The Bob Moog Foundation

Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast channel about electronic music and all things synth. I'm Rob Pritchard and in this episode I talk to Michelle Moog Koosa, executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation, an organization set up in her father's memory to carry out educational work in the community and curate and display his extensive archive and the many instruments he developed in his long career. In recent years, the BMF has increasingly touched the lives and minds of young people interested in electronic sounds, as well as preserving her father's legacy for current and future generations to enjoy and draw inspiration from via the Moogseum located in Asheville, North Carolina. I caught up with Michelle from her home. and began by asking her what prompted her to start the Bob Moog Foundation. Well, when my father was ill, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the end of April of 2005. About, um I don't know, maybe two months later, he decided he really wanted to keep in touch with about 40 people around the world. I wasn't sure how to do that, so my brother set up a page on thecaringbridge. com, which is a website, um, for terminally and critically ill people to keep in touch with people. And over the next seven weeks, we got 60, 000 hits on that page. And the day he died alone, There were 20, 000 people who visited the page, which really, all of that really overwhelmed us. But what really struck us deeply was the amount of testimonials that people left through that guestbook section. You know, so instead of people just sending well wishes, they were saying things like Bob Moog changed my life. Because of Bob Moog, I'm a musician. Bob Moog gave me my creative voice. Because of Bob Moog, I'm an engineer. They would tell stories about meeting Bob Moog and how humble he was and how giving he was when they talked to him. For instance, one person said, I met Bob Moog somewhere in England, and I stood in line forever. working up the nerve to talk to him. And when I got up to him, I was so nervous, but he immediately put me at ease. I asked him my question and he immediately whipped out a pen from his pocket, got a napkin and drew me a schematic. And he said, I still have that schematic framed on my wall of my studio. So it's just the, we had almost 4, 000 of those testimonials. And. It was at that point that I think my family really began to realize both the breadth and depth of my father's legacy, how deeply he impacted people all over the world, because those testimonials came in from 67 different countries. And when he passed away, we thought, you know, starting a foundation in dad's name is not something he would have ever envisioned because he was way too humble and didn't think of himself that way. We felt that he had cultivated such a legacy of inspiration that that legacy not only deserved to be carried forward, but really demanded it because it's not that often that you have a vehicle that is that powerful to affect people's lives in a positive way. And that led us to create the Bob Moog Foundation to carry on that legacy of inspiration and to continue it. as Bob had in a somewhat different way to inspire people of all ages through the intersection of music, science, and innovation. How did you determine the ways that you would engage with people? What was the inspiration? Because you basically have three core areas for the BMF, and that's the work with young children, the archive, and of course the Moogseum. How did you come up with those three ideas and what was the driving force behind them? Well, it was somewhat of an organic process. As you might imagine, this was all new to us. So it was, as we say here in the United States, baptism by fire, trying to figure out what we were going to do. And we actually started out with some different goals, such as creating scholarships at major universities, universities where my father had some kind of connection. But then the reality of that confronted us and that you needed 750, a chair at any given university. And that we had no money. So that was not an option. And we thought, you know, there's, there's probably a better way to do this. And, you know, it kind of helped us focus what we really wanted out of this foundation. And one of the things that we decided is we really wanted to inspire as many people as we could. And we also wanted to be able to inspire people through the foundations of my father's legacy, such as the foundations of the science of sound. And in order to do that We would have to reach out to young children. So that's when we created Dr. Bob Sound School, um, which has been a very powerful project for us. The program teaches little kids about the science of sound through music and technology. And when I say little kids, we're talking about second graders here in the United States. That's kids who are about seven years old. So really getting them just a few years after kindergarten. It's a 10 week curriculum that's multi sensory and highly experiential, and it's meant not only to inspire kids and teach them about the basic physics of sound, but to also engage them in science and the process of discovery and thinking outside the box, which is something we're very