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Aerophone Academy Podcast
Expressive Synthesis with Guest Dr. Tom Rhea
Episode 005
Embark on a sonic exploration with Dr. Tom Rhea, a luminary in the field of electronic music, as we navigate the rich tapestry of musical innovation. From his formative years mastering the flutophone to revolutionizing synthesizer manuals, Dr. Rhea's insights are a treasure trove for enthusiasts and professionals alike. His storied career, including a tenure at Berklee College of Music and contributions to Keyboard Magazine, sets the stage for a profound dialogue on the evolution of electronic instruments.
This episode delves into the subtleties of sound, as Dr. Rhea delves into the complex world of formants and their pivotal role in shaping the timbre of instruments. Prepare to be captivated by the Electronic Valve Instrument's (EVI) analog warmth and versatility, and learn how formants ensure each instrument in an orchestra can sing its unique song without discord. The human voice as the ultimate formant generator is also a fascinating topic we unravel, shedding light on how this knowledge enhances both synthesis and mixing techniques.
We round off with a panorama of historical and modern electronic instruments that have left indelible marks on the fabric of music. From the ondes Martenot's emotive capabilities to the expressive potential of the Haken Continuum, we trace the lineage and influence of these groundbreaking creations. Dr. Rhea's anecdotes of innovation, marketability, and the interplay between musician ingenuity and instrument design are not only enlightening but also serve as a testament to the ever-evolving narrative of music technology. Join us for this enthralling journey through the past, present, and future of electronic soundscapes.
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Welcome to the Aerophone Academy podcast with me, Matt Traum.
Alistair Parnell:And I'm Alistair Parnell. Join us each month as we discuss the wonderful world of wind controllers and you get the very best information and answers to your questions.
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Alistair Parnell:And while you're at it, why not check out www. isax. academy
Matt Traum:and patchmanmusic. com.
Alistair Parnell:Welcome, welcome everybody, to another episode of the Aerophone Academy podcast. We are on episode number five and once again, we're really excited about this one because we have a very, very special guest with us, and, Matt, I think you might have some introductory words to say about our special guest.
Matt Traum:I sure do. He's a good friend of mine. I've been working with him for several years helping restore some historic synthesizer documents and recordings and audio and video and he has a new book out and this is Tom Rhea. And Tom was a professor at the Berklee College of Music for many years and taught courses in electronic music and music synthesis. Tom also wrote a monthly article in Keyboard Magazine from 1977 to 1981 on very interesting developments of synthesizer technology.
Matt Traum:Over the decades his publications and articles have been in Computer Music Journal. He's written many synthesizer owner's manuals, including the owner's manual for the Moog Minimoog, the Steiner-Crumar EVI electronic valve instrument and the Steiner-Crumar Master's Touch, among others. He also wrote a dissertation for his PhD called the "Evolution of Electronic Musical Instruments in the United States 1972". Tom produced the first original music for OxyLights, which was the world's largest permanent music and light installation in Niagara Falls, New York, and it was recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records. Tom's latest project is a beautiful 400-page book called Electronic Perspectives Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments and this is a gorgeous piece of work and it's just a beautiful thing if you're into electronic musical synthesis and the development of these instruments.
Alistair Parnell:So, really, Tom is probably the best first guest for us to have, right? Because it's like he's going to be able to explain the very start of, you know, the synthesis and the human interaction with the synthesizer, and that's what we do as synth players, right? So this is going to be great, really looking forward to it. Before we start, we have a little special piece of music. Tom Rhea Tom Rhea. (music).
Alistair Parnell:Well, that's got to be one of the best personal jingles I've ever heard. Dr Tom Rhea, and a very warm welcome to the Aerophone Academy podcast.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, thanks, that's a little bit of a joke, that's brilliant. A friend of mine, Anders Otterland, a Swedish fellow, was recording all kinds of strange music in Nashville, Tennessee, as we say. In the day back when I was a synthesizer clinician and I would drop in every week or two, he had a little eight track and had a very nice reverb, a plate reverb. I walked in and he said, oh, I lent him instruments, like I let him keep my Moog vocoder there and a couple of other things, and of course I would bring my electronic valve instrument and the master's touch and so forth. But I walked in one day and he said, oh, here, let's use the vocoder on this. He had this prerecorded.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I said, well, yeah, okay, but if you want me to talk, what the heck do you want me to say? He said, oh, just say your name over and over again. Brilliant, and that's exactly how that came about. So it's sort of like my website, drtomrhea. com. It has to be doctor, and I do have an earned PhD, but I don't care. But it has to be doctor, because it seems that some graphics artist out in the Midwest of the US has my name locked up, so I couldn't just have Tom Rhea, I had to do the doctor bit D-R. You know so I'm not an egomaniac, but it may seem that way.
Alistair Parnell:It's fascinating stuff. So I think probably what we ought to try and do is go back say from the very beginning for you, Tom, and I guess you know everyone would perhaps like to know how did you first get into music? Because I believe you were maybe a trumpet player or something before you got into the synthesis stuff.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Well, I started as a flutophone player. You know that's one of those little instruments, it's plastic like a recorder, but you do that when you're in the fourth grade or whatever grade way way back. Then I played piano. I took up trumpet as a senior in high school and I actually majored in that at Florida State. I've always been good at picking up instruments. It's not my skill to become a great virtuoso, but it seems that anything I pick up I can sort of play it after a very short time. Of course, I've always loved music and there was not much of it in my home, not really even a stereo, but for whatever reason it just sent me. So that's kind of how I started.
Alistair Parnell:And can I ask, were you into kind of everything, or was it jazz or classical, or you just probably liked everything, right?
Dr. Tom Rhea:No, it was strictly classical. At that time, you know, when I heard I may have heard it on the radio when I heard Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C sharp minor, I said, oh wow, I want to play that. After I'd been taking lessons for about four or five weeks on piano, I played a little tune called Ruffy and Tuffy. You know just very, very simple. But after a year I played the Rachmaninoff. I did it pretty well. I mean, I have a recording somewhere. It was pretty good. So in a year's time other people were astonished, but for me it was like oh well, all you do is practice a lot, and there you do that.
Matt Traum:And so you later went on to play trumpets professionally.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, In the boondocks. Basically I was a trumpet major at FSU and I played with the Tallahassee Symphony there some. And then I went to Nashville. I was fortunate to get a full scholarship at George Peabody College, which is now part of Vanderbilt University there in Nashville. Yes, I was a trumpet player. I played some with the Nashville Symphony. I did a good bit of church work too, and my first wife and I actually sang. We sang in both of us in one Episcopal church and I also sang in another. So I was just sort of a itinerant musician as they were in the old days.
Alistair Parnell:So what was the progression then? Because I know you did some teaching at Berkeley, but am I jumping the gun there? I mean, was that was that was a trumpet side of things, or no, it was on the synthesis side, right?
