Switched-On Rock, Wired Classics

By Michael Walsh.

Composers and performers turn on to the synthesizer

The athletes in Chariots of Fire jogged along the beach to its inspirited pulse, and Jennifer Beals went head over heels for its driving beat in Flashdance. Rock groups love its modish, high-tech tones, and jazzmen such as Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock have found its versatility irresistible. Laurie Anderson, the avant-garde performance artist, colored her United States, PartsI-IV with its plaintive, other-worldly resonance, and its dark bass notes lurk menacingly in the minimalist scores of Composer Philip Glass.

The most provocative development in music today is not a song, a singer or a style; it is the sound of the electronic synthesizer, which is boldly claiming a place in the family of instruments. Probably not since Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone about 1840 has a newcomer been so widely embraced by musicians. "A synthesizer works like a magnifying glass," says Chariots Composer Vangelis, who also used several in the score of Blade Runner. "With it, you can go deeper into sound than you can with an acoustic instrument."

Indeed, film composers have adopted the synthesizer at a tempo approaching allegro con brio. Giorgio Moroder has given it prominence in his scores for Midnight Express, Cat People and Scarface. James Horner used it along with mandolins, balalaikas and snippets of Tchaikovsky in his brooding themes for Gorky Park, and even such veteran film scorers as Quincy Jones and Lalo Schifrin have found that a judicious use of the synthesizer expands their imaginations. Observes Jones: "We're not giving up anything by using the synthesizer, only adding to the possibilities with space-age colors."

It is rockers, though, who have so far used the new instrument most extensively. From the rippling ecstasy of The Who's Baba O'Riley (1971) to the hypnotic insistence of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), the synthesizer has become almost as important to rock as drums and electric guitars. Novelty is part of its attraction. "People are tired of guitar-based music," says Mark Mothersbaugh, a member of Devo. "Synthesized sounds are as close as you can get to V-2 rockets, mortar blasts and TV news."

Instead of making sound by physical means, the way a piano does when its hammers strike the strings, the synthesizer generates tones electronically. Older analog models employed a battery of oscillators, filters and amplifiers, both to produce and to alter the color of sound. Their newer digital cousins are to analogs what compact disc record players are to the ordinary turntable; they represent each point on the sonic spectrum with a series of numbers programmed into the machine. Synthesizers can go beyond standard intervals (the white and black keys of a piano) to register quarter tones and microtones. They can repeat complicated riffs with inhuman speed and accuracy, and approximate the sound of conventional instruments to the extent that unsophisticated listeners may have trouble distinguishing, say, between synthesized drums and the real thing.

More warily than their pop music colleagues, serious composers have taken notice. An instrument that can reduce the forces needed to perform Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra from a 100-piece symphony orchestra to a couple of keyboards, electrical outlets and multitrack stereo tape is obviously something to be reckoned with, even if its characteristically metallic tones and dispassionate air will never replace the luster or emotion of a Berlin Philharmonic. But experimenters such as Anderson, Glass, Pierre Boulez and Morton Subotnick are seeking to conjure new sounds in such works as Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon and Boulez's Repons, not re-create old ones. The synthesizer offers them bright, fresh colors to daub onto Western music's 1,000-year-old pallette.

The synthesizer is the latest chapter in the history of electronic music. A prototype was built by RCA in the '50s, but it was not until the mid-'60s that Robert Moog, a New Yorker, and Don Buchla, a Californian, independently designed the first practical models. They were ungainly machines, bristling with plugs and wires that looked more at home in a scientist's laboratory than on a stage. In 1968 Wendy Carlos (then Walter, before a sex change) used a Moog for the album Switched-On Bach, a fetching electronic counterfeit that alerted musicians to the instrument's possibilities. Carlos, however, had to synthesize each phrase individually and put the whole thing together on tape, a laborious, time-consuming process. By contrast, today's advanced digital synthesizers, such as the Synclavier and the Fairlight (typical cost: $30,000) are easier to play, far more versatile and smaller than a Hammond organ. In 1982 more than 40,000 synthesizers were sold in the U.S.

Inevitably, the synthesizer's growing popularity has prompted fears that live musicians may be on their way to technological obsolescence. Although the machine was intended as a tool for composers, its talent for mimicry has made it a cost-effective, ersatz orchestra. Classical musicians, who play a largely 18th and 19th century repertory, are unlikely ever to be cashiered, but others are not so lucky. Complains Violinist Paul Shure, a California studio musician: "Synthesizers have all but ruined string players in recordings." Five years ago, Don Butterfield, a New York City tubist, played about 150 television and radio commercials a year, a lucrative source of income for a freelancer; today, he averages fewer than 50.

The situation is particularly sensitive in Hollywood and on Broadway. Says Composer Horner: "Producers want a guy who for $40,000 will give them an electronic score that will sound like a symphony orchestra, whereas that same score written for and played by live musicians can run upwards of $150,000." On Broadway, union contracts prevent the replacement of performers by electronic instruments, but in Hollywood the issue is currently being negotiated by the studios and the musicians' union.

Such problems, though, may turn out to be short-lived. Synthesizers are enjoying a particular vogue just now because, in the words of one composer-arranger, "they fulfill pop music's never-ending quest for fresh ear candy," but entertainment-industry enthusiasms are notoriously transient, and next year may bring a rage for Mahler-size orchestras or Renaissance recorder ensembles. And despite its mockingbird predilections, the synthesizer still sounds, at root, mechanical.

But as the instrument becomes more sophisticated, its enormous potential will probably outweigh any drawbacks. The synthesizer could create a new class of performers, since it offers opportunities for musical expression even to those without conventional instrumental skills.

Notes Japanese Synthesist Isao Tomita, best known for his reworkings of orchestral showpieces like Gustav Hoist's The Planets: "In this computer age, the question of whether you can play traditional instruments must never be the major factor in qualifying yourself as a musician or composer."

That may be an extreme view--as long as music is played, there will be a need for violinists, clarinetists and pianists--but the statement contains more than a little truth. Inventor Buchla, busy designing a new generation of machines in his Berkeley workshop, envisions an instrument without a keyboard at all. Moog, now in North Carolina, is "working with musicians who need instruments that don't exist." If they succeed, the future could hold an aesthetic in which unconventional sounds fall as lightly and harmoniously on the ear as the C major scale.

Until that millennium, however, man is learning to coexist with machine--testing, experimenting, searching for the outer limits of expression. Which is exactly what adventurous musicians have always done. --By Michael Walsh. Reported by Barbara Kraft/Los Angeles, with other bureaus

With reporting by Barbara Kraft/Los Angeles, with other bureaus