committed to. We feel deeply that the world needs a lot more problem solvers. Creative problem solvers. And that is one of our goals in implementing Dr. Bob's Home School and growing it. We started out in eight classrooms and we're now in over a hundred and poised to then grow the program nationwide probably within the next year or two. This archive, I imagine that it's got some fascinating pieces of, uh, of history of your father and his work and his life. What are some of the most exciting or unusual things that one would find in the archive? Um, there's a Krumar Spirit in the archive. There are only 50 of those made. That's a Minimoog like synthesizer that Bob Developed with Tom Ray and Jim Scott in the early eighties. Unfortunately, it didn't go very far. There is a very special controller that Bob made for Roger Powell. There are a couple of beautiful mode, modulars, uh, that we have, uh, vintage mode, modulars. And we do have a collection of 2, 500 schematics. Many of them are not specifically from, from Dad, but, uh, they are from the company, and, uh, they're all fascinating in their own way. We also have copies of his desktop notebooks over, like, a 30 year period. Um, these are notebooks that he, uh, would keep by his his phone to take notes while he was talking on the phone. And, you know, there's anything from him arranging to go see Peter Zinoviev in England in 1969, um, to notes with Wendy Carlos about, you know, the fixed filter bank. And, uh, so it's, it's really a kind of astounding breadth of subjects that he was discussing with. All kinds of people, you know, you know, Beaver and Krauss circled with a star beside it. And it's, it's, it's amazing. And then there are also, there's, uh, correspondence and all kinds of, uh, vintage material from the product line and so much more, just lots of photos. And it's just a, the legacy itself is so rich and the, the archive really reflects that. What did you learn about your father by going through this archive that you, you didn't maybe know before? I think the thing that I really learned after he passed away and partially through the archive was just his perseverance. How he never stopped. He never stopped. He never wavered from the course that he was on. Um, and you can see that you can see it in some of his schematic notebooks. You can see it in his correspondence. I find a very admirable trait. And it's, you know, something that he never really talked about with the family. But it is obvious in the parts of his work that remain behind. I don't think a day goes by when I don't see a reference. To your father's work, whether it's somebody playing an instrument or talking about him or pictures of him, uh, he's ever present. But what about your father's inspirations? Um, who inspired your father? That's a really good question. Um, I would say earliest it was probably his own father who was an electrical engineer, George Conrad Moog. My grandfather was an electrical engineer for Con Edison, which is the electric company for New York City. And he took my father to work with him from time to time. But more importantly, uh, the two of them would go down in the basement workshop, that was quite well equipped apparently, and create little electronic hobbyist projects from around the time my father was nine or ten. So, um, it was because of him that my father got interested in electricity and electronics. And also he had a certain bent that way because my great aunt, my father's aunt, Aunt Florence, Florence Moog was my grandfather's sister. She was a zoologist and biologist and extremely accomplished, um, which is really saying something considering she was born in 1915. She went to NYU in Columbia and became Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. She Um, won the Westinghouse prize for scientific writing. She wrote three different articles for Scientific American, and she wrote over 10 books, and she was, uh, revered in her field. And she was, you know, a very quiet. But strong personality and my father really idolized her. He really respected her and looked up to her. And I think from reading some of the letters that he wrote her that we have in the archive, uh, that from a very young age, he was trying to kind of prove himself to her. Um, and he, she continued to serve as an inspiration for him, probably his entire life, but certainly, um, when he was young, uh, you know, between the ages of, of 10 and, and 25, shall we say. And then the, the work in the basement workshop with Grandpa George eventually led to Dad discovering, um, an article on how to build a theremin. And that is when he became so enamored and enthralled with the elegant but expressive design of the theremin. And he studied it extensively, and he felt this very strong connection to Leon Theremin himself. And he said later on that He considered Leon Theremin to be his virtual mentor. So I would say it was those three people, his father, his aunt, and Leon Thurman, that inspired him on the path that he eventually followed. Tell me more about the Moog Zim. How is it laid out? What can we see? Um, and you know, what, what the, the, the experience like try and paint a picture of the magazine in words, maybe. Okay, so the Moogseum is a highly interactive facility. It's a modest size, so