The short version
- In the summer of 1976 Klaus Schulze answered, in an interview, the claim that a synthesizer is not a musical instrument. His official website carries the German original and an English translation.
- The line we picked: "eine Gitarre oder eine Violine wächst doch auch nicht auf dem Baum". A guitar or a violin does not grow on a tree either.
- He had owned his Big Moog for about half a year, and since Moondawn he had been playing with the drummer Harald Grosskopf.
- The site names neither the interviewer nor where the interview first appeared.
The interviewer started with what people were saying. Even among musicians, the question went, you heard that all the Schulzes and Froeses really did was push a button after 2 minutes and slide a fader up after 3 minutes 27 seconds. With machines that cost so much and were so complicated, that cliché was not going away any time soon. How would Schulze answer it? Schulze said that the argument, a synthesizer is a machine and so not a human instrument, was simply nonsense.
Where the line comes from
Schulze's official website runs the interview on two pages. The German original is headed "Sommer 1976", and the English page ends with a note that kdm translated it from the German in 1997. In the introduction the interviewer explained that the first part would only present Schulze's equipment, so the front half of the interview is a tour of the gear. We leave the gear alone here and stand in front of one sentence.
The introduction also catches the mood of the year. The interviewer lined Schulze up with Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Mike Oldfield, Stockhausen and Herbie Hancock, and noted that few people split opinion like they did. What was said about Schulze's music, the introduction says, ran from praise for music of the spheres all the way to "Rumgefrickele am Synthesizer", fiddling about on a synthesizer. The biggest charge, and the least fair, was that these people were not musicians at all.
Having called it nonsense, Schulze began with materials. A synthesizer, like a violin, is made from things that come out of the earth. Quartz, copper and crystals are as natural as wood, strings and a bow. Stradivari himself worked with acids, temperatures and varnish to shape how his instruments sounded. Look at guitarists now and you see effects units and amplifiers everywhere that have little to do with playing the guitar. Take the charge seriously and only the classical guitar would still count as an instrument. Then he said this:
"Ich meine, eine Gitarre oder eine Violine wächst doch auch nicht auf dem Baum."
I mean, a guitar or a violin doesn't grow on a tree either. The website made it the title of the whole interview. Schulze carried on. A guitar or a violin makes no music by itself, and neither does a synthesizer. Whether you draw a bow across a string or press a key to trigger a sound, the first move comes from the player, and either way you have to measure your touch precisely to get the sound you want. The only differences, he said, are in the handling and the technique.
Schulze in the summer of 1976
When he said it, Schulze had owned his Big Moog, by his own account, for about half a year, and he thought he would need another 10 years to really know it. As our Moondawn review tells it, he bought that Moog from Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh on 22 December 1975. There were, Schulze reckoned, about ten people in the world playing really large synthesizer systems, and they were all flying off in different directions.
The interview also explains why he brought in Grosskopf. Didn't that show that a synthesizer player needs other musicians after all, the interviewer asked. Schulze gave two reasons. A sequencer rhythm can run faster or slower, but it stays mechanical, and a good drummer can bring a rhythm to life. The second reason mattered more, he said. Until then the only conversation he could have on stage was with the synthesizer, and there he was the one asking and the one answering. With Grosskopf, the two of them talk to each other in music.
There is a nice contradiction too. The synthesizer is a very personal instrument, Schulze said, and because he couldn't stand wind instruments he would never go looking for a trumpet sound. Earlier in the same interview, going through his stage rig piece by piece, he mentioned that for the brass parts he also had a Crumar Brassman.
Reading it fifty years on
Read the passage again now and what stays is the ground Schulze stood on. Copper instead of wood, a keyboard instead of a bow, and the same hand opening the sound. Take that line back to the records and you listen in different places.
- On Moondawn, wait in "Floating" for the moment Grosskopf's drums come in. That is where the conversation he described begins.
- Then put on Timewind. In this interview Schulze named it as a good example of how he combined preset keyboards and synthesizers. It is the sound of the time before the drummer, when the one asking and the one answering were the same man.
Where to get it
Both records are available as reissues on CD and LP. Which edition to buy is covered in the Moondawn review and the Timewind review.