Dr. Tom Rhea:No, I'd long stopped playing trumpet. When I was at George Peabody they bought a Moog synthesizer, a Moog 3C. Dr Gil Trythall was my one of my people on my dissertation committee and he was the resident expert on electronics. I remember going into his studio and he had these wires with clips and analog audio tape stuff hanging on the walls. I said what's this? He said, oh, this is B-flat and this is C-sharp and this is white noise and that's how we were all doing it back then, basically until the Moog synthesizer came.
Dr. Tom Rhea:And then of course it was like, wow, you know, listen to everything we can do. Now I just soon realized that I probably had more brains than I had talent, even though I was a pretty strong player. I just realized somehow that having a means to use my imagination and my intelligence would be the avenue for me to go. So I sort of fell in love with electronic music right there in graduate school. I eventually met Bob Moog and long, long story. But I wound up working for Les Trubey and Dave Van Koevering in Florida after graduation with a PhD. Eventually, Van Koevering brought me up to Buffalo where I wrote the original synthesizer manual for the Model D Minimoog the actual D from 1974, not the other one. So all of that basically before I started teaching at Berklee.
Dr. Tom Rhea:But in some ways a synthesizer clinician is a teacher. You're basically going out and you're teaching people how to use the equipment. And I taught some famous people as well. You know I worked with Keith Emerson. I flew around with Yes for a week or 10 days. Billy Cobham was there at the factory, Miroslav Vitous, you know just, and the wonderful thing was that I was in the ivory tower before I actually got out into business and then I began to realize, wow, these guys are good.
Dr. Tom Rhea:And at first I just respected the sheer virtuosity of these players Tom Coster and Jan and all of these people. But after a while I began to realize, yes, the music is beautiful and valid. So I kind of got off into that other track. At that point I was happy that I was out there selling synthesizers during the era of fusion and progressive rock, and I don't think I'd be able to do that. As I mentioned in my NAMM oral history interview, I don't think I'd be able to do that today because there just aren't enough artists that have roots in deep music. There are some fine artists around now, don't get me wrong just not enough of them. So I'm glad I came up in the era that I came up in.
Matt Traum:Yeah, Well, Tom, with some of these clinics that you gave for, was it Moog mostly that you were doing at the time?
Matt Traum:Yeah, a lot of the emphasis that I found. I listened to some of these recordings that you have on your website and you were really into trying to get expression out of these keyboards. And of course these keyboards back then had no velocity sensing. It was basically a switch on off for the note and they would have a wheel, maybe a wheel or two on the side for pitch and maybe vibrato. But you were figuring out ways to do legato and playing in a musical way. That was always your sort of your stick, wasn't it?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, absolutely Well, because I play saxophone in high school and then I played trumpet, you know, even in a small way, with a couple of symphony orchestras, I knew what the nuance of acoustic musical instruments is and was. So I wanted something like that. It's true that those early synthesizers were certainly not velocity sensitive or anything like that. Although it's kind of interesting, the Microm oog which was designed by Jim Scott, with a little help from me. It had something called negative enveloping, which it wasn't velocity sensitive, but if you knew how much time to leave in between notes you could actually make a difference in the timbre, and so in a sense it was sensitive. And because it had something called single triggering it was possible to phrase better.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I think Jan Hammer was a brilliant musician, but he told me he said no. I asked him do you want to come and teach some in my classes? No, I can't do that. I said I'm sure you could. He says no, that's a different skill. But he intuitively selected the Minimoog because it had single triggering, which means, not like a machine gun, multiple triggering. Every time you hit a key you get a new envelope, you get a new attack, you get a new attack and that is just not very nuance-filled. If you listen to Hammer's music you realize, wow, I mean he's phrasing.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Also, he was playing a lot of notes on the wheel and when the Micromoog came in with the ribbon, I really became an expert at playing the ribbon and there's a segment on my website, as a matter of fact, where I talk about the ribbon and tapping on it, which you can't tap on a wheel.
Dr. Tom Rhea:You know, I became a bit of an expert in the idea of the ergonomics, the human engineering of musical instruments. So yeah, I became kind of gung-ho about that and of course that would lead me to Nyle Steiner and the EVI and the Master's Touch, because that was another dimension. And of course, since I'd been a wind player, it was reasonably easy for me to sort of graft my trumpet skills onto the EVI, although obviously I was not the virtuoso that Nyle was and is on both the EVI and the EWI. I mean he is amazing. Of course he played, I think, with the Utah Symphony, so he was a big-time player already. But it naturally led me to wind synthesis, and I still believe that wind synthesis has not gotten its due totally.
Speaker 6:(music)
Matt Traum:So we're hearing you playing EVI on that piece, right
Dr. Tom Rhea:Oh yeah, yeah, that's me. Now you know again, I didn't play all those parts on the excerpt you just played. That's a number of musicians and that's Anders Otterland's his music.
Matt Traum:Maybe late 70s, early 80s? Yeah, the Crumar EVI came out in 1980. So I don't know which EVI you're playing. On this it says Steiner EVI. Is that?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, it's the old, analog, old fashioned EVI that you saw Nyle playing it on Barbra Streisand's special and he acted like it was a Flit Raid, bug spray. That's great. Yeah, it was the same one. I think you know the black. Yeah, I mean, as a matter of fact, I preferred the analog version. I mean, I just, I don't know, it just seemed very fluid to me.
Matt Traum:Yeah, it really felt it had that brass quality to it when you blew it kind of really opened up. Yeah, had a full dynamic range. Yep.
Alistair Parnell:Yeah, that's lovely. What are we hearing there then, Tom?
Dr. Tom Rhea:An interesting thing about that little excerpt it's the same music four times in a row and I tried as much as I could to alter the note values and make things more obvious. But what I did is I took a plain sawtooth and I played these same lines more than one time and I put formants on each line so that it would become more distinct. I did that with a Moog 914 or 907A filter, as I recall. It was amazing In Nashville when I played it for people they said wow, what's that? Is that some kind of a new synthesizer? I said nope, it's a sawtooth, it's just wind controlled and there's also a formant, and there's also a formant that's analog EVI strictly, but run through a Moog 907A fixed filter, so it can have formants.
Dr. Tom Rhea:You know acoustic instruments, many of them have formants. The Oboe has a formant F-O-R-M-A-N-T at about 1k. The Bassoon has one at 500. And a lot of instruments. And this is one of the reasons that instruments in the orchestra don't step on each other. They are emphasizing a different part of the audio spectrum as they play.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Of course, one of the interesting things when you have an instrument that plays formants as you play up and down its scale, the waveform changes for every note, unlike a synthesizer which, unfortunately, if you play a sawtooth up and down the keyboard, it's a sawtooth all the way up and down the keyboard pretty much looks the same and sounds the same to my ears. So I always would try to inject formants, areas of emphasis, a particular area of emphasis, and on acoustic instruments this happens, of course, because of the shape of the tube and and some physics, uh, about the instrument. You know, the oboe's a cone, a truncated cone, the clarinet's a cylinder and overblows the 12th instead of the octave. It therefore has mostly odd harmonics, you know, just to do a little geek speak there for a moment. So yeah, that was strictly EVI.
