Music and Technology, Part IV—Michigan State University

By Gary White

One year of teaching music in the public schools in Dolores, Colorado convinced me that public school teaching was not a good long-term occupation for me. I applied to the University of Michigan and Michigan State University schools of music for their PhD programs in music composition. Having been accepted at both, I chose Michigan State because their offer of graduate teaching assistantship support was better.

We moved to East Lansing, Michigan and I got settled into the School of Music as a graduate assistant in music theory. At Michigan State I chose Dr. H. Owen Reed, a midwestern regional composer of distinction, as my composition teacher. My work in music theory was under the direction of Dr. Paul Harder, who was working on teaching materials for the first two years of music theory instruction using a then revolutionary approach called programmed instruction. This was a paper-and-pencil version of what would, in later years, become computer assisted instruction. Again, I was not far from technology.

When it came time to fulfill the PhD requirement of two foreign languages, I petitioned the university to allow me to study computer programming as a substitute for one of the languages. After considerable controversy, the request was granted and I became the first of many future PhD students who chose computer science as a substitute for one of the foreign language requirements. I proposed to take the full undergraduate sequence in computer science as my fulfillment of the German language requirement. That sequence was three courses in length, which was all the undergraduate computer science courses that Michigan State offered at the time. The courses included programming languages and computer architecture. While I was learning programming I wrote several programs to test music theory principles and a program to output all combinatorial 12-tone rows.

Near the end of my graduate studies at MSU I flew to St. Louis to attend the Music Teachers National Conference annual convention with Dr. Harder and several other graduate students. I was walking through the exhibits area when I saw a young man sitting at a booth with a strange looking high tech gadget behind him. No one was stopping by to find out what he was showing so I stopped and introduced myself. He was Robert Moog and the gadget behind him was the music synthesizer that he had just invented. He had taped versions of what would become the best-selling album Switched On Bach by Walter Carlos that had just been created using the Moog Synthesizer (see photo). I was intrigued and spent the next hour or so learning the basics of music synthesis from this pioneer figure in the field. Music and technology were coming closer and closer together.