it's a size of maybe a large gallery. And the goal is to bring Bob's legacy to life for people of all ages and all walks of life. So while it is somewhat of a mecca for synthesizer enthusiasts and geeks, um, it is not made specifically for them. We really wanted to make this rich, um, history accessible. And we also wanted to, um, do two things. We wanted to shed light on Bob Moog as a complex, nuanced human being and not just an icon up on a pedestal. And the other thing is that we really wanted to put his legacy in context because sometimes people only know that Bob Moog invented the synthesizer, and they don't know a lot else. Um, of course, the synthesizer enthusiasts and synth geeks know that it's much broader than that, but a lot of people don't, and we really wanted to make sure that people knew where his legacy fits. Amongst so many others. Um, so we start off with a, an interactive timeline of Bob Moog's life and career. The timeline features almost 100 beautiful photos. Uh, but the real jewel, I think, is that we have a Um, three touchscreens that allow you to delve into over 700 pieces of archival material to bring any given year alive, whatever period you're interested in. Um, so people can kind of delve into whatever interests them. Those touchscreens also have tons of music. and video on them. A video of Bob talking about a variety of different subjects. They're hearing about it directly from him, which we also feel is very important. Whenever we can, we like to go right to him as a source. People really love that because it brings a lot of things together with the video and the music and all the archival material, the photos laid out in this very linear form. But right next to the timeline. is an exhibit about Leon Theremin, the theremin, and Bob's connection to the theremin. We really wanted to immediately associate people from the timeline to the inspiration and give credit where credit is due because Leon Theremin is so extremely important. And kind of embedded in that exhibit are three different theremins that Bob made over a 50 year period, starting in 1954 and going all the way up to the late 90s. Um, and one of those is one of the first 28 theremins that he ever made. It's a vacuum tune based theremin, the model 201, which is one of our crown jewels because it is so rare. Immediately following that, there's a Theremin interactive exhibit where people can, once they've learned about Leon Theremin, they can then, um, learn how a Theremin works, learn how to play it, watch other people play it. And in the back of the Moxium, we have an interactive dome, um, that, allows you to learn how electricity turns into sound when it's traveling through a circuit board. And my own ignorance was my inspiration for that exhibit because it's like I, I see these beautiful circuit boards that my father has created. And of course, so many other people have created as well. And, uh, for a lay person like myself, they look like little jewel cities. And I really wanted to understand much more about them and help other people understand much more about, uh, you know, actually what their functionality was. Because it is, you know, when you think about it, pretty magical how electricity can go through a circuit and come out as sound and different kinds of sound. So that exhibit not only has a six and a half minute presentation with these beautiful visuals that go with it, Um, explaining capacitors transistors. But then at the end, there's a knob based interface, where you can actually interact with all of those different parts of the circuit and make your own sounds. Uh, we also have an exhibit on Bob's connection to Asheville because we would get asked about that a lot. Why is the Moogseum in Asheville? And there's a very good reason for that, and so we go through his connection. And then Filling up about, I would say, about 20 percent of the Moexam is our timeline of synthesis, which features 34 different developments over a 100 year period, including the Fairlight, I might add. 34 different developments in synthesis, starting with the teleharmonium and ending with the Hawking continuum. And of course, there are hundreds of developments, but we had to kind of prioritize because of our space issue. But in addition to this really cool visual timeline, again, we have these touchscreen interfaces that were developed. for us by Mal Meehan, and they feature over 400 pieces of archival material and help bring alive not only the instruments themselves, but their inventors. And this was a really fun project for me because I got to reach out to all of the major synthesizer manufacturers, the families of other synthesizer innovators. and ask for their help in bringing those legacies alive. We really felt strongly about putting Bob's legacy in context. And on this timeline that ranges from 1896 to 1995, Bob Moog's perhaps most impactful work falls right in the middle. And it's very easy to see that there were many people who came before him and many people who came after him. So, that is Both the Bob Moog Timeline and the Timeline of Synthesis are where people wind up spending the most time in the Moog Zine, just delving deep into those touchscreens. In the Timeline of Synthesis, we feature tons of photos about the instrument, about