Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer

By Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco

Harvard University Press., 2002, $29.95

Marcus Boon

(Originally published in The Wire.)

Although a great deal of lip service is paid to the importance of new technologies in contemporary music, most analyses of such technologies amount to treating them as manna from heaven – gifts that fall out of the sky which are then picked up by musicians and entrepreneurs and used to jumpstart technocultures.  Even the hacker ethic, embodied in SF novelist William Gibson’s celebrated statement that “the street finds its own use for things”, often cited as key to the rise of punk, hiphop or techno, is merely a variation on this theme.  The hacker may experiment and find new uses for machines, whether they be Powerbooks, or Roland 808 drum machines, but he/she is still essentially stealing something that has already been fully formed from a technological point of view.

Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s Analog Days takes a different approach to the history of the Moog synthesizer.  Pinch and Trocco, a professor and grad student respectively of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (a shortish drive from Trumansburg, where the R.A. Moog Co. set up research and production facilities in a storefront in 1963), view the development of technologies such as the Moog as itself being a process of dynamic negotiation between musicians and composers with their sonic visions and desires, R & D teams composed of scientists and technicians, exploring the possibilities of sound production, entrepreneurs seeking to package and market such developments in new product lines, and a vast historical and scientific landscape that shapes and sets limits on what all the parties involved in this process believe possible or desirable.  Through a series of detailed interviews with people associated with the Moog’s development, ranging from Bob Moog himself to assorted technicians, sound gurus, marketing people and musicians who had input into the Moog’s development, they reconstruct, with the care of anthropologists studying the habits of some obscure tribe, how exactly it was that the Moog became a significant force in musical culture in the 1960s.

As is well known by now, Moog started out building and selling theremin kits, when he met with a young experimental composer Herb Deutsch, who turned him on to the joys of experimental sound composition at a concert in a Manhattan loft.  The first Moog synth was developed in 1964 in Trumansburg by “synthesizing” Deutsch’s knowledge of sonic possibility gained from Stockhausen, Cage, Tudor et al, with Moog’s deep understanding of the potential of the component parts of the theremin.  The book details the slow shift in Moog culture from John Cage’s Moog driven “Variations V” performance with the Merce Cunningham dancers in 1965, to the Trips Festival organized by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in January 1966 in San Francisco which featured Moog rival Don Buchla playing his Box, to the first attempts to popularize the Moog’s sound, such as Beaver and Crause’s The Zodiac Cosmic Sounds (1967) and Wendy (a.k.a Walter) Carlos’s Switched on Bach (1968) record.  And then, suddenly everybody had a brand new Moog: The Beatles, Byrds, Doors, Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder along with TONTO (the world’s first polyphonic multitimbral synth), Mother Mallard (one of the first live synth groups), the First Moog Quartet, who performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1970, and the Island of Electronicus (an actual island off the coast of Florida which hosted touristy Minimoog driven sound “happenings”). 

Analog Days contrasts the Moog’s success with the story of former NASA worker Don Buchla, whose Buchla Box was as one time a market rival for the Moog.  Buchla became involved in the activities of the San Francisco Tape Center in the early 1960s, a performance space used by young avant composers such as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Morton Subotnik (whose Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) remains the biggest Buchla hit).  While Moog decided to control his synths with a keyboard, Buchla, high on dreams of a music that was no longer based on keyboard driven polyphony and the chromatic scale, went with touch sensitive pads that could be configured to produce sounds in a more open, unrestricted way – a decision that doomed Buchla, always something of a renegade anyway, to the periphery of the music business.

For Pinch and Trocco, the decision to use a keyboard as the interface between the performer and  the Moog’s sound synthesizing capabilities, was by no means a foregone conclusion.  But once made, this decision, which was embedded in the esoterica of voltage based pitch control mechanisms, the musical tastes of the R & D team (which in the case of the book’s authors definitely veers towards Über-Prog outfits like Mother Mallard and ELP!) and the demands of potential synth purchasers, committed Moog and co. to a certain pattern of development.  It meant for example that the synthesizer would be played by a keyboard player rather than some other type of musician, and that therefore R & D work should be directed towards the needs of keyboard players.  There was nothing inherent in the synthesizer itself, which is after all just a set of circuits and components that generate specific sounds, that determined this path of development.  The synth on The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”, the record that turned on the world to the joys of sound synthesis, was the keyboardless theremin after all.  The Moog emerged through a combination of chance, habit, physics and marketing.

Pinch and Trocco limit themselves to the period in the Moog’s history (as well as that of the Buchla Box and rival companies such as Arp and Yamaha) where the Moog’s capabilities were being actively and dynamically developed.  There’s no mention of synth-toting Wire faves like The Silver Apples, Can and Suicide, who were presumably not consulted during the development of the Moog, and only a token mention of the use of synths in disco, techno and more contemporary genres of electronic music.  At first this seems puzzling – but perhaps the history of the Moog should be divided between the period where the specifics of the hardwiring of the machine were still up for grabs, which Pinch and Trocco have now given us an elegant and compelling account of, and a later, “hacker” period where the essentially finished product was taken apart by outsiders around the world such as Aphex Twin’s Richard James in the UK or Panasonic’s Mika Vainio in Finland, without any consultation with the machine’s developers.

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