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Bob Moog - Remember two months ago when I mentioned that Jack Kilby died? Yesterday Robert Moog, pioneer of electronic music, died of a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor at the age of 71. A message I received from the WSJ summarized it this way:

Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog (sounds like "vogue") synthesizer, which revolutionized music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died yesterday at the age of 71. An electrical engineer and physicist by training, he first built electronic instruments as a hobby. As a teenager, he made thousands of dollars selling kits for building theremins, instruments with two antennas that make eerie sounds when you wave your hands around them. In 1964, he built the first Moog synthesizer; unlike other synthesizers of the day, it used a keyboard interface. He also made the synthesizers much more cheaply than others, helping to popularize it among musicians. The instrument first grabbed broader attention in 1969, when Walter (later Wendy) Carlos's "Switched-on Bach," an album of Moog versions of Bach tunes, won a Grammy. That year, the Beatles used a Moog in "Abbey Road." In the early 1970s, the introduction of the Minimoog let musicians take the synthesizers onstage, fueling (for better or for worse) the spread of "progressive" artists such as Yes and Genesis. Synthesizers spread in popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s, infiltrating funk and disco, and giving rise to electronic and techno music, which flourish today.

(I thought TJ might be interested in that tidbit about Abbey Road...)

More about Bob Moog at Wikipedia. In a way the Moog synthesizer was like the great grandfather of the Yamaha keyboards that TJ, Claire, and I play on today.