Gershon Kingsley

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Gershon Kingsley , actually Götz Gustav Ksinski (born October 28, 1922 in Bochum , Germany , † December 10, 2019 in New York City , New York , United States ), was a German-American composer . His best-known work is the composition Pop Corn , composed in 1969 in the early phase of electronic pop music . He was the leader of the First Moog Quartet and the first person to use the Moog synthesizer in live performances. His compositions are diverse and fluctuate between avant-garde and pop.

Life

Kingsley's father was a Jewish German and his mother was a Catholic by birth from Poland. Kingsley grew up in Berlin . In 1938 he fled National Socialist Germany to Palestine . There he lived and worked in a kibbutz , learned to play the piano and performed with local jazz bands in the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv area . Kingsley studied in Jerusalem and went to the United States in 1946. After his success with Pop Corn , he returned to Germany and worked in Munich mainly as a film and advertising composer. From the end of the 1990s he lived in New York. The parents emigrated to the USA via Cuba in 1939 .

Career

The earliest evidence of his career is a classical record: in 1966 he arranged 15 French folk songs by Joseph Canteloube and also acted as conductor of the recording with the soprano Netania Davrath in Vienna, who had already recorded all five collections of Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne there three years earlier had, under a conductor with the pseudonym Pierre de la Roche.

Kingsley's career as a pop musician began with the release of the album The In Sound from Way Out , which he shared with Jean-Jacques Perrey recorded. The Perrey-Kingsley duo later recorded Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight on the Moog and then went their separate ways. Kingsley created a classic Moog album with Music to Moog By , which mainly contains cover versions of songs by famous artists such as The Beatles , Beethoven and Simon and Garfunkel . His next work, called First Moog Quartet, is a collection of live recordings from his nationwide tour and uses four Moog synthesizers. Some of these compositions have a much more experimental character, as Kingsley uses spoken word and beat poetry and underlay these with artificial extraterrestrial noises and sounds. Kingsley did not stick with the Moog synthesizer, however, but was a pioneer in the use of the first Fairlight and Synclavier digital synthesizers.

Gershon Kingsley also wrote theme songs for television productions of the ZDF , so for The Pyramid , the series Merlin and Babbelgamm .

Kingsley also composed two operas, Tierra (1992, Munich Gasteig ) and Raoul (2008, Theater Bremen ).

Popcorn

The best known and most successful version of his synthesizer instrumental Pop Corn comes from Hot Butter in 1972 and was a number one hit in Germany and Switzerland and an international top ten. Also in 1972 the Pop-Corn Makers (7th place) and Anarchic System (13th place) entered the German charts with popcorn . In 2005 it became another world hit thanks to Crazy Frog . Particularly interesting is the cover version of the Italian pop group La Strana Società from 1972, whose ensemble included the then unknown Umberto Tozzi , who later achieved world fame with hits like " Gloria ", " Tu " and " Ti Amo ".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/obituary/8546355/gershon-kingsley-dead
  2. ↑ Entry on Discogs
  3. ↑ a b Sam Mason: Biography of Gershon Kingley (English) on gershonkingley.com, accessed December 13, 2017.
  4. ↑ Video of Tozzi singing his original "Gloria" on YouTube
personal data
SURNAME Kingsley, Gershon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ksinski, Götz Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American composer
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Bochum
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 2019
Place of death New York City