Moog Music

[qatsi]

I'd been thinking that I should look for more concerts outside the Proms season, and a few weeks ago I found the Barbican listing for last night's concert with the Britten Sinfonia and the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble. It was an interesting stage arrangement, almost as if there were two orchestras: a semicircle of Moog synthesizers at the front, and the acoustic instruments behind. The first half had a bias towards music composed for or used in film and television, although it began with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C Minor from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Klavier, in an arrangement by Wendy Carlos, moving on to Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary, Bernard Hermann's Fahrenheit 451 Suite, Ives' The Unanswered Question, John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Vangelis' Chariots of Fire and finishing off with a certain number attributed to Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire, the theme from Doctor Who, reminiscent in this arrangement mostly of the Pertwee/Baker era, with a bit of Peter Howell's 1980s sound world; but it was also a bit Murray Gold, on which I am not so keen (I quite enjoyed the 2005 version, but I don't think it needed quite so many iterations). The Bach and Carpenter pieces were for Moogs only, and the Hermann was purely orchestral, but most of the pieces were performed jointly. Some of the Moogs were played with woodwind-style instruments rather than via keyboards, which was novel to me, but I suppose it's just a different method of providing input into the electronics, with its own characteristics.

I had no idea really what to expect of the second half, the London premiere of Will Gregory's Heat Ray: The Archimedes Suite. Gregory came to the microphone to explain that we should approach this as film music, for a film that hadn't been made, and to ask us to imagine a biopic of the ancient scientist. He said CGI, but thinking of the subject matter I inclined more to the stop-motion world of Ray Harryhausen. In any case, it did have the air of film music. Gregory offered an explanation of each movement, which was useful and informative, but it also had the effect of partitioning the pieces from each other, so it became difficult to experience the music as a whole. But overall it was a different evening, and I enjoyed it.