Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer, was born 88 years ago today.
Founder of Moog Music, Moog was a pioneer of electronic music. His innovative electronic design is employed in numerous synthesizers including the Minimoog Model D, Minimoog Voyager, Little Phatty, Moog Taurus Bass Pedals, Moog Minitaur and the Moogerfooger line of effects pedals.
A native of New York City, Moog attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Queens College, New York in 1957, another in electrical engineering from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University.
During his lifetime, Moog founded two companies for manufacturing electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000. He spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Moog gave an enthusiastically-received lecture at the 2004 New Interfaces for Musical Expression, held in Hamamatsu, Japan's "City of Musical Instruments," in June, 2004. He was the inspiration behind the 2004 film, Moog.
The Moog synthesizer was one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. He created the first voltage-controlled subtractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller and demonstrated it at the AES convention in 1964. He is a listed inventor on ten U.S. patents.
Moog had his theremin company (R. A. Moog Co., which later became Moog Music) manufacture and market his synthesizers. Unlike the few other 1960s synthesizer manufacturers, Moog shipped a piano-style keyboard as the standard user interface.
Moog also established standards for analog synthesizer control interfacing, with a logarithmic one volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse triggering signal.
The first Moog instruments were modular synthesizers. In 1971, Moog Music began production of the Minimoog Model D, which was among the first synthesizers that was widely available, portable and relatively affordable.
One of Moog's earliest musical customers was Wendy Carlos, whom he credits with providing feedback valuable to further development. Through his involvement in electronic music, Moog developed close professional relationships with artists such as Don Buchla, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, John Cage, Gershon Kingsley, Clara Rockmore, Jean Jacques Perrey and Pamelia Kurstin.
In a 2000 interview, Moog said: "I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers. They use my tools."
Moog was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor on April 28, 2005. He died at the age of 71 in Asheville, North Carolina on August 21, 2005.
Here, Moog demonstrates the Minimoog
Building a Theremin: My Personal Odyssey
In October, 1994, at the New York Film Festival, I watched a powerful documentary by Steven M. Martin about the creation of the world's first electronic musical instrument.
Billed as part biography, part social history and part detective story, the film — "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" — told the remarkable story of Leon Theremin, a Russian-born inventor whose adventures spanned the avant garde music world in New York City in the 1920s to the clandestine world of the KGB in the 1930s and 40s.
In 1922, Theremin demonstrated an early version of his strange new music machine for Nikolai Lenin, the U.S.S.R.'s leader. Five years later, he played his instrument for a group of American VIPs in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It was received into America's Jazz Age culture with awe and excitement.
The original theremin, which resembled a wooden speakers' podium with a loop of metal extending from one side and a vertical metal antenna on the other, was a real curiosity in the early radio days.
Audiences were mesmerized by a new breed of instrument whose music was generated not from physical contact but from hand movements made in the air around the two protruding antennas.
By controlling the pitch with the right hand and the volume with the left, it's possible to create music that suggests — as the New York Times put it — "a violin or a soprano or a Martian making a landing. It is surpassingly strange."
For about two years beginning in 1929, RCA manufactured and sold 500 theremins. From 1930 until his mysterious disappearance in 1938, Leon Theremin built the instruments for customers in his New York studio on West 54th Street.
That disappearance makes the Theremin legend even more strange and fascinating.
The inventor was apparently kidnapped by Soviet agents from his New York establishment and taken to Russia where, after a period of imprisonment, he was engaged by the government to design electronic eavesdropping technology for spies in World War II.
Long assumed dead in the West (a German newspaper reported his demise), he was spotted by chance one day at the Moscow Conservatory of Music by a visiting reporter for the New York Times. This led to his emotional return to the United States in 1991 (an event portrayed in the film).
Whether we realize it or not, most of us are familiar with the wavering vibrato sound of the theremin from dozens of 1950's-era science fiction and horror movies. Films like Spellbound, The Lost Weekend and The Day the Earth Stood Still used theremins on their soundtracks. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations is perhaps the best known use of a theremin in a pop music recording.
The theremin caught the imagination of Robert Moog, who started building the instruments as a teenager and began to manufacture them again for sale in 1954 — 16 years after Leon Theremin's disappearance. A decade later Moog made music history when he invented the Moog synthesizer, the first in a successful line of electronic music synthesizers.
I met Moog at the film festival and quickly became enamored by the theremin. At the time, Moog made theremins at Big Briar, Inc., his company located in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.
Taking advantage of the explosion of new interest in theremins after the release of the film, Moog introduced an affordable Theremin called the Etherwave. It was a no compromise, fully professional instrument that had the tone color and playing characteristics of Theremin's original. A Etherwave kit cost $229 at the time.
Nostalgic for my old Heathkit days and fascinated by the idea of owning such an oddball instrument (though I had no ability to play it), I purchased an Etherwave kit from Big Briar. It came with an unfinished wood cabinet, nickel-plated brass antennas, a pre-assembled circuit card, a power supply and several bags of parts. Also included was an instructional video and a CD of theremin music by the inventor's protégé, Clara Rockmore.
The Big Briar brochure said "if you can read a diagram, solder and use basic home tools, you should be able to build this theremin in an evening or two." As with Heathkits, Big Briar (actually Robert Moog personally) didn’t let me fail. I got Moog on the phone a couple of times and he was most helpful. He nursed me through the project. When I turned on the power switch of the Etherwave, it worked perfectly.
When I finished the kit, I asked Robert Moog if he could explain why such a cult-like following has developed around this instrument — with more than 50 professional musical acts at the time using theremins in performance throughout the world.
Moog said several factors contributed to its appeal. "For one thing the instrument is responsive," he said. "With a keyboard you put your finger on a key and the note plays. That's it. This is just the opposite. The note keeps changing with every single motion of your hand. People like that. They enjoy that responsiveness.
"Another part of it," he continued, "is that's all in the air. There's something ethereal about that. Something gossamer. Back in the earlier days it was an elitist thing. It was rather sensational, but there were very few people who actually got up and played it. Now that's changed. It's much better established now than in the past. People are engrossed in it. It's almost a cult thing."
(P.S. Though I sold my home-built theremin to a professional musician who could play it, I'm still fascinated by the instrument. Now I have a theremin ring tone on my iPhone. People do a doubletake every time it rings!)
In the above photo, I attempt to play my finished theremin.