Richard Hirsh <[email protected]> wrote: Walter/Wendy Carlos, creator of Switched-on Bach and several sequel albums, none of which surpassed the first, IMO.
Yes, of course. This wasn't a difficult question given there are so few candidates. Now, why did I make the following extreme claim? IMO this person had as much influence on ongoing musical practice as did Mozart or Beethoven in their day. Before Switched-on Bach it was rare to hear electronically generated sounds, and when one did hear them, they sounded slightly outside the realm of musical sounds. Electronic sounds were acceptable only in science fiction film sound tracks. Bob Moog was a major contributor to changing this. He was a brilliant electronics tweaker (really an engineer) who solved the design problem of a voltage-controlled analog oscillator that very-linear and very stable. Before Moog's oscillators, it was hard to build a synthesizer that could produce reproducible in-tune octaves, etc. So electronic music often sounded like it was receiving a bad performance. Carlos took the new instrument and popularized it with the very-well-performed hugely-successful Switched-on Bach. The synthesizer was entirely analog and everything was performed by human hands on clavier and knobs -- I believe there were no computers or other digital machinery involved -- but it immediately made electronic synthesizer sounds familiar to and acceptable by the public. That public acceptance made development of inexpensive digital synthesizers and then computer-aided performance much more likely. Without the Carlos' breakthrough album, we would not today have MIDI and all the digital computer stuff that is such a large part of (mostly commercial and popular) music today. If Carlos had not made the breakthrough, certainly someone else soon would have. But Carlos was the one who did it, and the influence on musical practice is hard to overestimate. All this is completely NHR, of course. _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
