Robert Moog has passed away.
He was no doubt an important man, whose invention has added much to the vocabulary of music. I cannot say that I am a fan of the Moog synthetizer myself, but it has been well used by great musicians, and therefore has done all that a musical instrument should do. However, the people who talk of a "musical revolution" and of the "first electronic instrument" do a disservice to the unhappy Lev Sergeyevic Theremin, the exiled Russian genius who invented the real first electronic instrument - the Theremin, that emits an eerie and oddly inhuman muted glissando howl - and who was abducted by Soviet agents from his New York home in 1938, taken to Russia, and forced to invent for Stalin and his successors until Communism failed and he was let out, aged and fragile, into the light of day. His is one of the many hideous tragedies caused by the revolutionary movements of the last century, and should be remembered. Plus, it actually influenced Robert Moog, who built a Theremin himself before going on to devise his synthetizer. Moog, unlike Theremin, had the good luck never to draw the attention of any tyrant worse than studio heads and producers. May he rest in peace; there are worse things to do with one'slife than to add to the stock of musical sounds. Ironically, to the best of my knowledge Lev Theremin is still alive, and has had a few years at least to enjoy freedom and the fruit of his talent.