Hofstra professor has a lifelong love affair with music

Second of two parts.

It was the late 1980s, and Herbert Deutsch found himself sitting across from Muppets creator Jim Henson in a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan.

Deutsch had received the phone call while he was working as vice president of sales for Bob Moog’s company — Moog Music. Someone from Henson’s company had called Deutsch and asked if he’d like to meet with Henson to discuss the prospect of collaborating on a musical education project.

Both men shared not only a deep passion for music, but also for unique and creative approaches to making music. Deutsch had already etched his name in music history by co-inventing the Moog synthesizer, and Henson was a household name with the creation of “The Muppet Show,” which aired on CBS from 1976 to 1981. His puppets, including Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, are now known around the world.

“Jim was a wonderful guy,” said Deutsch. “Everything you think about in the Muppets was really there. He was funny, smart, creative and nice.”

The two men were working on a business called the “Muppet Music Project,” which would incorporate a year’s worth of shows using Henson’s Muppets. “The idea was that they would teach about music in a very unique way,” Deutsch recalled. “Not the way music is normally taught in public schools, but in a more creative way, and inventing new ideas and inventing new thinking about music.”

But the idea was never picked up, said Deutsch. Henson died suddenly in 1990 of a bacterial infection. His death effectively ended the project. “The whole thing just kind of disappeared,” Deutsch said.

But the everlasting image of his work with Henson, said Deutsch, was a video that the two made as a sales pitch, in which Deutsch was introduced on stage by none other than Kermit the Frog, while sitting behind a giant Moog synthesizer.

Herbert and Nancy