by Albert Glinsky (Music 786.74 Moog)
It’s hard to even imagine what it was like in a world before synthesizers, as they make up a huge proportion of the music we hear today. All kinds of pop music, film music, dance music, even commercials, would sound totally different without this 20th century addition to the universe of musical instruments. Just like early computers, early synthesizers were gigantic and very expensive devices, and only places like universities really had the space and money to invest in using and improving them. They were in no way portable, it could take hours to wire them up to produce a single kind of sound, and as a result, they were more like a tool for musical research than a full-fledged instrument at first. That all changed in large part due to an inventor named Bob Moog, who changed the world of music forever by creating the first commercially-available synthesizer, followed by smaller and more portable synths that took the instrument from studios to stages. His last name is itself ubiquitous with the synths of his creation, and author and composer Albert Glinsky has created the first in-depth biography of Bob that extends all the way to the end of his time on Earth. It’s called Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
Considering Moog’s history with electronic music, Albert Glinsky is the perfect person to write this book. Glinsky wrote the essential biography of Leon Theremin (Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage), inventor of the hands-free electronic instrument that bears his name, which was published back in the year 2000. As you’ll find out in this new book if you didn’t already know, Moog got his start building theremins, and he wrote the forward to Glinsky’s Theremin biography. The pair remained in touch through Moog’s death in 2005, and as Glinsky worked on this new book, the Moog family gave him full access to Bob’s personal archive of papers and records. Between these documents and new interviews with various figures important to the rise of the Moog synthesizer, Glinsky has created a thorough examination of our other 20th C. musical figure who name became synonymous with his invention.
While one might suspect that the story of Moog’s life could be an extended victory lap, being the inventor of one of the most popular, paradigm-shifting instruments of all time, it turns out that the story of his life and work is far more nuanced, with lots of ups and downs. For all of his strengths as an inventor and engineer, Moog wasn’t nearly so skilled with the business side of things, which created lifelong problems for him. But let’s start from the beginning: Glinsky covers Moog’s childhood in the first few chapters, and among the most important aspects, we learn that his mother forced him to take piano lessons, which he disliked but obviously came in handy later in life, and his father George maintained a woodworking and electronics space in the family home’s basement, where father and son worked on many electronics projects together. In fact, once Bob was in college around 1954, he collaborated with his father on a new design for a theremin, for which Bob designed the circuit and George created a handsome wood cabinet. In those days, home electronics do-it-yourself magazines were quite popular, and Bob thought to share his new circuit by writing an article for Radio and Television News. The Moogs cleverly placed an ad in the same issue as the article, offering to sell kits or fully-assembled theremins. Father and son ended up designing a few theremin models and had some modest success selling them—until one looked at their ledger, that is. Ultimately, they made $6,750 in revenue in 1954, but were $302.25 in the red for having done so. The next year, they were in the black at $232.
Even in these very early days of designing and selling instruments, strange business practices that threatened the viability of his projects began to appear. Glinsky relays an odd story about well-known composer Raymond Scott purchasing one of the Moog theremins and modifying it by turning it into a keyboard instrument. He intended to market his new “Clavivox,” and wanted the Moogs to sign over any patent rights to their circuit. As the story of Moog’s life unfolds, this kind of thing seems to follow him forever, and he doesn’t have the business savvy to thwart such aggressive moves effectively.
By the time Moog was pursuing a doctorate in Engineering Physics at Cornell, he was running the Moog company by himself, married, and raising his first child. In 1959, transistor technology had become inexpensive enough that he was able to create new models based on the technology — a step up from tubes — and tried his old trick of writing an article and placing an ad to promote them. It worked. His fledgling family was off to a good start with his profits from selling do-it-yourself transistor-based theremin kits. In his next product catalog, he included a tear-off survey to see what kinds of products his customers might want next, and gradually found himself looking at synthesizers. As mentioned earlier, at that time in the early 1960s, electronic music was still considered something to be researched, and generally was practiced in “electronic music labs” at college campuses, appropriately enough. The devices used were enormous, proprietary, expensive, and fragile. But Moog started thinking about the new transistor technologies that he had installed in his latest theremins, and quickly came out with the idea of voltage control for designing a smaller, cheaper synthesizer.
