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SEMIBEGUN 005: GOTTA SWITCH ON TO GO OFF

“My dear young friends, have you heard the news?” Leonard Bernstein addresses his young concert-going audience, “They suddenly found out that Bach is in—in with old and young, rebels and hippies, scholars and dropouts. Everyone who likes music suddenly likes Bach.”[1] Since his death almost three hundred years ago, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach has undergone multiple waves of rediscovery and renewed popularity. Gottfried von Swieten, Sarah Itzig Levy, Felix Mendelssohn, the list of historical figures who “revived” his works goes on and on into the early music popularization of the 1960’s, which Bernstein highlights above in an edition of his Young Peoples Concert’s dedicated to “Bach Transmogrified.” From the rise of early music personalities like David Munrow on British radio and television, the parodic antics of Peter Schickele’s fictitious character P.D.Q. Bach, the foreground placement of harpsichord in pop recordings by producers like Phil Spector, and the success of albums like Joshua Rifkin’s The Baroque Beatles Book and Wendy Carlos’ Switched-on Bach certainly confirm that Bach & co. were indeed back in ever new ways.

To echo Bernstein, Bach’s music lends itself to transmogrification, arrangement, adaptation, remix. Even switched-off, performers subject his work to an array of timbral treatments on clavichord, harpsichord, lute, many types of organs, and frequently on piano. Leopold Stokowski arranged pieces for symphony orchestra, and I’ve certainly played fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier in chamber ensembles of contemporary instruments. Robert Schumann attempted to bring the solo cello and violin pieces into the Romantic era by adding a piano accompaniments to make them “more accessible to his contemporaries.”[2] Between the improvisatory elements of early music performance practice and its instrumentation’s timbral richness and variability, the music almost demands some level of transmogrification. So, with her Moog modular synthesizer and its purported endless possibilities for sound production, Wendy Carlos electrified Bach. And then, for a moment, everything switched-on.

The mix for this episode dives into the synthesized timbres and textures of the Switched-on “Moogsploitation,” an explosion of exploratory synthesizer records on the market in the late-60’s and 70’s following the success of Wendy Carlos’ platinum selling album Switched-on Bach. The quality of these synthesized arrangements of rock, pop, ragtime, country, classical, and jazz vary in terms of recording and performance. What the records lack in quality, however, they make up for in audacity and cornball charm. But perhaps more significantly, “switching on” required experimentation in pure electronic music outside of the avant-garde context. As a result, the recordings presented a buffet of electronic sonic potentials to the mainstream through a vehicle of familiarity and fun. The results of these experiments, effected by choice of source material to arrangement and technique, hover along a spectrum from kitschy to bizarre with real moments of beauty along the way. My approach to this repertoire involves reframing a certain negative perception of these records as a strength. Instead of a cheap application of new music technology, these recordings present a different kind of experimentalism that clashes stylistically, and in many ways politically, with the mid-century avant-garde approach to electronic composition. Switching on catalyzed a release of electronic music from the exclusive realm of specialists and helped socialize the synthesizer (particularly the Moog) to a wider audience of listeners and practitioners across numerous popular genres; not as a moment of devaluation but one of expanse.

“The Switched-On-style of classical-meets-pop synth records are incredibly Strange relics from a time long gone, and they still retain a haunting, sometimes daunting, quality.”[3] With a touch of Fisherian melodrama, this comment in a 1996 issue of Beastie Boys magazine Grand Royal points to a problem when evaluating these records fifty years after release. They are doubly novel, gimmicky in content and alien in vintage. Some of the novelty comes from age, although “haunting” is an interesting descriptor that conjures ill-suited ideas of horror as opposed to uncanniness. The timbral palette of Wendy Carlos’ Moog 900 Series, shaped by the recording/mixing decisions of her and producer Rachel Elkind, emerges as specifically and deliberately out of time while also undeniably belonging to the late 1960’s.  