the inventor, videos featuring the inventor, the instrument being played, also artists who use those instruments. Specsheets, advertisements, just as far as we could go into conveying the importance of those instruments. We also have a recreation of Bob Moog's workbench, which is really fun. We really wanted, like, a place where people could kind of envision Bob actually being in the middle of the room there with them. And then we have a hands on synthesis. Exhibit which allows people to explore the different parameters of synthesis and guides them through each one. What is an oscillator? What is a filter? What is an envelope? Again, my own ignorance was the inspiration for this. Well, it sometimes I have felt a little uncomfortable with the fact that I did not have the technical background That's a lot of synthesizer enthusiasts out there have it has served me in helping to educate the broader population about his legacy so this Exhibit is really amazing for doing that, because it is accessible to anybody. It's, it's self guided, so you go at your own pace. And people also wind up spending a lot of time there, and I, I had this very fulfilling moment the first day we opened, May 23rd of 2019, and you know, we were all exhausted. And we had I had been up half the night, you know, finishing everything off. It had been a very intense, like, last month or even six months before creating it. But we had a young couple come in, and they spent a lot of time at the Hands On Synthesis exhibit. And afterward, the young woman came up to us and said, You know, I'm, I'm We're Canadian, and I'm in a band in Canada, and I'm a singer, but, you know, I, I like to experience other instruments, and one of my band members suggested that I get a synthesizer, but I'd been way too intimidated to even play a synthesizer. I just found it so intimidating, it's a whole other language. She said, but you know, after playing around with that exhibit, I'm going to go, I'm going to get myself a synthesizer. And I thought, okay, my job here is done. So then we have a couple of synthesizers out for people to play, that's kind of, you know, the culmination is for people to be able to play a synthesizer themselves, so. What synthesizers are there? Well, right now we have a Voyager and a Subsequent 37. I guess with the older stuff, you really Probably don't want too many people touching. Well, unfortunately not, you know, we have we have a sonic six in the collection. We have a modular. We have a multi mode and a micro mode. And I would love to put all of those out for people to play with. But they are only playable because someone has spent scores of hours restoring them for us. And unfortunately, they are somewhat delicate. So we do keep them tucked away in the archive. Do you ever get them out for a, you know, special event or a performance or do you plan to do something like that so that people can actually hear these things, you know, living and breathing? Yes, absolutely. We want them played and heard. Um, you know, I will say that we opened the Möxium, In May of 2019, as I mentioned, and then we had to close nine months later and, you know, and we're just beginning to get our sea legs back after, um, you know, the kind of worst part of the pandemic. So it's going to take a little while for us to kind of get on solid ground again. But when we do, we definitely want to put on more performances that feature the instruments that we have. One other thing that you've done fairly recently, and we hope to see the results of fairly soon, is a new documentary movie made by the same company who did I Dream of Wires, uh, Waveshape and Media, and this film's called Electronic Voyager, which sees you traveling around speaking to the great and the good about your father's impact on their lives as musicians or as friends and fellow synthesizer designers and so on and so forth. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came into being and your experiences with making that film? Yeah, absolutely. So Electronic Voyager was the brainchild of the producer and director at Waveshaper Media, Jason Ahmen. Robert Ventinato, and they really, after doing I Dream of Wires, they really wanted to bring Bob Moog's story to life, and they were trying to think of creative approaches, and that's when they contacted me and said, you know, we'd really like to tell his story through your eyes. And so it became a story of me tracing his sonic footsteps, going kind of back in time and talking to people who were with him from the earliest, from the age of, say, 15 years old, um, talking to his cousin. Right up into his colleagues who, you know, he designed certain instruments with. So, we set out to do that and we wound up traveling up and down the east coast of the United States. Um, and then over to Europe as well, to France and England. And who did you meet along the way? Um, we started out with Dave VanCovering, who some of your listeners might know as the super salesman for the Minimoog. If it weren't for Dave VanCovering, uh, the world may not have grasped on to the Minimoog for the powerful musical tool that it was. And he had a lifetime friendship and working relationship with Bob. So, um, we interviewed him, Gary Newman. Bernie Worrell. We also interviewed, of