There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a couple of tracks from Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on Switched-On Rock, Switched-On Country, Switched-On Santa, or Switched-On Bacharach? More likely than not, you’ve never even heard of those other albums, which have nothing to do with Carlos and everything to do with the music-industry fad that her then-high-tech renditions of Bach set off in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. That’s the subject of the new Bandsplaining video above, which covers the “awkward and glorious” releases that constituted the initial waves of electronic pop music.
Like so many cultural shifts, the rise of electronic pop took place thanks to a technological change. To be more specific, it was made possible by the invention of the voltage-controlled, modular synthesizer, itself dependent on two particular innovations. Voltage control permitted the pitch of the sounds being generated to be selected with a piano-style keyboard, a slide ribbon, a sequencer, or any other interface the creator’s electronics know-how would allow. In the context of synthesizers, a module is “a little box with an input and an output that did one thing and one thing only, either making a waveform or modifying it somehow,” as Robert Moog once described it, adding that multiple modules could be connected together with cables.
If the name Moog sounds familiar, that’s because the lines of synthesizers that bear it changed music forever. In fact, Carlos used an early Moog model to record Switched-On Bach, having custom-built it in collaboration with the inventor himself. Though the machine set up behind the Bach impersonator on that album’s cover may look unwieldy today, it represented a major improvement in convenience over the room-filling, musically unintuitive behemoths previously accessible only at certain universities and corporate R&D departments. So did the synthesizer invented by Don Buchla on the west coast, at about the same time Moog was building his on the east coast, though each man’s design expressed a different vision of how electronic instruments would adapt to music, or vice versa.
Indeed, up through at least the first few years of the seventies, it would’ve been impossible to say how or whether electronic sounds would find their place in mainstream records. The emergence of home hi-fi culture created a market for swinging “space age pop” by the likes of Les Baxter, Dick Hyman, and Juan Garcia Esquivel, the subject of Bandsplaining’s previous video. This one highlights such releases as Richard Hayman’s Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine and Gershon Kingsley’s Music to Moog By, whose track “Popcorn” would become a worldwide hit when re-recorded by Hot Butter in 1972, but not before the space-age composer Hyman got in on the action. “The Minotaur,” his piece of hypnotic psychedelia with an Indian drone and Greek melody, reached #38 on the Hot 100 57 years ago — and today, remains a thrilling eight-and-a-half-minute ride down one of the many roads electronic pop music didn’t take.
Related Content:
The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)
Hear Glenn Gould Celebrate the Moog Synthesizer & Wendy Carlos’ Pioneering Album Switched-On Bach (1968)
What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)
How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music
Watch Composer Wendy Carlos Demo an Original Moog Synthesizer (1989)
The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.