final credits - robert moog
In the annals of recorded music, there are but a handful of true pioneers. There was Thomas Edison, who invented the medium. There was Leon Theremin, who introduced the first pure electronic instrument. Les Paul, who invented the electric guitar and pioneered modern studio technology, and Leo Fender, who made electric guitars accessible to millions. And then there was Bob Moog, who developed mass-produced devices whose impact on modern music has lasted five decades, forever changing the soundscape of culture. As inventor of the Moog Synthesizer, Bob Moog saw himself not as an innovator but a toolmaker, with musicians as his customer. From modern music pop songs to cell phone ring tones and iPods, Moog's work is heard every minute of every day.
Robert Moog died August 21, 2005 at age 71 from glioblastoma multiforme, an inoperable brain tumour.
The story of Robert Arthur Moog (rhymes with "vogue") starts early in the 1920s, when Leon Theremin, a Russian-born scientist, invented an electronic instrument which could be "played" by waving the hands near two metal rods attached to a wooden box. The "Theremin" would not only have an impact on Moog as a student of sound, but replications of the device financed Moog through school.
Never achieving widespread status as a legitimate musical instrument, the Theremin was mostly widely heard in the movies "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound," as well as the Beach Boys hit of 1967, "Good Vibrations." Theremin disappeared in 1938 and was thought to have died in a Stalinist purge (but was actually kept under wraps to work on electronic bugging devices).
Moog was born on May 23, 1934 in New York. His father was an engineer and his mother was a piano teacher. A reluctant piano student, Moog spent his time tinkering with radios that he built from mail-order kits. In 1949, at the age of 14, he built a Theremin from plans he found in the magazine "Electronics World." Within five years, Moog produced a Theremin design of his own and published an article about it in "Radio and Television News." In 1954, he started the R. A. Moog Company, selling Theremins and Theremin kits.
Among Moog's early customers was the sound pioneer Raymond Scott, a studio bandleader who cut off the Theremin's pitch antennas and re-assembled the device with wires in the back of a keyboard. It became the "Clavivox." The Scott conversion of the "aerial" instrument to a keyboard-controlled device made a lasting impact on Moog.
As Moog was completing his Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell University in 1965, he had started working with composer Herbert Deutsch on his first "synthesizer" modules. Moog and Deutsch were familiar with the huge synthesizers in use at Columbia University and at RCA, which were becoming popular with European composers of postmodern music. However, the RCA synthesizer cost over $100,000 in contemporary currency and occupied a large room. Moog's relatively portable and affordable device (the first voltage-controlled synthesizer) made its debut at an audio engineering society convention in the fall of 1964. Selling for just $11,000, the "Moog Modular Synthesizer" also had two novel features: a keyboard interface and the "ADSR." The ADSR (attack-decay-sustain-release) was a waveform generator that allowed performers to control the way notes swell and fade.
In 1967, the Moog synthesizer made its recording debut on the song "Star Collector," a Carole King/Gerry Goffin-penned track on the Monkees album "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd." The Moog was played by Paul Beaver & Mickey Dolenz.
Word of the instrument and its capabilities soon spread in the music world. Among the first buyers were John Cage and Mick Jagger. When the Rolling Stones had a Moog shipped over from America, customs officers spent three hours taking the equipment apart searching for drugs. Moog's business records showed that someone stayed with Jagger for five weeks teaching him how to use it. The instrument was only used once as a prop on a film set and was later sold to German space-rockers Tangerine Dream.
Also first in line was George Harrison. The Moog played a central part in his first non-Beatles recording "Electronic Sound," released in late 1968. Harrison brought the instrument to Abbey Road, and the Moog sound soon appeared on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," "Because" and "Here Comes The Sun."
However, the recording that made Moog a household name was the 1968 album "Switched-On Bach." A collection of Bach transcriptions, the Walter Carlos album was meticulously recorded -- one line at a time, with the electronic instrument reset for each "performance." Canadian pianist Glenn Gould praised Carlos' Fourth Brandenburg as "the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs - live, canned or intuited - that I've ever heard." The album won three Grammys and helped fuel the demand for synthesizers. Ironically, the album's performer has gone to great lengths to be distant from the pioneering effort. Walter became Wendy and has distanced herself from work performed as Walter.
The Moog sound went on to electrify Beethoven for the eerie soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" in 1971, and soon the pop music world embraced the instrument. The Micromoog, Minimoog, Multimoog, Memorymoog and versions of Moog's original modular monsters crowded the stages of Emerson Lake and Palmer, Herbie Hancock, Jan Hammer, the Byrds, Sun Ra, Manfred Mann, The Who, Yes, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, Genesis, the Beach Boys and the Doors. Keith Emerson's 10-foot-tall, 550-pound "Monster Moog" (at left) though indispensable as part of the group's show, often had to be tuned throughout a performance and had to be covered in tin foil to avoid picking up police radio traffic.
Soon competition entered the synthesizer market and "Moog" was not the only name in town anymore. Its creator lost control of the company in 1971, first to the entrepreneur Bill Waytena (who relocated it to a former gelatine factory in Buffalo, New York), and then to Norlin Musical Instruments. Moog continued to design instruments for Norlin until 1977.
Moog moved to a remote plot outside Asheville, North Carolina, a scenic Appalachian Mountain city that Rolling Stone magazine once dubbed "America's new freak capital." The field he pioneered was now dominated by Arp, Roland, Emu, Aries, Kurzweil, Yamaha and others. His analog inventions were now supplanted by digital devices.
Moog founded Big Briar, producing synthesizer modules and alternative controllers -- devices other than keyboards, with which a musician could play electronic instruments. He worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988. Moog resurrected his Theremin design as the "Ethervox," and was a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina. By 2002, he regained rights to the name "Moog Music."
In the late 1990s, after a decade of dependence on digital sound, a new wave of musicians embraced the warm organic tones of Moog's analog instruments. Musicians for Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Beck, Phish, Sonic Youth and Widespread Panic sought out Moog's original instruments. Tribute groups such as the Moog Cookbook sprung up, and in 2004 the movie Moog featured artists including DJ Logic, Money Mark, Mix Master Mike, DJ Spooky and Yes' Rick Wakeman paying tribute to the inventor. The film won best documentary at the 2004 Barcelona film festival, and Moog's classic equipment started experiencing a resurgence, showing up on Ebay fetching astronomical sums.
In later years, Moog cut a bizarre figure, with an ever-present pocket protector and a wave of white hair. He drove a 1980 Toyota Tercel with a butterfly, snail and goldfish painted on the side. For years his bumper sticker read: "Theremin Players Do It With High Frequency!"
Moog received a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement in 1970. In 2001 he was awarded the Polar Prize by the King of Sweden for his contributions to music. In 2002 both Moog and Apple Computer were awarded a Technical Grammy, presented to people and businesses who, through technical innovations, have enhanced the recording industry. Moog was the recipient of the Trustee’s Award of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, as well as the Silver Medal of the Audio Engineering Society of America.
For more about Robert Moog, visit these web sites: Moog Music and his entry at Wikipedia.
For more about Leon Theremin, visit these web sites: Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey -- the film's official web site, and his entry at Wikipedia.