The Reasoner Report
Friday, May 29, 1970

REASONER: This is CBS News correspondent Harry Reasoner reporting. One man's cacophony in another man's symphony. The story in the moment.

REASONER: England's seventeenth century writer Thomas Fuller once observed that music is nothing short of wild sounds civilized into time and tune. The British, after all, have always been taken with the whole process of civilizing. The other day, we happened to be walking through the corridor of an old office building on 55th Street when we heard oozing out from under an office door what struck us as some of the weirdest sounds imaginable. Out of curiosity we opened the door only to discover a man named Gershon Kingsley, who is considered the Vladimir Horowitz of the Moog.

 Kingsley does not walk around in a pith helmet and Bermuda shorts, but he is nevertheless engaged in a kind of civilizing process involving sound. Kingsley is a pianist and organist, a composer and arranger--in other words, what some people like to call a traditional musician. Yet he has found something new in music -- savagely sweet sounds he is attempting to tame. The sounds are produced by a contraption called the Moog. "Contraption" is probably not the right word. Instrument would be more apt. At any rate, the Moog is the thinking musician's thing, according to Gershon Kingsley, which leaves us to explain that a cumbersome synthesizer can do things with sound that might have added a few more curls to Beethoven's wig.

It takes up a whole room because of all the electronic gadgetry and is able to alter sounds played on the them so that the end result is pleasing to the composer, weird and fascinating to the listener and sometimes downright eerie. The Moog is to the synthesizer what the harpsichord was to the piano. And Madison Avenue has already discovered the Moog because, beyond its musical capacities, it is able to create sounds that previously existed only in an adman's nightmare.

The instrument looks like a switchboard with something like 200 dials and infinite patchcords. Altering the patch chords and playing on the two keyboards provided allows the performer to produce anything from the sounds of tomatoes splashing on the floor to vibrations that may make you want to scratch. It is like 3-D sound and you have the impression at times you are about to be swamped by some high tide sound waves. It took Gershon Kingsley two years to digest the wild possibilities of the Moog for the orchestra. If anybody is going to lend musical respectability to the Moog, it will probably be Gershon Kingsley.

Some traditional critics are still too skeptical to take the Moog seriously. But when you hear Kingsley go at it with two keyboards and vibrating patchcords, you get the feeling the Moog's detractors are just not tuned in. You can't help getting the impression that in a few years kids will leave the baseball diamond when the mothers all shout for them to come in and practice the Moog.

Kingsley says when the Japanese get wind of its possibilities we will undoubtedly find the marketplace filled with miniature Moogs, one to fit every possible purpose from providing listening pleasure to new ways to drive your mother-in-law home. Searching out some of the possibilities ourselves, we discovered that it's possible to create sounds of just about anything, from a cloud sailing by to the sound of a herring swimming through a jar of sour cream. This new latitude of sound has raised the heights of music never before open to Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Along, of course, with the heights of critical eyebrows. But Kingsley may yet find the sound of raised eyebrows as well.

REASONER: This has been Harry Reasoner reporting on CBS Radio.