moog had sold modules and later modular systems), used a Moog modular synthesizer to record her revolutionary electronic album Switched On Bach. In 1969, The Beatles would use it on their final album, Abbey Road, and a year later in 1970, rock keyboardist Keith Emerson would add the modular Moog Synthesizer to his sonic arsenal.
But Moog’s realization of that early dream of making the synthesizer truly portable, in the form of the Minimoog, would have an even greater lasting influence. Suddenly, synthesizers weren’t just for experimental composers and adventurous pop musicians. Keyboardists all across the musical spectrum, from jazz fusion (Chick Corea, Jan Hammer) to prog rock (Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman), and the developing Krautrock scene exemplified by Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, were not just using the synthesizer on recordings, but demonstrating its strengths as an expressive live instrument—one that was every bit the sonic equal of the guitar.
The synthesizer even found its way into the world of disco by way of Giorgio Moroder’s electronic disco recordings. Modern ambient music, particularly with Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno, also came of age as the Moog and other synthesizers became culturally ubiquitous. Beyond these popular music movements, Moog’s commitment to giving musicians the tools they needed to sonically express themselves indirectly helped give birth to modern electronic music through the underground movements of Chicago House, Detroit Techno, and New York City’s Hip-Hop scene.
And yet, across his decades of work, Moog remained characteristically modest and low-key, giving credit to the musicians who used his instruments in ways he hadn’t imagined back in the early 1960s. Like his contemporaries Don Buchla, Dave Smith, and the folks from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Moog lived to see electronic music develop from a curiosity in electrical engineering and avant-garde composing to a worldwide artistic culture. Rather fittingly, it’s still a creative tech culture in a constant state of innovation, which is something Moog would surely appreciate”.
On 23rd May, we mark ninety years since the birth of Dr. Robert Moog. From its humble beginnings, it went on to change music forever. If you want to know more, there is a great book, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog synthesizer, that was published back in 2004. Later in the year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Moog synthesizer. I am going to wrap up there. I hope that radio stations give a little salute to Dr. Robert Moog on 23rd May. Play some classics that feature his crucial invention. Without the Moog synthesiser, who knows what the music world would have lost out on. The Moog synthesizer arrived in 1964 and made…
A gigantic impact.