WILL GREGORY MOOG ENSEMBLE

Ruth performs on moog and various synthesizers in composer Will Gregory’s moog ensemble. In 2005 in Bath the nine piece moog orchestra, including Portishead’s Adrian Utley, jazz soloist Django Bates, sax player Simon Haram and Ruth performed the Brandenburg concertos on moogs plus a new work by Will to accompany a shot of Tim Henmann’s massively slowed down serve. In 2010 they played at the South Bank in Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack to The Day the Earth Stood Still, and a new work by Will, ‘Journey into the Sky’ conducted by Charles Hazlewood.

This formed the basis of Will’s opera Piccard in Space, which again involved the moog ensemble (Ruth playing mini moog), alongside the BBC Concert orchestra in March 2011.
Nearly 80 years ago, on 27 May 1931, the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard took off from Augsberg, Germany, in a pressurised aluminium capsule attached to a large hydrogen balloon. His destination was the stratosphere, the second major layer of our atmosphere, between six and 31 miles above Earth. No one had ever been that high before and Piccard wanted to measure the activity of cosmic rays and investigate Einstein’s theory of relativity. He and his assistant, Paul Kipfer, reached a record 15,785m (9.8 miles).