Harmonie Band is a six-piece ensemble of multi-instrumentalists with an internationally established reputation for performing contemporary music, presenting especially composed orchestral scores to accompany silent film, and leading educational projects for young people.

Following the ensemble’s 1991 Purcell Room concert in London’s South Bank Centre, it was invited by the BBC to record for ‘Music in our Time’ and ‘Mixing It’ with works by John Cage, Django Bates, John White, Paul Robinson and Frank Zappa.

In July 1992, with an expanded ensemble, Harmonie Band gave the UK premiere of the French composer Arnaud Petit’s score for Carl Theodore Dreyer’s film ‘La Passione de Jeanne D’Arc’, as the centrepiece of the Cambridge Film Festival in the spectacular outdoor surroundings of St John’s College Cambridge. In the same year, the ensemble’s director, Paul Robinson, was commissioned by the ‘Giornate del Cinema Muto’ festival in Pordenone, Italy to write a new score for Frank Borzage’s ‘Seventh Heaven’, which opened the festival.

In 1993, Harmonie Band presented films in the Dresden ‘Musikfestpiele’, the ‘Babylon’ Theatre in Berlin, and undertook a two-week tour of the Netherlands organised by the ‘Vereniging van Brabantse Filmtheaters’.

In 1994, the ensemble performed in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in film concerts promoted by the National Film Theatre and the South Bank’s ‘Deutsche Romantik’ festival to capacity houses. They returned to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1998 with the programme ‘The Treason of Images’ commissioned by the South Bank Centre, and including a new score with countertenor for Jean Cocteau’s film ‘Le Sang d’un Poete’.

In August 1998, Harmonie Band appeared as guests at the Hilliard Summer School in Cambridge, where Paul Robinson was Composer in Residence. Subsequent touring venues included the Glasgow Tramway, Southampton Film Festival, Philharmonic Hall Liverpool, the King’s Lynn Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Harrogate Festival and, in October 2001, a third tour of the Netherlands.

In February 2003 ‘Harmonie Band’ presented a Buster Keaton double-bill at The Hackney Empire Bullion Room Theatre, where, following the sell-out success of the event, they returned in the autumn for a Halloween screening of F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu”.

In 2003, Paul Robinson was commissioned to write a new score for Buster Keaton’s ‘The General’ for the King’s Cross 'Rail to Reel' Film Season, and was premiered at the Shaw Theatre in London.. In January 2004, assisted by an Arts Council England grant for touring, Harmonie Band presented ‘The General’ at Warwick Arts Centre, Leicester Phoenix, Midlands Art Centre, Hackney Empire, Duke of York’s, Brighton and Exeter Phoenix.

Most recently, Harmonie Band collaborated with the Hilliard Ensemble with a new score by Paul Robinson for Carl Theodor Dreyer's classic silent film 'La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc' The score was premiered in the Wroclaw Opera House, Poland, on July 28th 2007 and filmed by Polish Television.

For individual biographies please click on the names above.