On Instruments.(ANALOG DAYS; THE CLAVICHORD; MANUFACTURING THE MUSE)(Brief Article)

Robert Moog's moment of revelation came in 1964 when he and a colleague realized the acoustic possibilities of a pair of voltage-controlled oscillators. "It was my turn for my head to blow," he recalls in ANALOG DAYS, by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco (Harvard), a history of the Moog synthesizer. Electronic sound had, until then, been the province of the classical avant-garde, but the Moog came to dominate the counterculture--so much so that Mick Jagger hired one of Moog's staffers in 1968 to teach him how to play it.

Most musical instruments have less definite birth dates. The clavichord probably developed from precursors like the monochord and the psaltery sometime in the fifteenth century, but no one knows exactly how. Bernard Brauchli's THE CLAVICHORD (Cambridge) exhaustively charts the instrument's four-century career until its decline, in the mid-nineteenth ...