The Asheville Symphony Orchestra will honor the late Moog synthesizer creator (and Asheville resident) Robert Moog in a unique performance Saturday of Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Music director Daniel Meyer will lead a performance that features six Moog Little Phatty synthesizers playing the choral harmonies, typically performed by a six-woman choir, in Neptune, the Mystic.

“I wanted to pay tribute to Robert Moog and what he meant to Asheville,” Meyer said. “And the practical concern was, we knew we didn’t have a women’s chorus available to us in May. The confluence of these two events led to this brainstorm. It’s a bit of an adventure on our own.”

Wayne Kirby, professor of music and now music department chairman at UNC Asheville, hired Moog to be on the music faculty at UNCA in the late 1980s. The two developed a music technology program, which thrives today. The lab in UNCA’s music department is full of Moog equipment, and dozens of Kirby’s students have gone on to work for Moog Music or in other areas of electronic music.

“Bob was an inspiration to everyone he met, and he was also extraordinarily humble,” Kirby said. “He is directly responsible for inspiring me to pursue a career in electronic music. We met in 1974 at an audio engineering society convention in New York. Our relationship was more personal than professional. He was both a gentleman and a genius.”

via Citizen Times