Moogs and Buchla Synthesizers

Mark II Is Dead, Long Live the Moog!

By Donal Henahan

Mark II, king of electronic music synthesizers, sits in a room on West 125th Street, blinking red eyes sadly and making strange, whirring, clicking sounds. The king is doomed to die. Having served its purpose as a pioneer device in electronic music, the mighty Mark II is being pushed aside by a new generation of lean, compact machines. The young pretenders have such electronic-sounding names as Moog, Buchla and Synket and are the Pepsi generation of synthesizers: portable, transistorized, modular, relatively easy to operate, and taking up hardly more space than upright piano. Mark II is about 17 feet long and 7 feet high.

They can be purchased for less than $3,000 (though complex models can run to $7,000 exclusive of tape recorders and other standard studio equipment). Already the new machines have taken over a great deal of the music picture, and in the future may transform both the composing and performing arts. Built by the Radio Corporation of America in 1959 and now leased to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center for $1 a year, Mark II was financed by the $175,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant. To build it today, according to composers at the center, would cost more than $250,000.

Milton Babbitt Speaks

"But Mark II has to die," one of the machine's retainers, the composer and teacher, Milton Babbitt, said in an interview as he worked at the synthesizer on the third floor of the Columbia-Princeton center's West 125th Street studios. Mr. Babbitt has composed several important works such as "Philomel" on Mark II, and he loves the creature. It is much more subtle, versatile and sophisticated, he feels, than the brash young synthesizers now turning up all across the country in university music departments, in film, television and pop-music recording studios, and even in concert halls. "Why should a student learn how to use Mark II?" Mr. Babbitt asked. "It is the only one of its kind. When a student goes away from here he can't continue his work. The original R.C.A. synthesizer, Mark I, has actually been taken apart and dispersed for some time now."

Although serious composers such as Mr. Babbitt use the new synthesizers extensively, rock and other popular-music groups also have taken to the devices enthusiastically. Among those now working with the Moog are the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Electric Flag and the Grateful Dead. A Moog was called upon for the score of the movie "Candy." The Beatles, who have used several other electronic methods in their recordings, recently placed an order for a Moog system. The synthesizers can produce any sound imaginable and perhaps some that become imaginable only after having been produced.

Music and sound effects for television commercials are being synthesized on a large scale. Walter Carlos, whose Columbia album "Switched-On Bach" recently stirred up much discussion in musical and recording circles, has done commercials for Schaefer beer, the phone company's Yellow Pages, and others.Morton Subotnick has produced two synthesized works on his own Buchla systems on commission from None-such records: "Silver Apples of the Moon" and "The Wild Bull." John Eaton's "Microtonal Fantasy" (Decca) was synthesized on the Synket, an extremely compact device with three two-octave keyboards.

Mr. Carlos used his own elaborated version of the Moog III synthesizer to produce "Switched-On Bach," in which Bach pieces, including some for orchestra, were played on the Moog. The record's technical and musical sophistication served notice that the mini-synthesizer is now a musical instrument to be taken seriously. Mr. Carlos, a 29-year-old former recording engineer for Gotham Studios, holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Brown University and a master's in musical composition from Columbia. He keeps his synthesizer in his one-room apartment at 410 West End Avenue, where he achieves a homey touch by putting plants atop the cabinets.In most ways, however, his setup resembles other Moogs, with their mazes of connecting patchcords and plugs that make any Moog resemble an old-fashioned telephone switchboard. In the Carlos version, two five-octave keyboards control voltage changes. The keyboards may control not only pitch, but timbre, attack and decay of the tone, and many other musical elements.

Donald Buchla, a laconic, mustached scientist of 31, who manufactures the Buchla synthesizer in Oakland, Calif., also employs, like Mr. Moog, a kind of keyboard to vary voltages and trigger the sound impulse. But Mr. Buchla's keyboard is actually a flat touch-sensitive metal plate, without movable keys, and might better be compared to a violin fingerboard. The variety of ways in which voltage can be controlled in the modular synthesizers is limited only by the composer's imagination: It would be just as feasible to hook up, as an input mechanism, a guitar, a violin, a cash register, a digital computer or a typewriter. The keyboard method, some electronic experts contend, is not only unnecessary, but can prevent one from using the synthesizer to its full potential.

"But the keyboard is a very efficient device," Robert A. Moog said recently as he showed a reporter around his small plant in Trumansburg, N.Y., about 10 miles north of Ithaca. "Sure, the keyboard can hang a composer up on traditional music, but that kind of hangup can be overcome." "Almost 100 college music departments and conservatories have Moogs now," the 34-year-old musician-physicist said.

Mr. Buchla's systems, he said recently, are in use at about 25 colleges and music conservatories. Although basically similar, the two systems differ somewhat, and appeal to different sorts of musicians: "The Moog is conceived as an instrument," Mr. Subotnick said, "much more so than the Buchla. "The Columbia-Princeton studios (there are three in New York and one in Princeton, N.J.) have both Moog and Buchla equipment. One school of thought, recently getting much attention in electronic circles, insists that a synthesizer can be used as a performing instrument as well as a composer's tool. Mr. Carlos, for one, sees the Moog synthesizer as a natural development out of traditional instruments, in the way the piano developed out of the harpsichord.

Ways of Composing

The synthesizer, whether large or small, is one of three basic ways of composing what is hazily termed electronic music. The "classic" method, still valid and in use, is the "musique concrete" way--gathering sounds on tape and then splicing snippets together to achieve a desired sequence of sounds. John Cage has been working in this genre for years, and recently has been at the University of Illinois's tape studios putting together a new piece called "Hpschd," which will be a collage of 50 tracks of taped sound laid one atop the other. All electronic music, no matter how it begins, ends up on tape, of course.

The third system of composition, now slowly coming into view, involves using computers to gather and store musical information fed to it by the composer, after which the work can be "read out" by the computer at the composer's pleasure.

"The computer is the future," said Mr. Babbitt. "I don't work with it myself, so I can say that objectively." In the immediate future, Mr. Babbitt said, the digital computer is certain to be teamed with the new compact synthesizer, and when that happens electronic music is likely to be shaken up once again.

All this excitement is a far cry from electronic music's not distant past, when the very idea of "machine music" seemed monstrous to musicians and public alike. In 1956, when Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky needed room for their blossoming tape studio, Columbia University provided them with a house on the site of the former Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. It was, Mr. Ussachevsky recalled recently in the Music Educators Journal, a "suitable and charming" place.