1969: Year of the Moog
From Harrison's bungalow to India's National Institute of Design, the Moog was everywhere, all at once.
In 1969 George Harrison released Electronic Sounds, his second solo record, on Zapple, the avant-garde label imprint of The Beatles' Apple Records. Described by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco as an "embarrassingly bad album" in their book Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog synthesizer, it was made up of one side featuring Harrison noodling about on his own Moog synthesizer at home and one side a demonstration of the Moog by synthesist Bernie Krause, recorded without his knowledge. Krause was upset with Harrison's high-handed treatment, essentially stealing his work.
Of course no one, including Krause, thought the recording merited release as a record, but this was 1969 and experimentation was the order of the day. The incident does point out that, as Pinch and Horn say "The record industry just did not know how to deal with this hybrid machine-instrument and its operators; it defied all the normal categories." Were synthesists, responsible for creating patches and programming the Moog, musicians or were they more like sound engineers? Was their work creative and did it merit the same level of recognition as that of more traditional instrumental performers?
Musicians, especially rock musicians, wanted an instrument that could perform live, with a keyboard and many of the most common patches pre-programmed. For those like Krause who considered the Moog to be more of a sound generator, it was a less interesting application of the instrument.
Somewhere out there is a Moog synthesizer that was imported to India directly from Moog's Trumansburg, PA factory. It was purchased on behalf of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad as the crown jewel in the electronic music studio that was built and overseen by American pianist David Tudor. As part of its image building, the NID decided that it would create a state of the art electronic music studio, and at some point it was decided that it would include a Moog synthesizer.
The instrument has become the great white whale of British musician Paul Purgas, who traveled to Ahmedabad in search of it. And though the instrument itself eluded him, he turned up a bunch of tapes that had been made at the NID during Tudor's three month residency that may well be the genesis of electronic music experimentation in India. In October 2023 The state 51 Conspiracy label issued these recordings under the title The NID Tapes: Electronic Music From India 1969-1972.
The story of how the support of the Sarabhais, a rich mercantile family, transformed Ahmedabad and enchanted the New York avant-garde and the American government is a long and winding one. The Ford Foundation made significant investments in the National Institute of Design, which was meant to become the crown jewel in independent India's cultural showcase, all largely at the behest of Gita Sarabhai, who became a student of John Cage and, at the same time, helped educate him about the structure and theory behind Indian classical music and philosophy.
Cage traveled to India, and specifically to Ahmedabad with David Tudor and choreographer Merce Cunningham in 1964. It was all part of an effort to bring the vanguard of New York art, music, dance, and culture to India, both as an influence and as ambassadors who would return to the United States with a positive impression of a progressive society that was ready to take its place on the world stage.
David Tudor had, by this time, transformed himself from the leading interpreter of contemporary music written for the piano to a composer and performer of electronic music. As a pianist, Tudor was so attuned to the methods and music of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, that these composers would often compose with him in mind. 'What can we do that will challenge David?' seemed to be the question they asked themselves, making Tudor a force in contemporary music at the time despite not receiving much attention as a composer himself.
Around the same time that George Harrison was fiddling about with his newly purchased Moog setup, Tudor was arriving in Ahmedabad as the escort for the Moog shipment. The entire premise was so improbable as to be hallucinatory. As a musician and a composer of electronic music, Tudor was hostile to the Moog. He was much interested in recording natural sounds and using them in his compositions. The idea of punching a keyboard was not terribly interesting to him.
At this precise time, relations between the U.S. and India began to sour, resulting in President Nixon's support of Pakistan in the Indo Pakistan War. Things took a more pragmatic turn in the country, and the NID came under question for its use of funds, its program, and its overriding philosophy. In the end the Moog was seen as an extravagance that had no substantive use. The original NID experiment came to an end in 1973 with the resignation of the Sarabhais and in September, the flooding of the original building. As Alexander Keefe writes in "Subcontinental Synth:" "The NID gradually transformed itself into a more professional and conventional design school, an incubator for generations of legendary Indian ad men, visual artists, and product designers."
The tapes that Purgas selected and worked to restore for NID Tapes are in many cases little more than experimental exercises, and yet they demonstrate that the faculty and students at NID were seriously interested in what could be created with this new sound generating behemoth. Their creations are much more in line with what Bernie Krause felt was the proper use of the Moog than the work of many British and American rock and jazz artists of the time.
Those in the electronic music studio at NID were interested in the Moog because they were already interested in electronic music, not the other way around. Many of these recordings use voices, found sounds, and tape manipulation through splicing as experimental techniques beyond just the use of the Moog. The work of faculty member S.C. Sharma, for example, is noted by Purgas as having the most splices and of being the most like true compositions. His "Dance Music II" is maybe the track that sounds most like latter day synth pop music.
The tapes have been described by Purgas as ground zero for electronic music in India. In the years from 1969-1973, the NID's Moog years, experimentalists like Klause Shulze and Tangerine Dream emerged in Germany, Jean Michel Jarre in France, Wendy Carlos in the U.S., Japan's Tomita all with different visions of what could be created with electronic music precisely because it hadn't been done before. The dominance of American and British guitar based rock bands had been broken. Pioneers around the world sought to use new technology to create soundscapes that had not previously been heard, and it was no different in India as it approached the twentieth anniversary of its independence.
The nineteen tracks compiled here, playing just under one hour, are culled from 27 reels of tape that Purgas reviewed. Besides S.C.Sharma, there are recordings by Gita Sarabhai, I.S. Mathur, Atul Desai, and Jinraj Joshipura. There is also one track by David Tudor, and one by Atul Desai as well.
While in many ways the emergence of electronic music in the late sixties is the beginning of the democratization of music, it was still very much the purview of the privileged. Still, the widespread development of individual, regional, and national sound profiles that were recognizable, yet uninfluenced by the dominance of American and British blues-based rock, was remarkable.
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