Flore Laurentienne Blends Bach With a MiniMoog at the Clark

Friday, September 18, 7pm | Williamstown, MA

Flore Laurentienne returns to the Clark Art Institute on September 18, the Canadian instrumental project built around composer and keyboardist Mathieu David Gagnon. He leads two additional keyboardist-percussionists and a string quartet through a sound that fuses classical composition with vintage analog synthesizers—chiefly the MiniMoog, which Gagnon treats as the ensemble's signature instrument.

Gagnon was born in La Pocatière, Quebec, and grew up in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts along the Gaspé coast and is the brother of singer-songwriter Klô Pelgag. He trained in classical and orchestral music at the Conservatoire de Bordeaux and the Conservatoire d'Aubervilliers in France before returning home to work as an arranger and producer for Pelgag and other Quebec artists.

He named the project after the botanical writings of Marie-Victorin Kirouac, a Quebec botanist whose catalog of the region's flora gave Gagnon both a title and a governing idea: Music built from a deep attachment to the natural landscape and history of his home province, particularly the Bas-Saint-Laurent region along the St. Lawrence River.

Gagnon has described why his music is resistant to easy categorization. "I have a hard time with the general label 'neoclassical,'" he's says, noting that while the music uses instruments and techniques associated with classical composition, the reference points run equally to Bach, King Crimson, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, landing somewhere at the crossroads of classical, progressive, and experimental music. He's called himself less a pianist than "a composer trying to play his own music."

Auditorium, Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, MA.