Matt Traum:So for folks that don't maybe understand what a formant is, I guess you could think of it as a graphic equalizer. You know those old graphic equalizers that might have had 10 or 20 sliders on it where you had the low frequencies and the mids and then highs, and I guess if you made a curve of sorts with those sliders and then played something through that, that's essentially what a format it is. It's a stationary EQ curve, would you say. Tom.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, exactly, and you know this goes all the way back to Germany with what they call Hall-Vormanten. You have this in the Trautonium and you also have Harald Bode with his instrument. That was at the Cologne studio. He was very sensitive to the idea of formants. It arose a great deal in Germany and they had a good understanding of it. It's something that everybody should know about. That synthesizes, but unfortunately people still don't.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I mean, they think of EQ which is like EQing the whole mix or something like that. But in actual fact you might think of it as in the orchestra the instruments play well with each other because they don't step on each other. In the woodwind group, the oboe and the bassoon have different formants or areas of emphasis. It's as though you EQ'd all of these acoustic instruments Individually. Yeah, so that you know. But it's like in a good mix most people know, you make a little space for the vocalist, you know where. Maybe you emphasize 3K and maybe you diminish 3K throughout the whole band. You know, I mean there's all kinds of tricks in mixing uh, using uh, parametric eq and graphic eq and things like that. But I would think of formants as individual per voice, and if you know how to do that, then the instruments in a mix and basically Anders, who wrote the music for the excerpts we've heard, he understood this and he appreciated the fact that I had this filter that would allow me to do that with electronic stuff.
Matt Traum:And of course we've talked about this many times on the phone when we chat about the voice is really the ultimate format generator, isn't it? You could take your voice and just go. You know that's. You're just changing the format there on the same pitch, and that's essentially what we're talking about here absolutely.
Dr. Tom Rhea:As a matter of fact, vowels are nothing more than formants. I forget the frequencies, it's something like 270 and 3000. I had a whole sheet, you know. But when you say A-E-I-O-U-AH, you realize you're doing something different with your tongue, your mouth, your throat and basically, the reason we can articulate speech is because we can make these vowel sounds. The consonants are quite different. It's like air forced through your nose, your teeth, percussive, fricatives and so forth. But the vowels are where the emotional part of music goes. I mean, especially when a singer sings, they are producing formants to make speech. Basically, and even when we just speak, it depends on this concept.
Matt Traum:Of course. Then there's pitch, also, that the voice can do pitch, and then the timing of the. So you have the formants, the fricatives, the pitch and the timing essentially that make up a speech or singing.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Well, I believe that the human voice is the basis of all music and, as a matter of fact, no less a personage than Hugh La Caine, the great Canadian developer of instruments, agreed with me. I knew him and interacted with him several times. He wrote something to the extent that monophonic instruments are the basis of all of Western music, and I would say, well, I think, all of music, because I think it starts with an utterance by a human being, and then instruments began to spring up that I possibly I wasn't there, not quite that old, anyhow, I'm hopeful but I think instruments grew up in essence to imitate the human voice, and the human voice is all about formants.
Alistair Parnell:It's interesting. You're probably aware of this I believe it was Hector Berlioz was one of the composers that said he found the saxophone to be one of the instruments that was closest to that of the human voice.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yes, because what happens when you play a saxophone? The cavity behind the reed in your throat can change, and it's not that you vocalize anything. But you know a formant is about a cavity. You have what's known as Helmholtz resonators, a pop bottle. If you blow across a soda bottle it makes a certain pitch. You know. And if you think about it when you're doing formants you're blowing across the same pop bottle, no matter what notes you actually play. You could whistle notes across a pop bottle and allow it to color the sound. Medieval churches actually had like clay bottles, if you will buried in the walls with openings, so that they in essence tuned the room. I mean, this is an amazing thing that I found out that they understood formants, although they had no intellectual understanding of them. It was strictly empirical.
Matt Traum:I did not know that. Wow, fascinating, fascinating stuff.
Alistair Parnell:Shall we listen to another track?
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Matt Traum:That's incredible stuff. Wow, there's a lot to listen to there.
Dr. Tom Rhea:What are we hearing? Yeah, if you listen carefully to that last section in 5-4, I was playing that on a Micromoog or a Multimoog oog, I don't remember, but it was through the filter and I can't remember whether I was using the Master's Touch or not. But about the pitch bending, we alluded to that idea. Not only is the voice a wonderful formant maker, but it has essentially infinite resolution over pitch, which not all instruments can do. And I was playing a lot of those notes by sliding on the ribbon and I just never took the keyboard literally. And I found a great ally in Jan Hammer when I first heard him play. As a matter of fact, I told Van Koevering oh, the Minimoog, it's a piece of junk, it's never going to go anywhere. Worst marketing advice I ever gave. And when he came to my home I was a little bit put off. You know I'm the expert, why are you coming here telling me things? But anyhow, that idea, he said well, why? I said well, not enough interconnectivity. In other words, I'd been working on a Moog 3C, for Pete's sakes. You know 10 oscillators and Partridge in a Pear Tree and 47 Kumquats. I mean it had everything you could imagine. And here was the Minimoog. You know just three oscillators and one VCF, one VCA. It's like nah. Only when I heard Jan Hammer play it on a concert in Rochester, New York, then I realized, oh my Lord, now I understand this instrument. It is not a SoundCloud generator, it's a voice under control. And so I sort of made my reputation after that going around and I got really good on the Micromoog ribbon. As a matter of fact, if you listen to an excerpt that I did there, illustrating the ribbon, you would think, wow, what a keyboard player. No, I mean, my three fingers on my right hand were pretty good for being a trumpet player, but I was playing about half those notes by tapping on the ribbon and sliding around. So it was like. It seemed like I had great keyboard facility. No, I was a good ribbon player.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I tried to advance that idea, but it was all in the effort to find nuance. Nuance, the subtlety that musical instruments are capable of. It's not that I want people to imitate the clarinet, that's not it. I want them to imitate the musicality of the clarinet or any other instrument. You know, I want that to be part of it. I don't want them to play one-note keyboards, one-note organs. The people that truly understood. The monophonic synthesizer, when it came out, rose to the top because if you listen to them, the Tom Costers, the Jan Hammers, the Chick Coreas of the world, Herbie Hancock to a certain extent I mean, they understood. Oh, this is not a keyboard, it's a monophonic instrument and I have to think of it maybe like a horn. So since I had played some horns, it was easy for me to think of it that way.