Rivaling Bach and his dusty contemporaries was the public interest in the New Frontier. The synthesizer perfectly underscored the uncharted areas of science and space with sounds of fantasy, speculative futures, and unknown worlds. The 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet featured the first fully electronic score. A synthesized sonic world conjured by composers Bebe and Louis Barron shifts fluidly between underscoring, sound design, and diegetic music. The same synthesized tones heighten a scene’s tension, animate spaceship technologies, and illustrate the music of a 20,000-year long-gone civilization on this alien planet. The electronic sounds of Forbidden Planet flesh out another world’s past and our own world’s vintage conception of future. American composer and bandleader Sun Ra, too, used his Moog to probe the depths of the intergalactic world he and the Arkestra created, described by Robert Barry in The Music of the Future, as “a means of launching music into outer space.”[4] And as millions fixated on our own launch into space through their television, viewers heard the soundtrack of Mort Garson’s Moog in the CBS recap broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing (“one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind”).[5] Perhaps the “haunting” quality of the 1960’s synthesized sound refers to a nostalgia for the future, or lost futures. Space was the place, but the space-age utopia of Disney’s Tomorrowland never came to pass. Today’s space race is an ego-fueled competition between a few billionaires, and electronic music no longer signals the future as much as it does the present and, for the contemporary musicians like those making 90’s throwback rave music, the past.   

In mid-century academia, electronic music veered into and around the realm of scientific and technological research. As stories of innovation tend to go throughout the twentieth century, many key early advancements in music technology resulted in the service of military research. Leon Theremin developed his eponymous instrument while researching radio technology at Lenin’s Red Army Military Radiotechnical Lab, and later assisted in an act of espionage, allegedly leaking secrets of the Manhattan Project to aid the Soviets’ own nuclear project.[6] German-American engineer Semi Joseph Begun made advances in magnetic recording with funding from the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) during World War II.[7] Even Bob Moog worked on developing an instrument intended for Department of Defense research.[8]

Outside of the military, the bulk of electronic music production before the late 60’s took place within state-sponsored facilities in Europe like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and in the States within private universities like the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Much of the Center’s artistic output married a strain of avant-garde concert music austerity with synthesized and tape-based composition techniques. A collection of pieces made there can be heard on the 1964 album Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center featuring resident composers Bülent Arel, Halim El-Dabh, Vladimir Ussachevksy, Milton Babbitt, Otto Luenig, and Mario Davidovsky. Babbitt employed the massive, exorbitantly expensive, user-unfriendly RCA Mark II Synthesizer to fulfill his serialist fantasies by painstakingly programming every compositional parameter on punch cards. As a graduate student at Columbia, Wendy Carlos found it difficult to produce the more traditionally tonal work she wanted to make. As an assistant to Ussachevsky, she was inspired by neither the aesthetics nor much of the machinery floating around the Center. The inaccessibility and exclusivity of this music-making approach was not entirely unintentional. Roshanak Kheshti describes the attitude Carlos rejected as one “rooted in the idea that the vanguard of aesthetic innovation would be, at least initially, intolerable to the general public of any society.”[9] In an interview with Moog historian Thom Holmes in 2001, Wendy Carlos confirms this attitude: “I think the established composers were just too much in love with their abstract systems to consider that the music coming out of it was, by and large, fairly forgettable and kind of hateful,” made with “arrogance and pomposity.”[10] Ussachevsky, co-founder of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, tried to the thwart the use of the Moog by pop musicians (“they’re just going to do junk with it”) by suggesting to Bob Moog that he forgo a traditional keyboard for his new modular system.[11] He added a keyboard controller anyway.

Resistance to the type of music Carlos wanted to make did not deter her, but it did push her from the realm of academia. She contacted Bob Moog and in 1966 began ordering modules for the electronic music studio she was building in her New York City apartment. She took naturally to the instrument as a performer and a critical engineer. She developed a friendly relationship with Bob Moog and they would meet over coffee to brainstorm improvements to the synthesizer. In 1967, Moog invited her to produce a nine-minute demo disk for the Moog 900 Series with a variety of sound effects, soundscapes, and a pop arrangement.

After hearing a realization of Bach’s Two-Part Invention in F Major Carlos made during her last year of graduate school, her friend Rachel Elkind suggested they create an entire album of electronic Bach. They pitched the idea to Columbia Records, and with her Moog, a mixing board, and an 8-track tape recorder, the album was completed between spring and summer of 1968.[12] The Moog, a finnicky monophonic instrument that went out of tune constantly, required the individual recording of each contrapuntal line. Although billed as a solo synthesizer project, the music was as much a feat of recording and editing as it was of synthesizer programming and performance. After a painstaking production process, Columbia Records released Switched-On Bach in October of 1968. By the end of the year, the record charted at No. 2 on the classical charts. Early the following year it crossed over into Billboard’s Top 200. It reached its highest position at No. 10 and would remain in the Top 40 into the summer of 1969.

