Music has an abundance of guitar gods, but who resides in Synthesizer Olympus? If you’re an '80s kid, a small list of synth heroes suggests itself—Thomas Dolby, Herbie Hancock, Gary Numan, and (when he’s not playing every other instrument) Stevie Wonder, but the first synthesizer titan remains Elisha Gray. While he’s usually thought of as the poor fellow who just missed out on patenting the telephone, Gray was definitely electronic music’s paterfamilias. From synth-pop to drone to ambient to psychedelia to hip hop and beyond, it all began with a Highland Park inventor (technically) MC'ing the first electronic music show in a North Shore Presbyterian Church on December 29, 1874.
The Highland Park Historical Society plans to commemorate Gray’s demonstration with a live “Electro Music” event Sunday, January 19, 7:30 p.m., at Highland Park Presbyterian Church (330 Laurel Ave, Highland Park, IL). To be clear, that’s not Electro as in the early 1980s electro-funk music genre powered by drum-machines and vocoders. It refers to Gray’s “musical telegraph” and several other devices he employed to deliver music electrically. The church’s choir will perform the 1874 concert’s original program. During the event, Oberlin College ethnomusicology professor emeritus and Gray scholar Roderic Knight will deliver a video demonstration with replicas of several of Gray’s original electric musical devices.
Knight has studied Gray and his inventions for many years. A specialist in the music of the Mande or Mandinka people of West Africa as well as the “music and dance traditions of tribal groups in Central India,” Knight has also studied and lectured on musical instruments and their history and classification. He first came across Gray while visiting a website called 120 Years of Electronic Music. The fact that Gray was a former Oberlin student also caught his eye. Gray never graduated from Oberlin, but did teach there for several years, eventually receiving an honorary degree from his alma mater.
Gray was born in Barnesville, Ohio, but later moved to Highland Park, Illinois, where he served as an alderman and church elder, ran his businesses, and, naturally, kept inventing. Among these were several instruments that employed electricity and magnetism rather than breath, plunking, or percussion to create sounds. I asked Knight if it’s a stretch call Gray the grandfather of electronic music. Speaking by email, he heartily confirms it—with some conditions.
“He is absolutely the great grandad of electronic music, at a time when it was electro-mechanical—before vacuum tubes and transistors.”
Gray’s musical forays were just a small part of his output. Knight mentioned several other inventions and accomplishments, including the telautograph, an ancestor of the fax machine that sent handwriting over telegraph wires. Gray went into business with Enos M. Barton in 1869, forming the Gray and Barton Company, building and selling telegraph equipment, fire alarms, lighting, and other supplies. Gray and Barton, Co. was integral in rebuilding Chicago’s telegraph system after the Great Fire in 1871, and still sells “electrical, communications, data networking and industrial products” to this day. Most famously, of course, Gray competed with Alexander Graham Bell to create and patent the telephone. Though some still quibble over who was the “true” inventor, it’s Bell who everyone remembers.
As for Gray's more musical inventions, they were ingenious yet simple affairs, generating tones by vibrating metal tines and amplifying them through physical means, like a violin or piano or a system of wooden tubes. Knight explains that Gray held concerts elsewhere as well, in New York, Washington, DC, and Oberlin. For an 1877 New York concert, Gray created a 16-note version of the original musical telegraph. Frederick Boscovitz, a well-known pianist of the time played the instrument in Western Union’s Philadelphia office, which transmitted the music to the New York concert. Try not to imagine booming, blasting, stadium-filling Skrillex beats, bass lines, and shrieks—a contemporary newspaper accounts describes clear tones resembling an organ’s, though the higher tones were harder for the ear to catch.
Sadly, Gray abandoned his musical inventions and returned to inventing and perfecting his other devices. Several of his inventions are preserved at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. While not as much of a household name as Bell or Edison, Gray still remains a Highland Park hometown hero.
The concert will be simultaneously broadcast on the Highland Park Presbyterian Church's YouTube channel.