course, Herb Deutsch. We interviewed him twice, um, as well as Jim Scott, who was an engineer at RA MoCo in 1969, along with Bill Hemsath, both of them worked on the Modulars and the Minimoogs, and Jim went on also to work on the Micromoog and the Multimoog and other products, um, and also had a long and kind of close professional relationship with Bob. We talked to David Borden of Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece, as well as Ed Kalhoff, who did the Schaefer Beer commercial, um, and, um, the Price is Right commercial. And actually, he was the one who named his big, huge modular, Mogerfoger. And Dad got such a kick out of that. He eventually asked him if he could use it on a product. Uh, and a really great interview, uh, with him. Um, and we interviewed Jean, uh, Peter Enovia. Rick Wakeman. Lydia Covina. Felix Visser, who was the founder of Cinon Synthesizers. And, and others. Uh, so it's just been really an extraordinary, extraordinary journey. We interviewed Tom Ray, who is very important to the Moog legacy, wrote many of the Moog manuals. This is an incredible electronic music historian, um, and was a, uh, an excellent salesman, um, for the Moog. company. And so much more than that. We got a chance to interview Suzanne Siani. Yeah, we just happened to be in the same place where she was and she agreed to interview. That was very special. We interviewed Morton Sabotnick and that was an interesting interview that I really enjoyed. So it's, it's just been a breathtaking, a really breathtaking journey. From that experience making the movie, did you learn anything really completely new about your father that you just never knew before? Well, one of the things I learned was how much pressure he was under around 1970. I mean, David Borden tells these stories about dad coming to him and just trying to get away from the pressure and David would bring him to a place right near his house where they could sit beside a lake and talk and dad would just kind of unwind and you know, my dad was pretty quiet guy. So the fact that he actually had the need to talk to someone like that was quite telling for me. It just kind of brought home again some of the complexities that he was facing at that time. Also, you know, people talk about my dad as his technical brilliance as compared to maybe his Lack of business acumen. So it was interesting to hear from his employees that they considered him the best boss that they ever had. That was an interesting perspective to just hear them talk about him as an employer. And the fact that even when the company was, you know, on the edge of bankruptcy, that my dad went to the bank and withdrew money from his personal bank account to give them Christmas bonuses. Which I did not know. That says a lot about him in, in many different ways. It's not just that he was generous or caring, but, um, it also emphasizes that the, the bottom line was not his, his main goal in his business. And then it was just, again, how. Deeply, he is part of people's lives and how much people attribute to him. And these are people from the engineers to Rick Wakeman. On the wave shaper media, YouTube channel of your, your chat with Rick, which is a personal favorite because I'm a huge Rick Wakeman fan. Um, and. He's stood in his, uh, storage shed, shall we call it, uh, with four of his nine Minimoogs, and he's playing them there right in front of you, which is just amazing. But what really comes across, and the one thing I think we can all agree on, is Rick is an incredibly genuine man, is his genuine love. For your father, not just because of him as a human being, but for what he did for his career and for the careers of many other keyboardists at a time when guitars were the most dominant, glamorous instrument. And along comes the Minimoog, and now they can compete. I think that that was a really defining moment for keyboardists at that time. You know, it just, it totally shifted the paradigm, Eve, within the musical world, within certain genres, and certainly within certain bands. And so, you know, what it makes you realize is I don't think Bob Moog sat down or even his engineer sat down and said, you know, we're going to totally change everything with this instrument. They knew they were doing something important, but that's the beautiful thing about making a tool of any kind, is that you never know how people are going to be able to use it and how that is going to change things. As a lot of your listeners will know, it was one of the engineers who kind of started the process on the Minimoog when they were finding that they were making the same patches when they were demonstrating the modulars for people and thought, well, I'm just going to make a small demonstration unit that's hardwired that I can just show people. And that was what they called the Min A. It was the model A of the Minimoog prototypes. And that evolved into the MinB, which was slightly more complex. But at that time, my father was traveling a great deal. He wasn't around a lot because he was actually trying to find an investor in the company. But when it got to the MinB, he decided that was the time that he wanted to start getting highly involved. And he was the one who came up with the interface. So that archetypal interface