Herb Deutsch Has Passed Away

video upload by Moog Music Inc



Herb Deutsch passed away yesterday. He was born on Feb 9th, 1932, making him 90 at the time of his passing. If you come to this site you know who he is. You can find pages of posts featuring him here. He was constantly active in the synth community, from it's birth as the co-inventor of the Moog Synthesizer with Bob Moog, to this day. I thought I would share the recent GIANTS video featuring him above from February this year.

When the greats pass away, I like to capture images and bios at the time of their passing. To the left is Herb Deutsch's current Facebook profile image. Directly below that is the last update of his posted on December 7. Below that is an image from the Wikipia page for him with the text that immediately follows. Finally, below that are some images of him from the early days from Moog Music's Herb Deutsch Looks Back on the Early Days of Electronic Music tribute.

He and Morton Subotnick likely had the greatest influences on the design of synthesisers as we know them. Herb brought us the tonal influence via the keyboard as the direct interface for a synthsizer and Subotnick brought us atonal sound exploration akin to tape manipulation.

via Wikipedia

"Herbert A. Deutsch (February, 1932 - 9 December 2022[1]) was an American composer, inventor, and educator. Currently professor emeritus of electronic music and composition at Hofstra University, he is best known for co-inventing the Moog Synthesizer with Bob Moog in 1964.

Deutsch died on 9 December 2022.[2]

Herbert A. Deutsch (February, 1932 - 9 December 2022[1]) was an American composer, inventor, and educator. Currently professor emeritus of electronic music and composition at Hofstra University, he is best known for co-inventing the Moog Synthesizer with Bob Moog in 1964.

Early life and education
Deutsch was born in 1932 in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York. At the age of four, he first realized he had a musical gift. Through his childhood, he studied music and began composing at a young age. Deutsch attended the Manhattan School of Music, earning his B.A. and M.A. there.

Work with Moog
Deutsch had assembled a theremin based on Moog's design in 1962 and in November, 1963 he introduced himself to Moog at a music-education conference in Rochester, NY.[3] In 1964 Moog and Deutsch started investigating the possibilities of a new instrument to aid composers.[4] Deutsch has been credited with the keyboard interface of the Moog.[4] He composed the first piece ever for the Moog ("Jazz Images - A Worksong and Blues"[3]) and performed early Moog concerts at The Town Hall and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1969's Jazz in the Garden [5]).[6] The prototype Moog synthesizer, developed by Bob Moog and Herbert Deutsch in 1964, is part of the collections of The Henry Ford museum.[7]

Career
Deutsch was a dedicated educator. In the early 1970s he taught at St. Agnes High School in Rockville Centre, New York. He has taught at Hofstra University for over 50 years and was twice the chair of the music department. Deutsch co-founded the Long Island Composers Alliance in 1972, and worked with music foundation NYSSMA. In 1994 he proposed its Electronic Music Composition Showcase.[8]

via Moog Music's article Herb Deutsch Looks Back on the Early Days of Electronic Music

"On October 12, 1964, Bob Moog unveiled the first modular voltage-controlled synthesizer, an instrument that forever changed the course of modern music.

It began quietly, in 1964, when Bob Moog designed a new electronic instrument to composer Herb Deutsch's request. Herb wanted something to create complex and experimental sounds, tones not easily found from other instruments or with studio trickery. What Bob designed was not wholly new, it sprung from a powerful new combination of existing ideas. The concepts, when combined with some elegant design choices, made a very powerful and revolutionary new system. The new ideas found in the Moog synthesizer took several years to catch on, and it is likely even the first users had little idea what range the new instrument could truly offer."