HAGGADAH DA-VIDA.(The Talk of the Town)(Gershon Kingsley)(Interview)

One recent evening, the composer Gershon Kingsley and his wife, Lillian, had some guests over to their apartment at the Parc Vendome, on West Fifty-sixth Street. The conversation centered on electronic music, which Kingsley pioneered in the nineteen-seventies. One of the guests was a young Englishman named Roger Bennett, whose company, Reboot Stereophonic, has just reissued a two-CD set of Kingsley's music called "God Is a Moog." It includes a piece called "Shabbat for Today" and an electronic operetta titled "The Fifth Cup," which is meant to accompany a Passover seder.

Kingsley is best known for the whizzing and whirring scores he wrote for Coca-Cola and Dunkin' Donuts commercials in the seventies, and for his pingy 1972 composition "Popcorn," which has been covered hundreds of times over the years (it was recently the basis for a popular cell-phone ringtone credited to a babbling cartoon character named Crazy Frog). But he composed music on Judaic themes, too. Kingsley was born in Germany in 1922 and escaped to Palestine in 1938. While living on a kibbutz, he memorized songs by Benny Goodman. He moved to America in 1946 and worked for Bugsy Siegel, as a piano player in the Flamingo Hotel; later, he was the organist for a Beverly Hills synagogue. After coming to New York, in 1955, and working as a Broadway conductor, Kingsley bought one of the earliest synthesizer keyboards built by Robert Moog. He went on to record some of the first commercially successful albums of electronic music.

Kingsley's hulking keyboards are set up in his living room, surrounded by framed photographs. In one picture, the young Kingsley sits at a keyboard as Leonard Bernstein looks on. In another, an even younger Kingsley can be seen playing with a jazz quintet: the image is captioned "One Jew and Four Palestinians (Arabs) Playing Jazz." The apartment's kitchen was out of commission, so the host was at a loss when it came to refreshments. A true New Yorker by now, he considered sending out for two cups of tea.

Wearing a snug black turtleneck and gray slacks, Kingsley sat down at his Apple computer and presented a short primer on his work. The music for a 1972 commercial for Hanes runproof stockings is mostly vocal noises modified by a Moog--"That's the stockings falling apart," Kingsley ...