that you're talking about this very elegant, simple, linear signal flow that was Um, replicated so many times, shall we say? Um, really, that was Bob Moog's, uh, impact on that instrument. And I will hearken back to what we were talking about with Leon Theremin. You know, Bob got such inspiration from the simple. Elegant designs of Leon Theremin. He carried that forward. And I believe that in some way, you see that. Elegant, simplicity, expressivity, in the interface of the Minimoog as well. So when can we expect to, to see Electronic Voyager on our screens, be they cinema or small screens at home? I think that has yet to be determined. I know that, uh, Waveshaper Media has a two hour rough cut and a four hour rough cut of the film. And they have had those things actually for well over a year, uh, but they are seeking funding for uh, musical clearance and continued production costs. Um, and that is the only thing right now that is holding them up is, is further, uh, funding. So if anyone out there is interested in investing in the film, please contact Waveshaper Media. So it's hard to say because it all depends on when that funding comes through, but I will tell you that. I would just ask everyone out there just to be patient and that the patients will pay off because it is going to be a really incredible documentary. You are in a very unique position. You are the daughter of a man who was incredibly important as a father and as a an engineer. And his legacy lives on, and your hard work is, is doing that very, very well, making sure that the world remembers him as a human being, as an engineer, as an inventor, as a pioneer, shall we say. And there are also other foundations springing up, uh, most recently, uh, the Art Foundation, which Dina Perlman, who Coincidentally, obviously the daughter of another great engineer, uh, and pioneer in synthesis is doing. How important is, uh, the work that you and Dina and other organizations do in maintaining the legacies of these men and women, uh, who have made such an impact, uh, scientifically, culturally, musically? Does that weight sit on your shoulders or is that something you relish and go for every day? It's both. The work is very important. Uh, you know, these are huge legacies. But when you have someone who's very close to both the person and their career, they can translate that in a different way for a wider audience. They can also translate it in a way that's a bit more nuanced than Alan R. Perlman equaling his synthesizers. Alan R. Perlman does equal many incredible pioneering synthesizers, but there's a lot more to his story than that. And the same for Bob Moog. And then there, there are other people who, um, you know, are trying to, um, you know, Lift up the legacies of their family members, such as, um, the Raymond Scott family, um, who are doing a great job. They had Scott Fest. They have the Raymond Scott archives. Uh, their father is a fascinating inventor. Um, there's a woman named Allison Tavel, and I'm going to Forgive me, Allison Blank on her father's name, but he invented something called the resonator. Um, yes, I remember this. Yes, and he tragically passed away way before it could become a product. But she has said about restoring it, talking to people about it, and I'm not sure exactly what her other plans are, but I have a feeling that they're going to be quite impressive. So it's all these facets of these different inventors that are being brought to the fore so that they can continue to inspire people so that people can Learn more about them. But to me, the story of invention is very powerful and very important because it is much more nuanced and much more complex than most people realize. And I think that in today's world, we might get attached to some extent to people that are highly accomplished. And I think it's important that people understand that these inventors, these mentors, these people who have led the way that they are not necessarily that much different from other people. And I think that they're held up on these pedestals so much. They seem far away and that the process of invention then seems far away for people. And I really want to knock down those barriers so that people realize That the things that Allison's father, that Bob Moog, Eleanor Perlman, Raymond Scott had in common were things like persistence, commitment, insatiable curiosity, and other qualities that like that, that lots of people either have or can cultivate. So that is a real importance for me for people lifting up these stories to try to inspire people to make their own impact in their own way. Because as we saw with like the Rick Wakeman story, you never know how deeply what you put out there is going to impact somebody else. Michelle, you're doing an absolutely amazing job yourself and your colleagues at the. Bob Moe Foundation. Well, thank you so much. We so appreciate the support and the opportunity to be here. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. Before you go, make sure you visit the Sound on Sound podcast page. at soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts where you can explore all the other great content playing across the other channels. I'm Rob Puricelli, and this has been a Failed Muso production for Sound On Sound.