Word: buchla
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...synthesizer is the latest chapter in the history of electronic music. A prototype was built by RCA in the '50s, but it was not until the mid-'60s that Robert Moog, a New Yorker, and Don Buchla, a Californian, independently designed the first practical models. They were ungainly machines, bristling with plugs and wires that looked more at home in a scientist's laboratory than on a stage. In 1968 Wendy Carlos (then Walter, before a sex change) used a Moog for the album Switched-On Bach, a fetching electronic counterfeit that alerted musicians to the instrument...
That may be an extreme view-as long as music is played, there will be a need for violinists, clarinetists and pianists-but the statement contains more than a little truth. Inventor Buchla, busy designing a new generation of machines in his Berkeley workshop, envisions an instrument without a keyboard at all. Moog, now in North Carolina, is "working with musicians who need instruments that don't exist." If they succeed, the future could hold an aesthetic in which unconventional sounds fall as lightly and harmoniously on the ear as the C major scale...
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