Moog, Robert A(rthur)

(b New York, 23 May 1934). American designer of electronic instruments. His name is primarily associated with a range of synthesizers manufactured by the R.A. Moog Co., which he founded in New York in 1954; early on the name ‘Moog’ was even used, loosely, to mean any type of synthesizer. He financed his studies at Queens College, CUNY, and later at Columbia University by building and marketing theremins, producing five models by 1962. In 1957 he moved to Ithaca, New York, where he gained a doctorate in engineering physics at Cornell University in 1965. At nearby Trumansburg in the spring and summer of 1964 he began to develop his first voltage-controlled synthesizer modules in collaboration with the composer Herbert Deutsch; they were demonstrated that autumn at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York. At the end of 1964 Moog's company marketed the first commercial modular synthesizer.

In 1970, faced with competition from newer synthesizer companies, Moog worked with James Scott, William Hemsath and Chad Hunt to develop the Minimoog, a portable monophonic instrument which became especially popular in rock music. It was discontinued in 1981, after some 13,000 had been produced. In 1971 the company became Moog Music and moved to Buffalo, New York. The last synthesizer to which Bob Moog made some design contribution there was the Micromoog (marketed 1973–5). After Moog Music became a division of Norlin Industries in 1973, Bob Moog was involved mainly in promotional and managerial duties. Other synthesizer models included the polyphonic Polymoog (1976–80), Multimoog (1978–81), Prodigy (1979–81), Source (1981–5) and Memorymoog (1982–5). Moog Music closed in 1985, but it was only put up for auction in 1995. Three unrelated new Moog companies have marketed or advertised Moog products based on the original synthesizers: Moog Music Custom Engineering of Buffalo sold Moog modules in the early 1990s; Moog Music Inc. of Cincinnati also sold modules in the late 1990s and advertised a new Minimoog, while Moog Music Ltd of Caerphilly, Wales produced a Minimoog in 1998. After the rights to the Moog trademark reverted to Bob Moog for legal reasons, neither of the two latter companies appear to have survived. Since 1998 Bob Moog’s own company, Big Briar, has developed a new Minimoog, for release in 2000. Since the demise of the original company many existing Minimoogs have been upgraded with MIDI by several companies.

At the end of 1977 Bob Moog left Norlin and in the following year started a new company, Big Briar, in Leicester, North Carolina (now in nearby Asheville), manufacturing a range of devices (with touch-sensitive keyboards, theremin-type controllers, touch ribbons, or touch-sensitive plates) for precision control of analogue and digital synthesizers; the advent of MIDI in 1983 led to MIDI versions of some of them. A new range of theremins appeared in the 1990s. In 1999 Big Briar introduced new products incorporating Moog's name, a ring modulator, a phaser and a low-pass filter in the Moogerfooger series of analogue effects modules (‘stomp-boxes’).

For many years from 1975 Moog contributed a regular column on synthesizers to Contemporary Keyboard (now Keyboard). As a pioneer and figurehead of the development of the synthesizer, he has been much sought after as a lecturer and has also appeared at trade fairs, festivals, conferences and competitions (such as the Ars Electronica in Linz). In 1984–8 Moog was Vice President of New Product Research at Kurzweil Music Systems (manufacturer of digital synthesizers) of Boston. Between 1989 and 1992 he was a research professor in the music department of the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Moog has also developed circuitry for a wide range of applications: guitar amplifiers, effects boxes, mixers, multi-track tape recorders and variable-speed controllers for tape recorders. He has worked closely with both classical and rock musicians, designing and equipping complete electronic music studios, and developing custom-built synthesizer systems for Wendy Carlos and the rock keyboard player Keith Emerson. He has created specialized electronic instruments and systems for a number of composers, among which are the dancer-responsive antennae used to activate tape recorders in Variations V (1965) by John Cage, and three microtonal Keyboard instruments. In 1992, after 20 years' development, the Multiple-Touch-Sensitive Keyboard was demonstrated, designed by Moog in collaboration with the composer John Eaton; there were no plans to manufacture it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveI (‘Minimoog’, ‘Moog’, ‘Moog, Robert A(rthur)’; all H. Davies)

R.A. Moog,: ‘Voltage-Controlled Electronic Music Modules’, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, xiii/3 (1965), 200–06

R.A. Moog: ‘Electronic Music: its Composition and Performance’, Electronics World, lxxvii/2 (1967), 42–6

D. Milano: ‘Robert Moog’, Contemporary Keyboard, i/1 (1975); repr. in The Art of Electronic Music, ed. T. Darter and G. Armbruster (New York, 1984), 69–73

D.T. Horn: Electronic Music Synthesizers (Blue Ridge Summit, PA, 1980), 34–58

R. Kostelanetz: On Innovative Music(ian)s (New York, 1989), 167–88

M. Vail: Vintage Synthesizers: Groundbreaking Instruments and Pioneering Designers of Electronic Music Synthesizers (San Francisco, 1993) [incl. C.F. Cochrane and R. Moog: ‘The Rise and Fall of Moog Music: Shuffle Off to Buffalo’, 29–39; M. Vail: ‘Keith Emerson's Moog: the World's Most Dangerous Synth’, 107–15, 143–50]

‘Robert Moog’, Incredibly Strange Music, ii, ed. V. Vale and A. Juno (San Francisco, 1994), 132–41 [interview, incl. reprint of Moog theremin brochure, c1960]

R.L. Doerschuk: ‘Bob Moog’, Keyboard, xxi/2 (1995), 92–100

P. Forrest: The A–Z of Analogue Synthesisers, i: A–M (Crediton, Devon, 1994; 2/1998), 42–3, 273–303

HUGH DAVIES