Electronic Perspectives: Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments

Tom Rhea’s colourful, comprehensive and insightful history of electrical and electronic music machines includes CDs with audio examples.

When I was a kid, among my greatest joys was getting one of those Christmas toy catalogues in the mail. While my sister wanted the dolls and games and my friends all wanted the baseball gloves and football helmets, I salivated over techie stuff: transistor radios, electric trains and cars, building and highway construction sets, and walkie‑talkies. Opening Electronic Perspectives: Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments is a lot like poring over one of those catalogues, only looking backwards. It’s a huge and beautifully put‑together compendium of electrical and electronic musical toys, going back well over a century.

Overview

Tom Rhea was the right guy to write this book. He is one of the sages of the electronic music era, having penned a column called 'Electronic Perspectives' for the late, lamented Contemporary Keyboard (later just Keyboard) magazine from 1977 to 1981. His PhD thesis, back in the days before the Minimoog (for which he wrote the owner’s manual), was on the evolution of electronic instruments. He had a 30‑year career teaching college courses in synthesis and synthesizers.

The book reflects the enormous knowledge Rhea has accumulated: it’s over 400 pages, and weighs upwards of seven pounds. All 51 of his columns are here, reproduced with their original layout and typefaces, accompanied by over 300 pages of illustrations, and bound in stiff cardboard with a hard slipcover. Attached to the back cover are two CDs containing some 53 musical examples totalling 1.5GB, some of which have never been heard before, and there are extensive notes about each track. It is, in one oversized volume, the history of electronic music, in words, pictures and recordings, from the pre‑vacuum‑tube era to the dawn of digital audio workstations.

Much of the information in his columns would still, even in the age of Google, not be easy to find.

What might be most remarkable about the columns, besides how well they hold up today, is that Rhea did all of the research for them the old‑fashioned way, long before there was an Internet. As musician and author Brian Kehew, who helped on the project, says in his foreword, Rhea used “card catalogues, engineering and music indices, telephone books, letters written, books in library stacks, old newspapers and magazines, [and] flights to interview pioneers using his cassette tape recorder”, as well as the New York Times on microfilm. Much of the information in his columns would still, even in the age of Google, not be easy to find. Stylistically, though, the columns don’t feel at all dated — Rhea’s conversational voice remains as pleasant to read as it is informative.

But while the columns form the basic framework of the book, they are enormously augmented by the work of graphic artist Joseph Bastardo, whose contributions include restorations of vintage ads, product brochures, concert programs, photos, patent documents, newspaper and magazine articles, and many other materials. As you can see from the sample spreads included in this review, they are simply gorgeous.

Some of the instruments the book covers will be familiar to today’s readers: the Theremin, the Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric pianos, the Hammond organ, and Robert Moog’s analogue synthesizers. Some others will be less well‑known: the RCA Mark II synthesizer, for example, which, with its 1700...