The Moog Concordance

The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble
+ Charlemagne Palestine
8 July 2015

Suicide: A Punk Mass
9 July 2015

Keith Emerson: Three Fates
With the BBC Concert Orchestra
10 July 2015

Moog Music Inc has formed a new partnership with independent event producer Paul Smith to co-present with the Barbican a celebration of the life and work of Dr Robert Moog in recognition of the 10th anniversary of his passing. It has been over 50 years since Dr Robert Moog introduced the world to a completely new type of instrument – the Moog modular synthesizer – that would go on to change the course of music history and influence decades of future instrument design.
The three-day Moog Concordance takes place in the Barbican Hall and features the first in a series of Moog-themed concerts including both premiere performances of specially commissioned new works as well as historical Moog-based music. A version of the Moog Sound Lab – a performance and recording series, giving artists the opportunity to experiment and explore with analog sound-scaping, synthesis and effects.

Wednesday 8 July 2015 sees a double-bill featuring The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble and American minimalist composer and performer Charlemagne Palestine. As one half of the electronic music sensation Goldfrapp, the keyboard-player and composer Will Gregory is one of the UK’s leading advocates of using synthesizers and electronic instruments to create new sounds and reinvent old ones. Here a stellar line-up of 10 musicians stretches the possibilities of the Moog synthesizer through newly composed music, transcriptions of classical works, and their own versions of music from popular culture and film. Members of the ensemble include Portishead’s Adrian Utley and composer Graham Fitkin, performing works by Bach, John Carpenter, Burt Bacharach and Oliver Messiaen on a fascinating array of vintage instruments. To mark the 10th anniversary of Robert Moog’s death, Moog Ensemble will perform two new works at the Barbican; a piece by Will Gregory featuring a new clocking device that enables all 10 synths to be synced, producing music previously impossible to perform live, and a selection of reworked pieces from the iconic score for Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange featuring a rare recorded reading by the book's author Anthony Burgess.
Although a contemporary of minimalist music pioneers Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich, musician, composer, performer and visual artist Charlemagne Palestine prefers to be known as a 'maximalist' composer. His works have recently been rediscovered as a driving force in the experimental music scene via numerous international releases on a variety of young independent record labels. Palestine has been writing intense, ritualistic music since the 1970s and he is best known for his durational piano performances. Here he will premiere a new piece composed especially for the Moog Soundlab, his first analog electronic work for over forty years.

Suicide: A Punk Mass on Thursday 9 July 2015 features cult American electronic proto-punk duo Suicide aka Alan Vega (vocals & electronics) and Martin Rev (synthesizers and drum machines). Suicide have been active since the early 1970's, and rose to fame in the UK for outraging even the punk audiences of the time; they became recognised as being highly influential in terms of the synth-pop, techno and industrial dance sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. The title for this show is taken from a 1970 gig flyer in which the band was the first ever to use the phrase "punk music" to advertise a concert. This Barbican Hall performance also forms part of the Station to Station project and is a bespoke show including a newly composed ‘mass’ featuring a number of special guests along with material from the band's back catalogue.

The Moog celebrations culminate on Friday 10 July 2015 with the UK premiere live performance of the Three Fates Project featuring legendary rock keyboard musician Keith Emerson and his band alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra. The project was recorded in 2011 by the Keith Emerson Band featuring guitarist Marc Bonilla and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester, conducted by Terje Mikkelsen, and it received its live premiere in Norway in 2012. Three Fates Project is much more than a typical instrumental rock-meets-orchestra project with the orchestra taking a more prominent role than usual, while still spotlighting Emerson's virtuoso Moog solos. The project’s title is taken from a track from the 1970 debut album of prog rock ensemble Emerson, Lake & Palmer who were a favourite band of Bob Moog and whom brought his synthesiser sound to some of the largest live audiences of the 70's.