Switched-on Bach was neither the first album for solo synthesizer (not even first for solo Moog)[13], nor the first to gain some mainstream, cross-over attention. In 1966, composer Morton Subotnik moved to New York City with his Buchla, the West Coast rival of the R. A. Moog company, to perform uptown electronic music at hippie discotheque the Electric Circus in Manhattan’s East Village. Not long after arrival, he received a $1,000 commission to create an album of solo synthesizer music for Elektra’s subsidiary label Nonesuch. A year later, Silver Apples of the Moon debuted to positive reviews, having found a niche between the audiences of the academic avant-garde and psychedelic rock.[14] But it was the success of S-OB that really spurred the dawn of the solo synthesizer record.   

Gil Trythall brings electronic music to the Grand Ole Opry with Switched On Nashville (and if you like that, why not try Switched-On Buck to satisfy everyone’s need to hear more Buck Owens?). The Moog receives a festive treatment in Switched On Santa. An out of tune “Maple Leaf Rag” from Gatsby’s World – Turned On Joplin plods along, honoring Scott Joplin’s preferred slower tempo. The Happy Moog! is entirely as advertised. On Yankee Transcendoodle, Joseph Byrd (of experimental rock band The United States of America) presents patriotic classics as they were meant to be heard—on an Arp 2600—to commemorate the bicentennial. Richard Hayman’s noisy rendition of Little Anthony and the Imperials R&B hit “Goin’ Out Of My Head” matches the experimental sound design of Dick Hyman’s bird song interlude in “Blackbird.” The Moog Machine’s “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In,” a tune popular with Moogsploitation records for its space-hippie vibes, sits on the weaker end of the spectrum with its lifeless, discordant tones and a blundering beat change. The rest of Switched-On Rock doesn’t boast much higher quality. The blue ribbon for most absurd goes to The Sounds of Love ...A to Zzzz, Sensuously SINthesized, an album by Fred Miller that features a woman’s voice moaning over dreadful arrangements of Ravel and bizarre original tunes that range from plaintive to brutal. However, The Sounds of Love follows the release of Mort Garson’s Music for Sensuous Lovers the year prior, yet another duet for synthesizer and sex sounds.

While some of the poorly mixed, carelessly performed, terribly uninspired arrangements approach unlistenability, the opposite end of the spectrum harbors occasional sonic beauty. The Mighty Moog’s arrangement of “Malagueña” by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona is an exquisite example of electronic orchestration with a fullness and depth that matches, if not surpasses, that of the modern symphony orchestra. And we cannot discuss electronic orchestration without including master of synthesizer arrangements Isao Tomita, whose work demands equal attention to what’s being given to Wendy Carlos. While he did release his own Electric Samurai: Switched-On Rock featuring tunes like “Jailhouse Rock” in 1974, he’s far better remembered for his work electrifying the classical canon. His 1975 synthesizer arrangements of Modest Mussorgsky’s solo piano behemoth Pictures at an Exhibition rival’s the classic 1922 orchestration by Ravel. The expanded possibilities of the synthesizer’s timbral palette ushered in a new era of orchestral imagination. And while electronic instruments have made guest appearances in the modern orchestra throughout the last century, whether in Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie or in the Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders/London Symphony Orchestra collaboration Promises, the synthesizer has certainly not supplanted the orchestra. Nor has the synthesizer arrangement record maintained much popularity beyond the mid-70s. A few novelty albums have re-emerged in the popular conscious. For a while Mother Earth’s Plantasia by Mort Garson (whose other credits include both the Apollo 11 underscore and one of the pornographic synthesizer records) was available for purchase from Urban Outfitters. However, most of these records remain in obscurity in record shops and the occasional vinyl rip uploaded to YouTube. I had to locate a physical copy of Joseph Byrd’s Yankee Transcendoodle to listen to it (athough someone has kindly uploaded it to YouTube since). Almost all of Wendy Carlos’ discography including Switched-on Bach is currently out of print and unavailable on streaming services. This fad of the late 1960s and 1970s is now preserved by a few dedicated fans and the vintage stores who unwittingly maintain their Switched-On stock.  

