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Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer.

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Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. By Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. [xv, 368 p. ISBN 0-674-00889-8 (pbk.)] Index, bibliography, illustrations, discography, glossary.

In 1954, nineteen-year-old Robert Moog founded a small company to facilitate the manufacturing and selling of Theremins and Theremin kits. As detailed in Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, this was but a first small step in a journey that would eventually make the name "Moog" perhaps the single-most identifiable "brand name" in synthesizers. The 2002 publication of this book is timed nicely to correspond with the recent flurry of activities leading up to the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the 1954 founding of the R. A. Moog Company. These include the 2002 award of a special Technical Grammy award to Moog, the 2004 release of director Hans Fjellestad's documentary Moog (Brooklyn, NY: Plexigroup, 2005, on DVD), and the 2004 and 2005 Moogfest concerts.

The book joins several others published in the last fifteen years that focus on electro-acoustic music history, and more specifically, electronic music instruments and their developers. These books include Reynold Weidenaar's Magic Music from the Telharmonium (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995), Albert Glinsky's Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000),...

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