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Gershon Kingsley occupies several unique niches within the history of popular and classical music -- and the sheer breadth of his work makes him something of a singular figure in music altogether. As a composer and instrumentalist, he is a central figure in the field of "space age pop" and new age music, but as a serious classical musician, Kingsley -- along with his younger American contemporary Walter Carlos -- was responsible for introducing the Moog synthesizer and other electronic keyboard instruments to serious music discussion and the popular music vernacular of the second half of the 1960s. And as a scholar in the field of Jewish music, he has made major contributions to the understanding of this field. He was born Götz Gustav Ksinski in Bochum, Germany, in 1922 (some sources say 1925), to a German father who was Jewish and a Polish mother who was Catholic -- the family was ultimately forced to flee the country to Palestine in 1938, when he was 15 years old. Always interested i...