From Library Journal
The sleek digital synthesizer of today is so easy to play and so ubiquitous in the world of popular music that its presence is often taken for granted. In this well-researched, entertaining, and immensely readable book, Pinch (science & technology, Cornell Univ.) and Trocco (Lesley Univ., U.K.) chronicle the analog synthesizer's early, heady years, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. The authors give preeminent pioneer Robert Moog due prominence, but they also chart the achievements of other luminaries from this era, such as rival inventors Donald Buchla and Alan Perlman, composers Wendy Carlos and Pauline Oliveras, and rock stars Keith Emerson and Mick Jagger. American readers will be interested to learn details of a lesser-known British entry in the analog synthesizer field-the VCS3-which became the preferred tool of many rock stars of the 1970s. The authors are especially effective in exploring the cultural, sociological, and economic sides to the synthesizer revolution. Throughout, their prose is engagingly anecdotal and accessible, and readers are never asked to wade through dense, technological jargon. Yet there are enough details to enlighten those trying to understand this multidisciplinary field of music, acoustics, physics, and electronics. Highly recommended.
Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
"Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for the first time in
Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.
The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used--from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson--recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.
Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history."
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