The old battleship Yamamoto speeds through the emptiness of space with the nefarious Gamelons in hot pursuit. The ship was racing to retrieve a device that would make a radioactive Earth hospitable again. Accompanying all the action was the strange, space-age electronic sounds of moog synthesizer music.
This work of fiction – actually a cartoon called Star Blazers, which aired in syndication for four years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, changed Professor Paul Oehlers’ life.
“Star Blazers was the first place that exposed me to the moog synthesizer,” Oehlers said. “It sounded awesome and I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do with my life.”
The moog synthesizer is a versatile instrument. It looks like a keyboard with countless knobs and switches above the keys. The sound of the moog synthesizer is complex. It can be made to sound like a piano with added effects, such as on Stevie Wonder’s albums, or to sound completely distanced from anything resembling a piano.
Oehlers takes advantage of the instruments flexibility. He’s comfortable with the synthesizer because of his early connection to music. For him the instrument is a tool he bends to create whatever sounds he needs to fit the part.
Music became an early part of Oehler’s life in Vorhees, N.J. He wrote his first composition at 9, and later learned to play the drums, piano and organ. At 14 he started college composition courses. “I was hooked on making music but I didn’t like to play in front of people, so composing was the best thing,” he said.
Oehlers now enjoys creating the sounds he first heard as a kid. His film scores range from the haunting, sparse, quiet hum found in his work titled Phreximus to the jittery, twittering of his work Little Bug.
His complex orchestral pieces bring a vibrant nature to the cold, electronic sound of the synthesizer and create an ambient swirl of melody and harmony. His pieces have been performed at festivals around the world including the Seoul International Electro-acoustic Music Festival and the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung in Darmstadt, Germany.
He was one of the few composers selected to be a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, one of the oldest artist colonies in America. In 2006, he created an electronic composition, Out of the Ashes, for the Nature Conservancy and the Fulcrum Point New Music Project, a Chicago-based music group which performs multi-media works.
His music has been played seen in an award-winning independent movie, Most High, released in 2004. Most High starred director/actor Marty Sader and actress Laura Keys. The film looked at crystal meth through the eyes of an addicted man. “I was recommended by a mutual friend of Marty Sader because he thought my music would be good for a movie about a man freaking out and falling apart from drugs,” Oehlers said.
Most High went on to win eight awards, including the most prestigious independent film award, the Gold Starfish, from the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Today, Oehlers is the director of American University’s audio technology department. Sitting in Ruby Tuesdays on Van Ness Street eating a buffalo bacon burger, he wears his typical black hat, black jacket and blue jeans. He talks with his two good friends at the university, Matt Weiner, the studio manager at the university’s recording studios, and Jason Lurie, the facilities manager at the Katzen Arts Center. They laugh at the idea of Oehlers being interviewed but the conversation takes quick turns from composer John Williams to the best horror movies to the state of classical music, which Oehlers views as an obsolete style.
They all remember when Oehlers took the job in 2004 and the mess the audio technology department was in.
“We had only one G4 computer in a class room,” said Weiner, a former audio technology student at American.
“It was good for an early 1990s program but in 2004 it was 10 years out of date. It was borderline criminally inadequate.”
Kristof Aldenderfer, a former student of Oehlers’ who now teaches audio technology classes, agreed. “We were in a small room with no air conditioning. The [sound isolation] booth was at a weird angle and there were dead mice found sometimes on the floors,” he said.
Oehlers said he felt the job was a calling. “I had to save these students,” he said. He took the position after the previous director stayed only one year.
“Students in my classes would have to group together to do projects since we didn’t have enough computers,” he said. “It was like Russian roulette. Every day we would have to guess which computer was going to fail. I had groups lose eight months of work in random computer outages. In the end I had to grade the students based on what I had seen before the crash.”
Today the audio technology department has a number of computers, each with updated digital audio software. The studio where students once had to wear shorts to keep cool, even in the winter, is now fitted with an air conditioner and better technology. Dead rats are no longer on the floor. The number of students in the program has stayed constant at around 55 people with audio technology as their major or minor.
“To be in the audio technology field you have to have the right personality,” Oehlers said. “It involves hours in front of a computer and mixer. There’s not a lot of meeting girls or rock stars, but it’s better than a degree in music. It’ll actually get you a job.”
Jobs of alumni of the audio technology department range from working as an audio engineer in New York who mix tracks to the head of the audiovisual department for the U.S Coast Guard in the Department of Homeland Security.
Oehlers, who has four degrees in music, including a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, said there are still needed improvements in the AU program. “The program has slowly gotten better. I wish I could do more.”
Oehlers knows his department is small but he says he believes he has a significant number of students for more attention from the university. “We just have the worst student to teacher ratio at 30:1. I used to teach three classes and work with students on 20 different independent studies each year.”
For now Oehlers said he is content with the way his life and the program are going. He’s looking at writing more music for films and is applying for another McDowell Colony fellowship.
He said he believes, though, that the audio technology field is often stereotyped and his department is misunderstood.
“I want to show people that working with music doesn’t mean that you’re just a DJ or you just drink all the time,” he said. “There’s a lot more too it then just that.”
###
