During the year 1976, our Nation's Bicentennial (remember? we got a new design on our 25cent piece and everything...), I was in the 6th grade. At my school we had a special music class we attended for an hour or so, once a week as I recall. Mostly we sang old songs from a book of American folk music, but looking back on it I realize now that it was a music appreciation class, as well. The teacher was cheerful and enthusiastic, with blond hair and a big smile. One day, she was very excited to share with us a very special treat; the invention of a new musical instrument. We were told that this didn't happen very often, and that it was unlikely it would happen again in our lifetimes. For some reason, this introduction fascinated me, and I paid very close attention. It sounded important.
The teacher passed out a flyer with some pictures on it, and put on a record for us to listen to - a recording made by this new instrument, called a synthesizer. The name alone sounded exotic and wonderful to me. The pictures, as I recall, were of the first commercially available synthesizers (probably an ARP 2600 among them, which, many years later when I took an electronic music class in college, was the tool used to teach me how to program them), along with the inventor of this amazing new machine that was able to generate and contour sound like nothing before it had ever been capable of doing; a man named Robert Moog. Already there were composers that were working with the new instrument, and we heard a short piece - a rendition of a Bach composition - by the then mostly unknown Walter Carlos.
I remember the experience like the most special Christmas ever. I was filled with such wonder and awe, such delight and curiosity. It had a lifetime of consequences for me, though I hardly knew that would be the case as I sat fidgeting in the classroom. The teacher, I remember, made a point of saying that since it was a new instrument, it might take many years for composers to fully explore and utilize it's seemingly limitless capabilities. And that perhaps one of us might someday grow up to be one of the composers to add to it's canon, to enlarge the instrument's vocabulary in some way.
Now that I'm a middle-aged man, I realize that the likelyhood of me ever being an important composer of sythesizer music is pretty slim, but that's ok. I love the fact that I was there at it's inception, that I was one of the first handful of people to know about and appreciate this new technology.
I bought my first synthesizer about 7 years after that 6th grade revelation, and have since owned, borrowed and played many incarnations of the wonderful new instrument first introduced by Robert Moog. And I've loved and cherished the time I spent with each and every one of them - as I have all the instruments I've owned and played.
I've always hoped that someone, if not me, would come along and lift the synthesizer higher than anyone previously had, and that I'd be around to hear it. Unfortunately, the most profound innovations came to the instrument itself, not the way it was used. Analog behemoths got smaller and more complex, then simpler, then more complex again over time. Then came the sleek digital cousins, introducing new sound possibilities and new kinds of synthesis. Then the analog machines came back in favor, and the industry responded with digital models that mimicked their analog predecessors. Then came the hybrids, and the virtual versions called 'soft synths'. These models have all gone in and out of favor, back and forth, over time, and will likely continue to do so.
It's been a wonderful ride, hasn't it? Anyone who has loved the instrument as I have, and has been around long enough, has seen and heard many amazing things during this evolution, and I'm sure that those folks are just as excited as I am to see what comes next.
But all along I've wondered why all the changes to the instrument, and not much change to it's use? I blame the music industry. The way it's been for many years is anathema to creativity and change. Synthesizers, it seems, sound like this, and this is what they're used for, and that's that. Yes there's been a few shocks and wonders along the way, but for the most part, I think, a new kind of instrument deserves a new kind of music - and that's something that the recording industry has fervently worked against; either by design or just shit luck. Our current time and technology, however, makes it possible for drastic change on a grand scale, and a revolution of sorts is taking place as I write this.
So here's the challenge: how to make a new kind of music for a still-new instrument? How to explore the possibilities? There's so many types of synths available, all ready and able to create the sounds they know you love to hear - they know because we bought those records and that's how those features became standard implementation. The synthesizer, though, is still just a baby. Other instruments we're familiar with have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years in one form or another, with only minor variations. Synths have only been around for less than fifty years. I wonder - did the trumpet or the lute or the piano endure a particular style of play for their first hundred or even two hundred years? Did people balk at them and say 'Eh, it'll never catch on'...?
So let us not be disuaded by the surfeit of sameness and consistancy in the music of synthesizers (even though much of it has served it's purpose and even been quite interesting and occasionally fantastic). Instead, let us look ahead now, and imagine that there's still much more to come from this fledgling intrument. Exciting, isn't it?
~ Bob Hendershot
San Francisco - June 25, 2008
