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Moog synthesizer collaborator Herbert Deutsch at IMAC
BY RAFER GUZMÁN
rafer.guzman@newsday.com
June 24, 2007
One of the most radical shifts in music began in 1961 with a hobbyist magazine article on how to build a theremin and a jazz musician from Baldwin named Herbert Deutsch.
The theremin, an electronic device that generates sound using radio frequencies, had been around for a while, but Deutsch found the Electronics World article interesting enough to pick up the issue and follow the instructions. When he couldn't get his gizmo to work, he phoned the article's author, an engineer, who gladly mailed out an easy-to-assemble kit for $49.95.
Two years later, Deutsch spotted the engineer selling his kits at a music trade show upstate in Rochester, and the two fell into conversation. They discussed a relatively recent invention called the Mark II synthesizer, which made music by sucking up rolls of key-punched paper and etching the results with a lathe onto a shellac record. It was intriguing, but you couldn't exactly "play" the thing like a piano or guitar, or even a theremin.
"Wouldn't it be exciting," Deutsch told the engineer, if there were smaller synthesizers "that a performer could own, or a composer could own? Something you could have in your home?"
The engineer, of course, was Robert Moog, whose name would soon become synonymous with the relatively portable, user-friendly synthesizers he first produced in 1964. The Moog forever changed the musical landscape, from the highbrow world of the avant-garde to the commercial world of pop. Credit for the technical wizardry goes to Moog, but if a synthesizer can be said to have a spirit, it came from Moog's musical friend, Herbert Deutsch.
"He was the scientist and I was the musician," says Deutsch, 75. "That's how we worked together."
Friday night at the IMAC Theater in Huntington,
Deutsch, a pianist and trumpet player, will perform a variety of his original compositions in a concert called "Celebrating the Music of the Moog Synthesizer." Featuring pieces such as "Jazz Images" (the first music written expressly for the Moog) and "Christmas Carol, 1963" (an example of the tape-collage genre called musique concrète), the show will serve as a history lesson on the early days of electronic music, taught by one who played a pivotal part.
Deutsch, who grew up on a chicken farm in Baldwin and now lives in Massapequa Park, sat in his home studio recently and talked about his fortuitous role in music history. A big-band jazz fan with a mechanical mind (he built his own automobile, including the body, when he was 16), Deutsch found himself drawn to the emerging field of electronic music as a young man. He especially liked to experiment with new sounds, chopping up reel-to-reel tapes and banging on sculptures fashioned from old auto parts.
"A geek's geek"
Moog, in the meantime, was running a small business making inexpensive guitar amplifiers and, of course, theremins. "He was a geek's geek," says Mike Adams, president of Moog Music, now based in Asheville, N.C. "He really had the pocket protector and loved everything to do with being an engineer."
By all accounts, though, Moog was no businessman. In the five years Adams worked with Moog (who died in 2005), "he never once asked to see a balance sheet. He just said, 'Just make sure I see a paycheck every week and I'll be happy.'"
In March 1964, Moog sent a letter to Deutsch inviting him to his workshop in Trumansburg, N.Y., where the two began to brainstorm.
With few precedents to guide them, they started from the ground up. One basic question was: Should this new synthesizer have a keyboard? Deutsch sought advice from Vladimir Ussachevsky, a designer of the Mark II, who advised against it.
"If you put a keyboard on it," Deutsch says Ussachevsky told him, "people will play unimportant music." (Deutsch, recalling Schoenberg's groundbreaking compositions on piano, opted for a keyboard anyway.)
At first, however, the keys worked like mere switches, turning the sound on and off - nothing like an organic instrument, whose notes start out strong but then waver and fade. Moog devised an electronic circuit to mimic the articulation of a real instrument, then hooked it up to a doorbell buzzer. Initially, Deutsch had to press the buzzer with one hand while pressing the keys with the other.
After the final product was unveiled at an audio engineers' convention in 1964, Moog was inundated with orders. But as with so many new technologies, his invention met with a mix of fascination and fear.
Musical dichotomy
In the classical world, many saw its ability to mimic sounds as a threat to musicians. "Switched-On Bach," the landmark 1968 album of Bach pieces played entirely on Moogs, only furthered that perception. In the rock world, however, young music fans embraced synth-heavy, progressive groups like Yes, Styx, Rush, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The generational divide memorably appeared in the 1980 movie "Fame," which featured a running argument between an old-world orchestra teacher and his synthesizer-happy student.
"The professional musicians were paranoid" about synthesizers, said Hubert Howe Jr., professor of music at Queens College and author of the early textbook "Electronic Music Synthesis." "When synthesizers started to be mass-produced, people wanted a machine that could sound like an instrument, and a good instrument, so the manufacturers took that as their mission."
Deutsch and Moog had a brief falling out, partly because Deutsch never directly shared in the profits from their creation, but the two had long since mended fences by the time of Moog's death. Deutsch has had a long career at Hofstra University, where he taught music for 41 years, twice served as department chairman and is now professor emeritus. He also continues to compose and perform.
In his basement he keeps a wide array of musical equipment, including a Memorymoog from the early 1980s and an extremely rare Minimoog from 1970, reminders of his role at a key turn in music history.
"It was always exciting to me, honestly, to know where I stood in that," he said. "The fact that I never got rich making electronic musical instruments never really bothered me, because I think I got about as rich as one can get. It's not that money thing. It's the musical stuff."
WHEN&WHERE
Herbert Deutsch plays "Celebrating the Music of the Moog Synthesizer" at 8 p.m. Friday at IMAC Theater, 370 New York Ave., Huntington. Tickets are $27.50. Call 631-549-2787 or go to imactheater.org.
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