Did Switched-On Bach achieve more success than projects like Silver Apples of the Moon solely due to its more populist aesthetics? In the moment, yes, but instead of a populism opposed to progressivism, Carlos’ work socialized an instrument and sound world that up until then largely existed in an exclusionary field. As a piece of queer remix, S-OB maintains its relevance. Although her work was incredibly influential, I would argue that experimental electronic and academic electroacoustic music today shares more in common stylistically with the legacy of Silver Apples than any of the Switched-On iterations, even the good ones. But much of that music lacks levity. S-OB does not. “To me, the project had a smile around the corners of the mouth. I never considered Switched-On Bach to be pompous and awesome. It was good fun. I had fun doing it and expected people to smile when they heard it.”[15]

A glance at the album cover confirms a tone not overly burdened by self-seriousness. A Bach-like figure donned in Rococo fashion stands (or sits, depending on the pressing) in front of a Moog modular synthesizer with electrical cables and manuscript paper littered on the rug below. On the sequel’s cover, the figure floats in space while a cable tethers the baroque composer’s space suit to his life-sustaining synthesizer. Keith Emerson’s first impression of the Moog on S-OB was that it sounded “like a load of elephants farting counterpoint with whoopee cushions in accompaniment,” and that wasn’t necessarily meant in a bad way.[16] Within a week after his initial listen, he tracked down a Moog in London to experiment with and perform at an upcoming concert. Not long after he was in a studio laying down the synthesizer solo at the end of “Lucky Man” on Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s debut album.

Simon Reynolds deems the seepage of synths (and themes of outer space) from the avant-garde into pop and rock as going “low-brow.”[17] In many instances, Bob Moog also agreed that his synths appeared on mediocre, gimmicky pop records. After the recording session for The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, a psychedelic concept album that features Moog sound effects as punctuation, he remembered being none too thrilled with the instrument’s application in this context: “I thought that was such a crock of shit… I didn’t know if I wanted to have my synthesizer associated with that.”[18] He especially disliked the exceptionally terrible Switched-On albums, particularly because many of these “cruddy records” had his name in the title.[19] However, this opinion did not apply to S-OB. On the back of the LP, he’s quoted calling it “the most stunning breakthrough of electronic music to date.”[20]

With her electronic orchestrations of Bach, Wendy Carlos gave an accessible form of purely electronic music to the masses. By providing a blueprint for sonic exploration and experimentation outside of an avant-garde context, any and every music could switch on. Whether or not the music benefited from the electrifying treatment is another thing entirely. The deluge of Switched-On music signals loosening of the academic monopoly on electronic music making and, especially in the work of Isao Tomita and Wendy Carlos, demonstrates a refreshing and aesthetically fulfilling balance between sonic excellence and joy. The deluge of Switched-On music signals loosening of the academic monopoly on electronic music making and, especially in the work of Isao Tomita and Wendy Carlos, demonstrates a refreshing and aesthetically fulfilling balance between sonic excellence and joy. Bob Moog knew and worked closely with a lot of musicians during his life. He spurred the synthesizer revolution. In the liner notes for the Switched-On Boxed Set he gives Carlos the credit for popularizing his instruments: “Throughout the world, far more people know of electronic music and the synthesizer through Switched-On Bach than through any other musical endeavor.”[21]

[1] Young People’s Concerts, “Bach Transmogrified,” aired 27 April 1969 on CBS.

[2] David Breitman, Piano-Playing Revisited: What Modern Players Can Learn from Period Instruments (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2021), 3.

[3] Andy Blinx, “Wendy Carlos: From Bach to the Future,” Grand Royal Spring-Summer (1996): 59.

[4] Robert Barry, The Music of the Future (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 51.

[5] “Mort Garson – Journey to the Moon and Beyond,” Bandcamp, 21 July 2023, <https://mortgarson.bandcamp.com/album/journey-to-the-moon-and-beyond>

[6] Alex Glinsky, Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 31.

[7] "NIHF Inductee Semi Begun Invented Magnetic Recording," invent.org, <https://www.invent.org/inductees/semi-joseph-begun>. The name Semibegun comes from Semi J. Begun.

[8] Glinsky, Switched On, 90; 121-122.

[9] Roshanak Kheshti, Switched-on Bach (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 78.

[10] Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Foundations of New Music and New Listening, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 158.

[11] Glinsky, Switched On, 75.

[12] Ibid., 136-7.

[13] Six months prior to the release of S-OB, the label Nonesuch put out Tragoedia, a 37-minute work for solo Moog composed by Andrew Rudin.

[14] Glinsky, Switched On, 119-121.

[15] Blinx, “Wendy Carlos: From Bach to the Future,” 60.

[16] Keith Emerson, Pictures of an Exhibitionist, (London: John Blake, 2004), 166.

[17] Simon Reynolds, Retromania, 390.

[18] Glinsky, Switched-On, 115.

[19] Ibid., 171.

[20] Robert Moog, liner notes for Wendy Carlos, Switched-On Bach, Columbia Masterworks MS 7194, 1968, Vinyl Record.

[21] Wendy Carlos, Switched-On Boxed Set, Book Two: Original Notes (Minneapolis: East Side Digital, 1999), 38.