Matt Traum:So I remember you, kind of changing subject a little bit here, telling me a story about the Lyricon. When you first heard it I think you were at a trade show. Yeah, can you tell us that story?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, and you know again my own history. I have very, very poor recollection of my own history because I've been too many places. Sometimes it's not the age, it's the mileage Too many places, met too many people. But it was at a trade show. It may have been in Chicago, I don't know where it was first introduced, wherever it was first introduced, if that was Chicago, the NAMM, National Association of Music Merchandisers and of course I'm there representing Moog and I'm doodling around, whatever I'm doing, and I'm hearing this wailing sound and it's faint but it's like what is that?
Dr. Tom Rhea:And I ran around and I came to this Wanger booth that you have to restrict sound and to play inside of, and I bolted in the door and there was Bill Bernardi and I said what the heck is that? Oh, it's a Lyricon. I said, wow, that is too much, man, that's a fantastic instrument. And I said, man, could I play it? He says, well, you know, do you play sax? I said, well, not well, but does it matter? So he told me and I'm pretty sure this is accurate, I may be, I just don't know, the first person outside of the company that ever played a Lyricon. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter, but it makes a great story anyway, doesn't it?
Matt Traum:Yeah what, but that's going back to probably what. 73 in that time period somewhere, 74?.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, yeah, very early yeah.
Matt Traum:Fascinating.
Alistair Parnell:And what did you think to it, Tom, when you first played it? I mean, did it kind of, you know, suit your kind of requisite of that kind of expressive quality? Was it nice to handle and control and respond to the breath how you thought it might be able to?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, it was excellent and I wanted one immediately. Unfortunately, it was expensive and I was a mere clinician, but I really couldn't afford one in those days and I couldn't even afford the second version, you know. That came out and later, when I was able to afford one, basically I realized, yeah, that's yesterday's technology, there are some better instruments on the market, you know. So I never did really own one, although I've owned a lot of instruments. But yeah, I was turned on, you know, by what I heard and how it felt to play it, you know. And since I played a little sax in high school, I played alto. Yeah, it was like, okay, it was sufficiently familiar and, like everything, if I practice a little bit, I'd be able to play it pretty well, you know.
Matt Traum:So and around that time, maybe earlier, a fellow named Eddie Harris, famous sax player back in, was it the late 60s that he started electrifying his saxophone again I have to to beg ignorance.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I don't even remember when I met Eddie Harris. I met him in Nashville, Tennessee, because that's where I lived and there was a place called the Exit Inn and it was called a listening room. It was not a nightclub. I mean, if you went in there and started shooting your mouth off and, you know, clinking your glasses and everything, they'd ask you to leave because it was meant to be a listening room. So Eddie Harris was there. I knew he had this crazy instrument, some kind of an amalgam of a sax mouthpiece and a trumpet or some wildly improbable thing like that. But I also noted he had this kind of ratty instrument. Don't even remember what brand it was. You know I was listening and it was like, wow boy, that's got to be touch sensitive. There's not that many things around that are velocity sensitive. And I come to find out he was just really good with the volume pedal because I interviewed him in his motel room that night and that was 1977.
Matt Traum:I was looking at the file that you shared with me so it looks like this was a little later on, but 77 was your interview date.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, oh, okay, yeah. What a fascinating character.
Matt Traum:Let's listen to maybe a clip from that. Can we do that?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Oh, really cool.
Speaker 7:Got me over there and gave me a percentage of every W2 was sold.
Speaker 8:This is the octave divider thing, like the Veritone.
Speaker 7:Like the Veritone, but they had filtering units in it which gave you an oboe effect. It was really made for clarinet more of a woodwind than saxophone, because the signal wasn't that great. It would crack up if you played too much.
Dr. Tom Rhea:They didn't get that from Hammond by any chance, did they?
Speaker 7:No, I went to Hammond afterwards.
Matt Traum:So that's Eddie Harris talking about some of his work that he did with CMI Norland on the W2 product.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, that's me and Eddie Harris. Yeah, we had quite an extended discussion. I probably ran out of tape. You know my ratty little cassette tape recorder. As a matter of fact, I've got 30 or 40 interviews of some very famous people from the day and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get those cleared so that I can use them and make sure I'm not creating a problem for anybody, you know, with permission, but also getting them cleaned up. Some of them are really terrible recordings but with the tools, especially like what Matt has been doing for me lately, it's amazing what can be retrieved. But I hope someday to get those cleaned up and put them on my website.
Matt Traum:Yeah, I mean Eddie Harris is going back to him a little bit. He was really, you could argue, maybe one of the first pioneers to really kind of electrify the wind instruments, unless you can think of anybody before that.
Dr. Tom Rhea:No that he.
Matt Traum:And this is pre-Lyricon too. This is by several years.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Oh yeah, this is quite early. I'm trying to think of a trumpet player that used the. I think I call I think the Varitone.
Matt Traum:Clark Terry did some electronic things too. Jazz trumpet player.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, that's the guy. I'm afraid I never interviewed him, but I knew about what he was doing and that's why I think I asked is this the Veritone? Which I don't know. Again, the dates I'm always fuzzy on dates, even as a so-called historian, you know, because in all candor, dates are not all that important. Who was the absolute first person that ever did anything? That's not what's critical. What really matters is the firstest with the mostest, as Old Hickory said. You know, getting there at first is not the thing, but what you do with it. So it's not only the firstest, it's the mostest. So I think of a lot of cases where people argue over who was first at something, and I'm like no.
Dr. Tom Rhea:It's who had a big hit in the marketplace, in the marketplace of ideas and people and, frankly, sales. I mean, in other words, who had an impact on our musical culture, an impact on our musical culture. I'm not a fanboy of anybody, but you have to admire somebody that's made it in the music business one way or the other. It's so tough and part of that is sales. You know, how did they do? Did it make an impact? Hugh Le Caine was a very, very talented designer of instruments, but his instruments were so strange and wonderful and kind of out of the center that he never had to face the cauldron of the marketplace, as I call it. And you know I'm a kind of a combination of an idealist and a capitalist. It's one thing to have one of someplace, it's another thing to bring something forth and to affect an entire generation of musicians.
Matt Traum:Yeah, exactly, just going back to Eddie Harris for one more moment here we've got two more clips of him talking from this interview in 1977. The first one is how he got involved with Selmer, helping them develop their product, and then also there was another little section where he's talking about the importance of having musicians who actually play these instruments, help design the product, and I found that one very interesting too. So let's play those two clips and maybe we can comment on it afterwards.
Speaker 8:So where did you get? You got the reputation for the electrifying or the electric, Eddie Harris.
Speaker 7:Well, what happened was Electro-Voice got in cahoots with Selmer to put a pickup on the saxophone, which you know about. Sure, when was that, though? 1965 And for the prototype, they wanted to experiment.
Recording:They went out and got the guys who they thought were the better players at the time to do it.
Speaker 7:They came down here. They got Boots Randolph he didn't want to deal with it. They got Stanley Getz he didn't want to deal with it. So they went down the chain of command. Then they went to Sonny Stitt and he didn't want to deal with it. What happened? A guy was there at Selmer that told them a guy who they needed to go to was a guy named Eddie Harris over there in Chicago. So they were trying different guys you know the late John Coltrane guys didn't want to play it, so they got me to come over there. See, that goes into dealing with musicians to help design these things.
Speaker 7:Because a guy just put in said this works here, this works here, it's okay, it comes out, it's just a, it's a computer machine, right.
Speaker 8:Has no feeling. Do you think part of the problem is with horns like that? With a saxophone, you are responsible for every sound that happens. Yes, and with an electronic thing, in the first place you've got a circuit that's actually producing the tone. You're just sort of controlling it. And also, like on a lot of synthesizers, you'll have vibrato.
Speaker 8:that'll be done with voltage, you know and stuff like that. The more that gets out of the musician's hands, the less it sounds like a musician playing. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe that's what I was telling you about this little ribbon on this instrument. You can at least get back into the horn pitch-wise. It's not like a keyboard. It's so far away from what's being produced.
Matt Traum:So long, about maybe 1979, Crumar licensed a couple products from Nyle Steiner, as far as I can tell, his Steiner EVI and then also the Steiner-designed Master's Touch. These are two very expressive instruments. One is designed obviously for trumpet players. It's basically a wind controller, an analog wind controller. The other one is a very interesting product that sits on the table and it's a control voltage output and it has three sensors on it.
Matt Traum:There's a mouthpiece that's similar to today's EWI, which has a breath sensor and a bite sensor in the mouthpiece, a little rubberized mouthpiece, and so there's two sensors there, and then down on the unit itself is a little wiggle sensor, basically the same the EWI vibrato sensor nowadays. So you've got three controllers there, and that was designed for keyboard players that they would interface that via CV into an analog-type synthesizer. It also featured an analog filter built inside of the box that was a Steiner filter essentially, so you could feed a signal into it from your keyboard that you're playing and then add the expression with breath vibrato by biting the mouthpiece and or the finger. So those two instruments, Tom. You wrote the manuals for those, so you were right on the cutting edge of this. Do you have any comments about the development of those instruments and writing the manual and working with them.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Well, I actually had nothing to do with the development of those instruments. I might say I thought the instruments were so nuance-filled I wanted to do the gig, but just to let you know how things work in the real world, okay. So I wrote the EVI manual and I sent it away and it's like okay, I didn't even get what they call galleys back. You know, here's what it's going to look like. And what happened is, evidently they did something called flopping. They flopped the graphic so that it no longer made any sense. You know, in other words, what I was talking about with words didn't fit the graphics anymore. So those are the kinds of things that can happen. Many have slipped between the cup and the lip, but still, intelligent people were able to maybe realize oh yeah, okay, I see what's happened here.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I wound up having an EVI and a master's touch as part of the gig. I was not paid a whole lot of money, but that was not in Nyle's hands. That was I think that was MTI at that point the Brieffels. I think I got paid $500 for each one of those manuals, but I would have written them in essence for nothing, because I believed in what Nyle was doing and I had known him all the way back at the time when it was Steiner Parker, you know, when he had a a partner, nominal partner, and I bought some modules from him at that point and, uh, I was very happy that he he made a wind instrument yeah, two very expressive, uh, products that came out around that same year I guess, and I don't think people realize the expression possibilities from those even now, 45 years later, almost no, it's when the synthesizer in general was unleashed on keyboard players.
Dr. Tom Rhea:In some sense it's. It's unfortunate that it was for keyboard players. Some people argue that Buchla's was because a few of his instruments had keyboards, that it was this or that you know. But and I knew Don, he was stayed overnight in his home, sat with him in his kitchen. It's not about me being at Moog or him being at Buchla, nothing about that. I didn't care about that kind of thing as I went around representing Moog. I was really representing nuance in the electronic musical instrument world at every juncture. Again, who is there firstest with the mostest? I mean, Don did wonderful instruments but they didn't have much impact really. Morton Subotnick and a few other people in a small coterie in California and a few other people, but brilliant though they may be. It's sort of like Raymond Scott did some brilliant instruments, but Raymond was very much like the paranoid originator of things you know the very secretive and stuff like that and therefore his story is not told very well.
Matt Traum:Okay so, we should probably talk about your book, your new book, your project here, such a beautiful piece of work that you've done. It's a work of art, it's a museum quality book and we have some audio clips. This book, as I mentioned, it's 400 pages and comes in a hardcover and lots of color and just beautifully restored pictures and it also includes two CDs with lots of audio examples of these really interesting old music synthesizers, sound synthesizers. You know the synthesizer didn't start with Moog when Switched-O n Bach came out in the late 1960s. Synthesizers have been around decades before that and, shall I say, century.
Matt Traum:Over a hundred years before that you know, as beginnings of electricity, they were starting to want to make music with electronic means and so a lot of these synthesizers. There was all kinds of developments that happened before the Moog that people don't realize, and that's. That's really the thing that I got out of this book, just seeing how many attempts at different innovations came about, going way, way back, much longer than people realize. So maybe we could talk a little bit about the book. First of all, we should mention that if you're interested in this book, you can purchase it. It's available for shipping right now for purchase. The website for it is electronicperspectives. com and there's information there where you go up there and click on it and you can order.
Matt Traum:Of course, Dr Tom's website, his personal website, has a plethora of media and restored archived documents. There's audio recordings, even some links to video recordings of historic significance, and Dr Tom's website is drtomrhea. com, that's d-r-t-o-m-r-h-e-a. com. So those two websites you can, you can go back and forth and you'll see information on the book at both of them. So maybe, um Tom, would you like to comment a little bit about this project and how it got started, and yeah, well, the spine of EP I call it electronic perspectives is exactly that.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Electronic perspective is a column that I wrote monthly from 1977 through 1981 in Keyboard magazine. However, I've stretched the idea greatly. You know there's a lot in there about the Theremin, the ondes Martenot, there's some stuff on Nyle Steiner and the EVI. I really stretched it's way beyond the keyboard format and the keyboard idea. The book was designed by Joe Bastardo and you'll see his work if you go to my website and the Electronic Perspectives. So yeah, it underwent a lot of changes from starting out just being the 52 columns and then, oh well, I've got other stuff. I'll make what Joe and I decided to call double-wides, pages left and right, that sort of amplify the columns. You know that have extra pictures, patent drawings, things, and Joe, he basically restored all of those graphics, and at any rate, Brian Kehew of Recording the Beatles fame co-author of that was the curator for the audio stuff.
Dr. Tom Rhea:There's two CDs chock full of gems and stones. Some things sound awful but that's the nature of historical stuff and some things are beautiful. So we have some of both. I chose CDs because there are millions of CD players that will always be working, at least for our foreseeable lifetimes. And who knows about the Internet? It blinks on and off, things come and go and you get 404s no longer available, and I'm kind of an old gearhead, so that's it, that's what you get well. I chose a five or six audio clips that were included on these CDs that I thought were interesting.
Matt Traum:They they sort of highlight some historic and significant synthesizers and so maybe we could play these clips and you can comment on the instrument that we're hearing afterwards and say you know, tell us what's unique about it, what's important about that instrument. Okay, so this first one is Clara Rockmore playing the Theremin. Of course she's the grand dame of the Theremin. Very interesting story about her. I think there was a movie about her and Mr. Theremin himself. So here's a Theremin performance. (music)
Alistair Parnell:You could almost be listening to someone singing that. It's incredible.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, and it's kind of interesting and this was pointed out to me at the first ContinuCon where Lippold Haken brought a group of people together and we celebrated the Haken Continuum. That was back in North Carolina some years ago. Of course, most of these instruments are not synthesizers. You know, when people say, well, the theremin was a synthesizer, no, a synthesizer in the classical sense is something that puts its sound together through constituent elements, the atomic parts of sound, duration, pitch, formants, you know, and waveforms and stuff like that, and you put together a sound. The Theremin was a unified instrument in the orchestral tradition, as was the ondes Martenot the and, to a certain extent, the Jenny Ondioline that we might hear. This is from the master tape, thanks to Steve Sherman. Very interesting. You mentioned the idea of a film about Clara Rockmore who was playing there. Actually, Bob and Shirleigh Moog made a video which is again on my website, the Dr Tom Rhea version. Who was there? Well, Bob was there, I was there, Clara was there and her sister, Nadia Reisenberg, the famous pianist from Juilliard, a teacher at Juilliard and also an artist and Bobby Sherman from the classical music station in New York City and it was done video vérité by none other than Ralf Bode, b-o-d-e. Now, Ralf Bode, the late Ralf Bode, was a son of Harald Bode. Ralf had a few cinematography credits, like Saturday Night Fever, Coal Miner's Daughter a few minor things like that. He was a very famous cinematographer and he was there and there was a guy with a stick with a mic on the end of it and Ralf dancing around with his video camera. It's a wonderful production and it's been cleaned up by Matt Traum. As a matter of fact, I'm very proud of what we did there. So yeah, the theremin Bob Moog described it as the most novel and difficult instrument.
Dr. Tom Rhea:You know that was ever done. It's probably true. A lot of people don't realize that it has two antennae. You never touch it. You wave your hands in front of these antennae and you control pitch and loudness. And the interesting thing is that's all you're controlling. And when you change the loudness it does change the waveform because of something called nonlinear wave shaping. But that was because it used vacuum tubes. So these were of their time, of their generation. They used the technology of that generation, radio technology.
Matt Traum:And we're looking at 100 years ago on this instrument or more on the Theremin.
Dr. Tom Rhea:The theremin came in at about. Oh yeah, wow, there I go again. Yeah, 1917 or so over 100 years, wow.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, more than 100 years. And Theremin actually played the Lev Termen, which was his name, was Gallicized to Leon. Theremin actually played his instrument for Lenin, you know the communist, and he wound up going to France and making a big stir there. Then he came to the US and he was lionized by the cognoscenti of musical life and it was a big deal. It wasn't just a horror film thing which it sort of descended to. And if you listen to Clara play it and a few others today, it's a marvelous instrument, very, very sensitive.
Matt Traum:And they're still being made, aren't they? The Moog company's still making them. Yeah, and that's how Moog started originally. He was building theremin kits and selling them.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, actually he was in graduate school and he was getting through by selling of all things, by the way, amplifiers, like guitar amplifiers, and of course he had no idea about the amplifiers because he tried to build an amplifier that was clean and that's the last thing that guitar players want. But he sold a bunch of them and he also sold a bunch of theremin kits and that was kind of the start. And then he met Herb Deutsch and they ginned up this crazy thing called a Moog synthesizer and a lot of other people got involved in that Wendy Carlos and Gustav Ciamaga, Vladimir Ussachevsky defined the ADSR envelope generator. It was a whole host of people and Bob was very sensitive. Bob Moog was very sensitive to listening to musicians I think we talked about earlier Eddie Harris was talking about Selmer bringing in musicians.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I could tell you legions of stories of instruments that either failed or did not meet their promise because the designers didn't listen to musicians. Now, musicians don't design instruments in general, but they have a heck of a lot to say about instruments. So I hope the future will include more involving musicians.
Matt Traum:You know, and anyone who says that theremin clip doesn't sound expressive and human. I don't know what you know, and that's one of the earliest quote synthesizer. It's not a synthesizer, but electronic musical instrument incredibly, incredibly expressive, and you could argue it's more expressive than most synthesizers made today. Yeah, okay, so let's go to the second clip here. This ondes Martenot, and is this a French instrument?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, Maurice Martenot was a uh, he was in the world war and was something like a telegraph operator and he somehow had the idea he was a cellist as a matter of fact an amateur cellist and he had this idea about vacuum tubes, the way they would squeal sometimes, and he sort of put it under control of this instrument that he called the ondes Martenot. On des means waves. It was first called the ondes Musicales and I have a 1928 booklet, the original that I'm hoping to publish sometime of that, and this was kind of the Theremin tamed. You know, very, very difficult to play a Theremin by waving your hands. Very few people can do it. Well, there are a number of ondes Martenot players and there are 300 to 400 works written for the ondes Martenot, including things like Turangalila it's a Sanskrit word and it's a beautiful piece by Messiaen, and this instrument was popular in France but also all over the world, and there are a number of pieces that get played nowadays. It was a nuance filled instrument, as you will hear. (music)
Dr. Tom Rhea:Well, what you're hearing is the fact- I have to do a little dissertation here now, I'm afraid. The piano is a wonderful instrument, but the agency that selects the pitch, the hand. And the agency that articulates the pitch, the hand, you know, you take a finger and you put it on a key, you select the pitch and then you press the key down to a certain velocity and you articulate the sound. On the ondes Martenot, you selected the pitch with your right hand, either on a black and white keyboard although the first models didn't even have a keyboard, they had a wire you would select the pitch with your right hand, but you would articulate the pitch with this button-like thing on your left hand.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Now, why is that important? Because now you have two degrees of freedom. On an ondes Martenot, you can sort of do what a wind instrument does you select the pitch with your fingers on a saxophone, but you articulate the sound with your breath, stream your tongue and so forth. So on the ondes Martenot you could just like a wind instrument. You could slur and play, for instance, tah-e-ta-tah-e-ta-tah-e-ta ta ta. And so you have, unlike the synthesizer, which has an ADSR or even more complicated, non-valuable generator. It's still you press a key and it goes through its timings. Now they've become much more sophisticated nowadays, of course, with velocity and force sensitivity, but still it's not like a guitar, for instance, where how you pluck and pull and hammer and whatever you do, you immediately get these changes of envelope, as it's called, the way sound is shaped, uh, in loudness in time. The ondes Martenot is excellent with that and that's what you hear in that particular excerpt fascinating.
Matt Traum:So you're hearing the left hand. That's essentially a pressure sensor, correct? Yes, in the left hand. So you can actually do crescendos and decrescendos and sustain notes, unlike a piano, which is basically a drum, a tuned drum that you hit and that's it. You stop it. Yeah, yeah exactly, yeah, yeah. So it's incredibly expressive and you can slur and do vibrato by moving your finger back and forth, like you would on a saxophone, with your bite pressure.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yep, yep, you would do the vibrato on your right hand and your, if you want to think of the breath, and on your left hand there, if you want to think of the breath, and on your left hand there's this button and it's very sensitive and you press it and you can go from like you say. You can do crescendos, decrescendos, you can articulate notes, you can follow up on long notes, almost like martelé bowing on a violin, and then pizzicato immediately afterwards. You don't have to change the envelope generator. You are the envelope generator and you are making the vibrato, not an LFO.
Matt Traum:As you are with the wind controller. And again, this is an instrument that is close to 100 years old, if not more, so yep. Amazing, wow, incredibly expressive. Let's move to the next clip, shall we?
Alistair Parnell:Ondioline, am I pronouncing that right?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yes.
Dr. Tom Rhea:That's Jean-Jacques Pe rrey, p-e-r-r-e-y playing the Ondioline presets. And that's an unaccompanied demo of many of the presets played by one of its premier artists. That's courtesy of Jean-Jacques Perrey, Patricia Leroy, with thanks to Wally De Backer. Now Wally, stage name Gotye, has taken it upon himself to restore a dozen or more Ondiolines. It was developed by Georges Jenny J E N N Y.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I don't know, remember the exact dates, but it was somewhat after the ondes Martenot , I guess in some ways it has more colorful presets than the ondes Martenot. O ne of the interesting things about the ondes Martenot it has three different kinds of speakers. It has a thing that looks like a lute and a thing that looks like a gong and a thing that just looks like a regular speaker. And I've often believed it's kind of crazy when modern synthesis have what they call their leads, their stereo pair or how many ever tracks they have, and they present that and you run it through these ordinary speakers. Well, no respecting guitarist would think of that. They know which amp and what kind of outrigger treatments they're going to use to make their voice. The Peavey amp doesn't sound like another amp, for instance a Marshall stack. So why are people stuck without thinking of the speaker as the coupling of the sound into the room?
Matt Traum:Exactly, we've talked about it in past episodes, where the speaker is part of the instrument.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, oh, absolutely yeah.
Matt Traum:Just as though the bell is on a trumpet or a saxophone. Very important. Yep, yep. And they all have their own sound too. So you have to select that, just like you would select a mouthpiece for your instrument, perhaps, or a reed thickness, yep. So the next clip we have is Hugh Le Caine, the Electronic Sackbut. I think Hugh was a Canadian. Yep and he had a very expressive instrument as well. It had a glide function and you could do portamento and very expressive. Any comments about this instrument? What was different about it?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Only that almost everything that Hugh did was unique in the best sense of that word. One of almost he populated Canadian electronic music studios with all manner of instrumentation, I would call it. Mostly, when I first met Mr Le Caine, he was very guarded because he realized that I was the Moog rep. I'd written the Minimoog manual. I think he was actually thinking that his electronic Sackbut would be vying against the Minimoog, which of course no. I mean there were reasons for that. Like I say, there's always the idea of the crucible of the marketplace and Mr Le Caine never really had to face that. There's, like I say, there's always the idea of the crucible of the marketplace and Mr Le Caine never really had to face that. He was established by the Canadian Research Board or something like that and subsidized and although his instrumentation was incredibly marvelous and unique and things like that, it really, uh, would have survived in in the marketplace as such and was this instrument ever released commercially, or was it just a one-off?
Dr. Tom Rhea:The pictures I've seen look like it was just pieces of wood and it didn't look very finished. There was more than one of the prototype that you see in my book, but basically it was not what we call a production model. You know, it's not something that was produced and it didn't have to be. And to me Mr Le Caine was the quintessential engineer. There's an old story in the musical instrument business what's the job? The first job of the chief marketing person is to shoot the chief engineer, because if you don't shoot the chief engineer, he or she will continue to change and develop and, you know, bring forth more prototypes and so forth. At a certain point you have to say, yeah, this is what we're selling, let's get it out there, and you know. So there's a good bit of truth in that little aphorism, or story.
Matt Traum:So this looks like this is a realization of the Gluck String Quartet. Is that correct from 1953?
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, you know musically, and I would warn all of my listeners when you're listening to things, you have to listen to them in the context, the time in which they were done, the situation. But what I hear when I listen to things, because I'm interested in instruments I hear degrees of freedom. In other words, was it capable of doing this, was it capable of doing portamento, was it capable of doing change of dynamic, change of filtering, et cetera, et cetera. You know, you hear some of these things. It's like wow, that's kind of off the wall, you know. But no, it was actually a very interesting development for its day.
Matt Traum:Well, let's listen to this Hugh Le Caine Sackbut performance.
Recording:Since there is only one instrument in existence to play concerted music, it is necessary to use multiple recording technique, that is, to record the various musical parts separately, then combine them to make the final record. Here are two F-sharps played on a real violin, followed by two more F sharps played on the electronic instrument. When I played the lower parts, I darkened the timbre progressively until, for the lowest part, I thought a cello-like sound was being produced by the electronic instrument. The four parts played together sound like this. (music)
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, to me this proves that instrument designers should not do their own demonstrations. I knew he was a wonderful, wonderful man, but you know, it's rare that the instrument designer is also a really virtuosic musician. Now, Nyle Steiner was a notable exception. Nyle, if I'm not mistaken. Matt, didn't he play with the Utah Symphony? I believe that's correct. Yes, trumpet yeah, he was a pretty darn good trumpet player to begin with. And when you listen to him play good trumpet player to begin with, and when you listen to him play even today you know the EVI and the EWI it's like wow, you know, this is a guy that can get around. And, as a matter of fact, Vladimir Ussachevsky, one of the composers from the RCA Center who worked on the RCA synthesizer and some other kinds of equipment, must have thought so, because he wrote four studies for clarinet and EVI, in which Nyle played the EVI part and F. Gerard Errante played the clarinet part. The two of them paired up and they pretty much stand on an equal footing. Let's have a listen, shall we? (music)
Speaker 6:(music)
Dr. Tom Rhea:Yeah, that was the fourth of four Studies for Clarinet and EVI 1980, by Vladimir Ussachevsky.
Matt Traum:The third is a study using the EVI alone and again it's startling the expressivity of the instrument. Absolutely. And so your book basically more or less sort of ends around the early 1980s as far as technology, but there have been, of course, many innovations since, and one of the things that you include in the book is the Haken Continuum, which is a more modern instrument currently available and it's extremely expressive. It's a keyboard sort of, with pressure and side to side response and up and down response. So you want to explain a little bit about the Continuum?
Dr. Tom Rhea:As a matter of fact, my last column was in 1981 because Keyboard Magazine just decided they didn't want to continue the columns. I had to argue for the last five or six to be included, including Bob Moog and a little bit about computers. But I didn't have any time for Al Pearlman ARP or Nyle Steiner or Tom Oberheim or Dave Smith, and if I sell enough copies of EP I hope to augment the book and write columns and have the same kinds of graphics in between that you'll find in the book. But at any rate, the Haken Continuum is a product of Lippold Haken, h-a-k-e-n. Edmund Eagan, who did a great deal of the sound, generating possibilities of this instrument, and you might think of it as a three-dimensional surface X and Y, maybe up and down. It looks like a keyboard, although it's red and black instead of white and black Up and down, which is the force, sensitivity, although you can assign things any way you want to, like modern instruments, and then forward to back might be timbre, for instance.
Dr. Tom Rhea:And there's some marvelous music being made on the Haken Continuum and, as a matter of fact, we were lucky to have Rob Schwimmer, who is a thereminist, a keyboardist, a Haken Continuum player, if you go to YouTube and listen to him. He plays jazz on the Haken Continuum. It's amazing, it's a polyphonic instrument and and it's quite capable of the kind of nuance that I truly admire in a musical instrument. So here is Rob, improvising and with no overdubs whatsoever, a brief excerpt on the Haken Continuum.
Alistair Parnell:Yeah, it's an incredibly immersive sound and it's kind of hard to believe that's just one player with no overdubs- you were saying? Exactl y. Incredible.
Dr. Tom Rhea:That's Rob Schwimmer playing Winter Skipping Pond 2020. Just a free improvisation. That's the kind of talent he has, but of course it has. I guess I have to name everything and codify it in some sense. It has what I call context management. In other words, you don't have envelope generators determining envelopes, you do it with your hands. If you press down hard, you get a louder sound. If you do it quickly, you get a pizzicato-like sound or you can draw it out. And you don't have an LFO low frequency oscillator doing modulation. You are the LFO, you do it with your hands. You know I guess I'm a performer at heart that I think the farther you get the musician away from the sound object, the more mechanical it starts to sound, and to me the Haken Continuum is the epitome of great context management for our musical instrument.
Alistair Parnell:So, Tom, we've covered some incredibly interesting kind of historical journey there and it sounds like the book is just an amazing resource. I'm just interesting, before we kind of wind this interview up with you, do you have any thoughts about kind of current day instruments or where you think things should be going? Are you happy seeing what we have, you know, present day?
Dr. Tom Rhea:in the old days you could. You could tell by ear what somebody was playing and you know there were definitive sounds for the various brands of synthesizers. They had earmarks, if you will. Nowadays, electronics has become so ubiquitous and, of course, sampling and physical modeling have made things essentially transparent. It's very difficult to even know who is playing what. We're in an amazing time.
Dr. Tom Rhea:I'm just happy that Bob Moog's dream, I think, is happening now, because some people have typified Bob. Well, he had a keyboard. You know, in actual fact Brian Kehew, co-author of Recording the Beatles, is working on a Moog company history and he showed me a paper that said that Bob actually did 15 to 20 different kinds of interfaces just in the first few years, that he was developing way beyond just a keyboard. He had a Theremin thing, he had something called a Trazor which anticipated in some sense the Continuum, I mean just a myriad of other things. So you know he was no slouch in that and that's what Bob thought was important and should happen because, if I may say, he and I were birds of a feather regarding that.
Dr. Tom Rhea:It's the idea that the musician should have control, should have the capability, and of course this would require practice. You know, nothing is automatic, nothing is free, as I used to tell my students. No, you know, there's no other way. There you got to spend your 10,000 hours, and it's not Calvinistic, it's just realistic. So I think we're in a very exciting time right now. A lot of things are happening that are adding to the sense of nuance, and I'm just grateful you know that we've moved in that direction and have not totally stagnated. Now, whether or not music as such will move in that direction remains to be seen. Yeah, interesting.
Alistair Parnell:And what about the second part of the question? Do you have any kind of composers who you, you know, hold in high regard currently, that are using a lot of synthesized music?
Dr. Tom Rhea:I don't keep up. You know this is 2024. I'm 80 years old. I've kept my head down the last six years doing this book. I have a wonderful hybrid studio next door, but I decided that nothing I could make in that studio, no kind of music I could compose or create, would be as important as this book for people you know. So I did the book. Maybe I'll get back into the studio now, I don't know and I'll start listening more.
Dr. Tom Rhea:But the problem with listening nowadays is you have to wade through an awful lot of stuff you just don't want to hear. It's different. People gripe about the big five or big six. In the old days, you know, they kept people from getting this and that done, but they also acted as arbiters in some sense. Of course there's no such thing as a record store in some ways now, but a few years back I would go into Boston and I'd go into this shop that still had what we now call CDs and it was like row after row after row of Jungle and this and that, you know, and Electronica and stuff like that. You know, democracy is a two-edged sword. The democratization of the means of making music means you can make a hit right in your bedroom. But the problem with that is, everybody will try it, Everybody will put theirs out online and you'll have to wade through all kinds of stuff before you find the gold. So everything's a two-edged sword. I'm just not going to cut myself lately. I'm just not going to cut myself lately.
Matt Traum:Well, we want to thank the great Dr Tom Rhea for joining us as our first guest here on the Aerophone Academy podcast and it's been an honor to have you as a friend and to have you today with us and I wish you the very best on your book. And again, if people would like to purchase this book, it's called Electronic Perspectives Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments and all the information and ordering is up at electronicperspectives. com and also Tom's personal website that he has where there's all kinds of manuals and PDFs and restored documents and restored documents Incredible resource for synthesizer fanatics is at drtomraycom. That's D-R-T-O-M-R-H-E-A. com. Both of those are highly recommended websites. Once again, thank you so much, Dr Rhea, and we appreciate your time.
Dr. Tom Rhea:Still just Tom. Thank you, Matt and Alistair. I appreciate you know getting on air and, uh, sort of exposing some of my viewpoints. Thanks much it's.
Alistair Parnell:It's been such an interesting uh conversation. Uh, Tom, we absolutely appreciate, and I'm sure everybody that's listening is is has found it equally enthralling as I have. So please make sure that you subscribe to our podcast and if you have the opportunity to share the podcast with somebody else, that would be very much appreciated. And give us a thumbs up and leave us a five star review that would also be very helpful and leave us a five-star review. That would also be very helpful.
Alistair Parnell:We look forward to the next episode where we are looking at doing talking about brass emulations. You may remember, in the fourth episode we did woodwind and in the sixth episode we're looking at brass emulation tips. So, as always, if you have any particular questions that you want to leave us, there's an email link in the podcast notes below and you can also you leave us one of those kind of voicemails through the link down there as well. That way we get to hear your voice on the next podcast. Once again, thanks everybody for listening and thank you to our special guest, Dr Tom Rhea. Take care everybody. See you in the next one.