Saturday, January 9, 2010

My hero / Bob Moog by Don Paterson



My hero Bob Moog

Don Paterson
Saturday 9 January 2010


B
ob Moog had a great name, which seemed to fit his machines almost as well as Mr Hoover's did his. (He never convinced anyone to pronounce it correctly: it rhymes with rogue.) He was also as far from the public image of "Dr Moog", the lab-coated evil genius and destroyer of human music, as it was possible to get: a sweet, patient, articulate man who saw himself purely as a toolmaker, determined to narrow, not widen, the gap between the player and the instrument.


As important as recordings such as Wendy Carlos's Switched-on Bach were in bringing Moog's synthesizer to the wider public, these early excursions now sound pretty dated. What remain as fresh as ever are the timelessly gorgeous sounds themselves, which have been so thoroughly assimilated into the soundscape of contemporary music that Moog's influence is much too deep to be quantified. Hans Fjellestad's documentary, Moog, saw the good doctor dragged all over the planet, mainly so musicians from every generation could tell him how much they owed him. His bemused humility was genuine, touching and an object lesson in how to take a fat compliment.
More than any 20th-century inventor you could name, Moog warmed up the wires and humanised the machine. He was a spiritual man who believed in nothing but material, though he treated matter as a form of energy (which of course it is), one we barely understand. As for his idea that all matter has a residual consciousness . . . well – beyond the hard-won lesson that if you don't love machines, they won't love you back – I'm sceptical. But not only did Moog elaborate this idea with great intellectual sophistication (his wife was a professor in the philosophy of religion), he set about proving it, up to his elbows in Bessel functions and Fourier transforms and circuitboards. His respect for material allowed him to draw the most beautiful sounds out of the ether; in doing so, Bob Moog simply increased the human expressive range. Some toolmaker.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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