If the Moog was a revelation, the moment of epiphany came on January 30th, 1970. Van Koevering was settling into a primo seat at Carnegie Hall. He was there at the invitation of Bob Moog, the founder and namesake of the synthesizer, to see the First Moog Quartet. It was the first presentation of a synthesizer in Carnegie Hall, led by the composer Gershon Kingsley, and Van Koevering and Moog had met only a few hours earlier when Moog had shown up unexpectedly at Van Koevering’s job. But now, after dinner with Moog and his extended family, Van Koevering was settling into his seat up front, eager for the concert to begin.

Van Koevering was, at that time, a novelty instrument showman – he did assembly shows, presentations like “The Science of Sound” in which he would demonstrate “noise events” on his PanBotRo (a contraption with an octave each of tuned pans, bottles and rocks). The son of a vaudeville performer, David and his siblings had grown up travelling the country as a musical troupe known as the Swiss Family Bell Ringers and the Musical Evangelists. His father, a regional star in Michigan, was also an alcoholic. Then sound and color in movies brought the coup de grâce to the vaudeville trade, his father got sober and saved at Mel Trotter’s Rescue Mission in Grand Rapids, and he turned his attention to his family.

“He’d take me to movies,” Van Koevering remembered. “Fred Astaire and Dan Dailey, and tell me what to look for. ‘Watch how he walks, how he moves, how he never stands still, never puts his hands in his pockets. When we get home tonight, you’re gonna do that.’” The child internalized the lessons and won amateur talent shows across the state of Michigan, playing ukulele behind his back or strumming while playing a harmonica held in his teeth. When he was eight, David came down with a severe case of rheumatic fever and missed a year of school. His father seized that time to teach him as many instruments as possible. By age ten, David could play 14 instruments at performance level.

With vaudeville belly-up and his father sober and saved, the family hit the road, touring the country doing assembly shows and “playing music with a positive message,” just as Mel Trotter once had for soldiers during World War One. Van Koevering came of age on the road, attending correspondence school. A prodigy both musically and academically, he finished first in his class.

As an adult, Van Koevering took over the family business. “I never let grass grow beneath my feet,” David explained. He worked with a booking agent out of Chicago who got him four shows a day. He drove a Ford Econoline van, outfitted with a kitchenette and stuffed with his various musical contraptions. “I’m racing to get to the next school on time,” he says, hoofing from redwood forests to Gulf Stream waters, the cafeterias of suburban Detroit to the auditoriums of west Texas, playing hymns on the four-in-hand bells and teaching intervals on his tuned rocks. On repeat in Econoline’s customized tape deck was Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach. He was transfixed by the sound of the Moog synthesizer.

As Van Koevering logged miles, played and replayed Switched-On up the Atlantic seaboard, he decided to drop by the Moog factory in Trumansburg, New York, but Moog was out of town. Still hoping to meet, he left word for Moog: “I’ve got work from Long Island to Albany, and then I’m leaving New York for a year.”

A few days later, Van Koevering was setting up his show in a Long Island school auditorium when the principal came in to tell him he had a visitor. It was Bob Moog. He stuck around for the show and, impressed (or at least amused), invited Van Koevering to attend the concert at Carnegie Hall that evening.

Hearing Wendy Carlos on the tape deck was one thing, but listening to Kingsley and the First Moog Quartet – the windswept skitters, the vastness of the sonic territory the synth can create, the pulsing levity of tracks like “Popcorn” – left him trembling in his seat, with Uncle and Aunt Moog to his right and left.