Moog essentially invented the modular synthesizer in 1964, using voltage-controlled oscillators and amplifiers to generate sounds. Although his synth designs were monophonic, producing one note at a time, he was able to control his system with a familiar piano keyboard, and connections between the various electronic components could be made with small cables, so that users could change their own sounds. Collaborating with other musicians on design, He continued to refine the performance of his first synth by adding “envelope” controls for attack and release, which makes synth tones sound more “natural” in the way that instruments like horns or strings behave. Upon showing it to some of the composers at UTEMS in Toronto, they loved it and suggested adding a filter band for even more sound possibilities. Moog started experimenting with adding polyphony to the design, too, so that it could handle playing chords. But all the while, money wasn’t coming in, and he was quickly devouring his savings from the theremin kits. A lucky break hosting a booth at the 1964 AES convention finally got his synthesizer prototype in front of the right people (academic electronic composers), and he started making sales to university sound lab programs.
The rest of Moog’s story continues in much the same way: he invented new methods for sound synthesis, important people ordered his inventions, but invariably producing these devices cost more than anticipated, and he was continually on the brink of financial disaster, even though he became increasingly famous for his thoughtfully-designed and relatively rugged synthesizers. First the contemporary classical music world embraced his designs, then the independent composers of more unusual projects like Wendy Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach” became a sensation. Soon, pop-adjacent composers discovered the instruments, producing dozens of “Moog _____” albums throughout the 1970s, which truly started to put the Moog name into the public consciousness. Once he designed the MiniMoog, an even more portable non-modular synthesizer, rock, pop and jazz musicians began adding the instrument to their performances. David Bowie, The Beatles, The Monkees, The Doors, and many more high profile artists incorporated Moog synths into their work.
Glinsky brings up the inventions of some of Moog’s competitors, too, as they were also important to the early years of consumer synthesizers. In the early days, his main competitor was Don Buchla, whose devices included the first sequencer, and used non-keyboard interfaces for playing his synths. The Buchla machines also ended up in many university electronic music labs. In the 70s, ARP synths like the 2600 and the Soloist started to cut into Moog’s sales, and by the 80s, the Japanese manufacturers like Roland and Yamaha were producing instruments of similar quality but at lower price points. By this time, Moog himself had moved onto a new venture that he called Big Briar, so he wasn’t around for the company bearing his name declaring bankruptcy in 1987. He missed out on some bizarre shenanigans in the final years of Moog Electronics, such as putting new badges on MemoryMoog synths to pass them off as “Sanctuary Synthesizers,” and selling them at church workshops, traveling by hearse. But Moog’s Big Briar had stumbled, too, and he was working for Kurzweil for several years, leaving just before that company became insolvent as well.
Returning to his Big Briar project, and sadly going through a divorce from his wife of 35 years (who had also been instrumental in taking care of paperwork throughout his career), Moog continued to struggle with keeping his business afloat, but there was at least a poetic victory toward the end of his life. After 5 years of court battles, he regained control of his name in 2002, and Moog Music Inc. was reborn. With a new business partner, the company was profitable in 2004. Sadly, he didn’t get to enjoy what looked like the beginning of a truly successful business venture for long: he died of a fast-growing brain tumor the following year.
In a brief postlude, Glinsky mentions that Moog Music has carried on, starting with the successful launch of the Little Phatty, the last instrument Moog had worked on developing. The company went on to become employee-owned in 2015, too. But all books have limitations in terms of predicting the future, and even though this one was just published late last year, there have been shifts in the business that may affect the legacy of this company in the long term: employees sought to unionize last year, and then just last month, the company was bought out by InMusic, a company that has been buying up lots of old music and audio companies like Alesis, Marantz, M-Audio, and and Akai. For now, Moog Music will remain in the Ashville, NC location they’ve been working in since Moog himself was still alive, but it’s hard to guess what the future will hold.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky or Synthesizer Evolution: From Analogue to Digital (and back) by Oli Freke.)
( Wikipedia page about Robert Moog ) | ( official Albert Glinsky web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff
Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that
page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog
individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the
reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment