The Bob Moog Foundation has received an extensive donation from inMusic Brands, the parent company of Moog Music. The collection includes Bob Moog’s personal office files and effects from the final years of his tenure at Moog Music, encompassing 4,489 items, including more than 500 schematics and 700 letters.
The donation also includes vintage synthesizers and prototype models, including a Fairlight CMI, a Synton System 3000 modular synthesizer and a bench-model Minimoog Voyager prototype.
The collection contains hundreds of back issues of industry magazines and dozens of rare product catalogs from electronic musical instrument companies. It also includes correspondence between Bob Moog and industry figures including Wendy Carlos, Herb Deutsch, Felix Visser and Lydia Kavina, along with first drafts of book forewords, technical articles, artwork and handwritten engineering notes in schematic notebooks.
“The Bob Moog Foundation serves as an essential steward of one of the most important legacies in electronic music,” said Joe Richardson, president of Moog Music and executive vice president of inMusic. “We are proud to contribute these materials so they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers, educators, musicians, and fans. As Moog Music continues to bring creative tools to artists around the world, the Foundation’s educational mission helps ensure that the ideas, curiosity, and ingenuity that defined Bob Moog continue to inspire others.”
Among the test models are Moogerfooger prototypes, a Multiple Resonant Filter test fixture and a Moog Phone Controller model PC-30. The donation also includes 16 multi-drawer cabinets containing capacitors, integrated circuits and other electronic components used to create and repair Moog synthesizers. The Foundation said evaluating, documenting and archiving the donation has taken more than a year.
The donation continues a relationship among inMusic, Moog Music and the independent Bob Moog Foundation. Previous inMusic donations include Bob Moog’s 2002 Technical Grammy and the original woodworking lathe used by Bob Moog and his father, George Moog, to make cabinetry for early Moog instruments.
“The Bob Moog Foundation is deeply grateful to inMusic for this incredible, generous donation of historical archival material,” said Michelle Moog-Koussa, executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation. “Every donated piece helps us tell the story of Bob’s complex, indelible legacy. This donation helps solidify the Bob Moog Foundation Archives as a world-class repository for Moog and electronic music history.”
The Foundation’s archive contains more than 15,000 pieces related to Bob Moog and his collaborators. The material is preserved for researchers, journalists and museums and is featured at the Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina.
For more information, visit moogfoundation.org.