Music And The Arts The New Moog Music

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31922, 25 February 1969, Page 12

Music And The Arts The New Moog Music

(“Newsweek” Feature Service)

What is a chord? Can it be a bleep and a bonk, a thump and a whistle? Can you write a sonata for a running faucet or a rattling radiator?

These are just some of the questions under consideration these days by pioneers in the “new music” —not Simon and Garfunkel or The Jefferson Airplane, for if they mean “new music” to you, you might as well be bopping to Lawrence Welk. The new “new music” is not played and not sung. It is neither written nor conducted.

It is programmed, taped, filtered, oscillated, modulated and synthesised. It incorporates every sound imaginable and many that the mind of man has never heard or conceived. It is, in a word, electronic. It is the musical Mecca to which the avant garde is flocking. Using huge machines costing thousands of dollars, electronic musicians are doctoring tapes and creating sounds that assault the cardrums and tickle the brain.

Take a composer, Pauline Oliveros. “I had some people come over,” she says, “got them a little drunk, and they belched.” Miss Oliveros was right there with her tape recorder. She captured the belches, distorted them electronically, and presto—instant music.

Or Alvin Lucier, director of the electronic music studio at Brandeis University. Sometimes his concerts consist of amplified noises from electromagnetic disturbances gathered from the ionosphere. Sometimes he tapes electrodes to his head and lets them gather up the alpha waves his brain sends off when he blinks. The waves are amplified through loudspeakers, and they set off a series of drums and gongs. Technically, there is nothing very new about electronic music, as such. Almost all the music we hear is amplified or transmitted electronically. An electric organ is a basic synthesiser made up of electric circuits, called oscillators, each of which produces a single pitch. And know it or not, we have been listening to pure electronic music on television for years: the sing-song noise of a coffee percolator on a commercial, the tuneful callletters of N.B.C.

What gave the new sound .its big impetus was the (development of machines so (sophisticated and versatile ((capable of producing such (a wide and wild range of (noises) that the only limitation on compositions is the .manipulative skill of the (composer.

Scores of college music departments have purchased synthesisers built by 34-year-old Robert A. Moog. For S3OOO to §7OOO, it is possible to buy a machine like the one that scored the movie “Candy,” or the ones that are being used by the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead.

The price of the machines, plus the complexity of the process of sound synthesis, has dictated that electronic music still has a fairly small and , esoteric audience—mostly in studios and mostly among aficionados who know

all about the technical marvel they are hearing. But Columbia Records, which has so far released 15 electronic - music records, found to its surprise that it could sell out the first printings (3500 to 5000 copies) of almost all the discs. The music is so weird that it taxes critics. “Life is too short and domestic bliss too fragile,” wrote one music critic, “for a reviewer to spend his hours measuring and comparing the sounds produced by ring modulators, oscillators, potentiometers and the other tools of the electronic composer.” But critics are becoming accustomed to the impossible. How, for instance, do you review John Cage’s “4’33”,

in which the pianist sits silently for four minutes and 33 seconds and' lets . the “music" flow from the coughs, shuffles, and other sounds made by the audience? One electronic record, Walter Carlos’s “Switched -On Bach,” has won critical raves and become the best-seller on the classical charts. It’s “the record of the year,” says the Bach interpreter, Glenn Gould, who then immediately adds, “No, let’s go all the way—the decade.” To make the record, Carlos and a colleague played standard Bach compositions on a keybdard Moog, and they produced almost perfect baroque instrumental sounds, as well as a highly-praised improvised cadenza.

If electronic music has yet to make serious inroads in the pop field, it has already raised profound questions for musicologists and sociologists. As technology improves the sound quality of machines, will live concerts become obsolete? Who will pay to hear the greatest living pianist, when an inanimate object can go him several better? As one critic notes: “With the new synthesisers, new modes of mastery will come into being, and certain of our older concepts of pleasure will be subtly broken down.”

The photograph shows one of the instruments.