A bit of ancient Marxist humor:
This was a skit from the 1924 I’ll Say She Is, re-enacted in 1931 when moving pictures finally had sound.
A bit of musical history:
Jean-Jaques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley recorded what was probably the first electronic music intended for popular audiences. Their first album featured Perrey’s Ondioline, a forerunner of the Moogs and Arps to come, plus tape loops with funny noises. In the musical demonstration during the second half of the video, note how Perrey wiggles the keyboard side to side to obtain a vibrato.
I stumbled across the Perrey video while looking for the episode of To Tell the Truth in which the panelists try to identify the real Robert Moog.1 Perrey and Kingsley used Moog’s modular synthesizer on the second album, over a year before Switched-on Bach. The music from the two Perrey-Kingsley albums is collected here. It may be cheesy, but it’s cheese of high quality. If you’ve been to Disneyland, you may have heard one of their tunes.
The formidable jazz pianist Dick Hyman was another early user of the Moog. “The Minotaur” got some airplay on top-forty radio in 1969, but the flip side was more fun:
Pop quiz: Who said this about what?
Primitive music with all modern conveniences
Claude Debussy on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
Notes
- As I recall, two of the candidates were knowledgeable about avant-garde music; the third said “I don’t know” to nearly every question. The panelists split their vote between the first two. Guess which one was Moog. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s been posted anywhere online yet.
Update: Here it is. My memory wasn’t quite accurate, but the panelists did all get it wrong.