Moog music: Albert Glinsky writes biography of trendsetter Bob Moog

What do The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” Stevie Wonder’s "Living for the City," and Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” have in common?

How about the soundtracks of “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Shining,” and “Tron?”

In each case, the recording artist embraced the electric sound of the Moog synthesizer, a technology invented by American engineer Bob Moog in 1964 that created a musical revolution.

After Moog died in 2005, his daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa, executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation, asked Mercyhurst University Professor Emeritus Albert Glinsky to write her father’s biography, a project Glinsky began in 2009.

“One of the reasons she reached out to me was because her father liked my Theremin book so much that he bought copies for friends and made notations in the margins of his favorite parts,” Glinsky said.

“Theremin: Ether Music & Espionage” is Glinsky’s critically acclaimed biography of Moog’s predecessor, Russian physicist Leon Theremin, who invented the electronic musical instrument named after him in 1920.

Glinsky’s latest book, “Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution,” with an introduction by Francis Ford Coppola, is due out from Oxford Press next month and already is generating a buzz. A review by Andy Hamilton in the British publication, The Wire, notes: “Glinsky is a clear, stylish, and exciting writer … he comments that Moog ‘often joked about his accidental success … conditions were favorable in 1964, and his work plugged easily into the zeitgeist. He himself acknowledged that if his synth had debuted 10 years earlier, people might not have known what to do with it. But, in the 1960s, his instrument was like striking a match in a dry forest—it made the whole place catch fire’… It’s a book to savor and return to.”

Glinsky goes on to say that it would be composer Wendy Carlos and her Grammy winning debut album, 1968’s “Switched-On Bach,” in which music by Johann Sebastian Bach was performed on a Moog synthesizer, that helped popularize its use by some of the biggest musical acts of the time, including The Doors, Grateful Dead, and The Beatles.

“The process of writing this book has been an extraordinary experience, and I am proud to be able to offer this definitive story of Bob’s complex life and career,” Glinsky said.