Schedule
Day one
Jump to day two
Installation: FUJI||||||||||TA
Yosuke Fujita’s installation will run all weekend across the festival, with a live Saturday performance at 18.15.Silvia Tarozzi: Mi Specchio E Rifletto
withSilvia Tarozzi vocals, violin, slide guitar, radio, toys, composition Valeria Sturba vocals, violin, theremin
Stefano Pilia baritone electric guitar
Edoardo Marraffa tenor and soprano saxophones
Cecilia Stacchiotti synthesizers, keyboard, vocals, bansuri flute
Tectonics Glasgow 2022 opens with a live performance of music from Tarozzi’s 2020 album Mi Specchio E Rifletto , inspired by the Milanese poet Alda Merini. Over a decade, Tarozzi used the rhythms of Merini’s poetry as building blocks for her own work, resulting in ‘a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, illuminating complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life’ (Pitchfork).
The Beat Goes On: A Tribute to Janet Beat
withAndie Brown and Sharon Gal / Juliet Fraser / Ailie Ormston
Now in her eighties, Janet Beat is a pioneering composer whose work embraced electronics and non-Western instrumentation and who refused to be silenced by a male-dominated musical establishment. In the first of two Beat-focused events, Tectonics artists pay tribute to her pioneering style and ever-questioning spirit with performances of their own.
These include Beat’s Puspawarna (1989–90) for voice, gong and electronics, performed by Juliet Fraser; a set from Andie Brown and Sharon Gal, working with glass, voice, electronics and field recordings, with typically mysterious and atmospheric results; and Ailie Ormston who presents a new electroacoustic work for using live instrumentation, processed sounds and amplified objects, brought together through improvisation, collage and curiosity.
FUJI||||||||||TA in Performance: Noiseem
Strictly Limited Capacity: please register for this event at the Box Office on the day of performance. Places will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis. There will be another performance on Sunday at 17.15.Meet the Artists
Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists involved in Day 1 of Tectonics (Limited capacity).Joanna Ward / Douglas R Ewart
Joanna Ward from the trees and from my friends (bean piece 3)* BBC Commission, World Premiere Douglas R Ewart Red Hills+Ilan Volkov conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra* Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra+
In her own words, Joanna Ward’s work experiments ‘with scores and with sound, and her practice ranges across genre and between media, usually in collaboration with other performers, artists and thinkers.’ Here the BBC SSO give the World Premiere of her new BBC commission. Douglas Ewart’s Red Hills, is the title track from his 1983 album. Originally written for his Clarinet Choir, it’s performed here by members of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. Ewart himself closes the festival on Sunday night in performance with Joëlle Léandre.
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1
Kristine Tjøgersen Between Trees (UK Premiere)Amber Priestley For Jocelyn Bell Burnell (BBC Commission, World Premiere)
Pascale Criton Alter* (BBC Commission, World Premiere)
Juliet Fraser soprano*
Ilan Volkov conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
The BBC SSO’s first concert opens with Kristine Tjøgersen’s exploration of nature and the interconnections between birds, animals, plants, fungus and humans: an excursion which gives the audience a feeling not of observing a forest, but being inside it.
Amber Priestley’s new work is inspired by conversations she had with the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell one of the discoverers of pulsars (or neutron stars). For it, Priestley ‘imagined-through the filter of an orchestra - radio interference together with the regularity of the rhythm given off by a pulsar. My translation of this phenomenon is just one way that it can be heard’.
Pascale Criton’s music first appeared at Tectonics Glasgow in 2018 and she returns with a work specially written for the festival. Written during the pandemic, Alter plays on the idea of otherness, as well as alteration and transformation. The reference points are unstable, driven by minute reciprocal influences, bordering on acoustic phenomena such as beats and resulting sounds. Its text is a variation on this shifting world expressed in French, English and Arabic, with words written during the confinement by its soprano soloist, Juliet Fraser.
Marja Ahti / Russell Haswell
with members of the BBC SSOMarja Ahti works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with
synthesizers and electronic feedback. Her work-in-progress, Membranes “starts from the idea of a moment of listening as a membrane – a fluid, vibrant position dissolving the divide between inner and outer space. Recordings of resonant spaces, chambers and vibrating structures inhabit or contain an architecture of electronic arcs, shapes, shades and textures, all vibrating together, often on the brink of collapse, collision or feedback.”
Once described by Hans Ulrich Obrist as “a national treasure”, Glasgow-based Russell Haswell is an artist, record producer, free improvisor, computer musician, noise aficionado, and curator. His work resists easy summarisation, focusing on the site-specific, performance and methodology of large-scale sound works, sometimes in surround. He closes Saturday with a performance specially-created for himself and members of the BBC SSO.
Day two
Installation: FUJI||||||||||TA
Yosuke Fujita’s installation, with a live Sunday performance at 17.15.Janet Beat: A Portrait
Janet Beat Work for TapeApollo and Marsyas for clarinet synthesised sound
Circe for solo viola Piangam for piano and tape
Yann Ghiro clarinet James Clapperton piano Scott Dickinson viola
“I get the best of all possible worlds by using computers along with human performers for I can exploit the special qualities which each can bring to the music... there are qualities such as the subtle nuances of timbre and phrase which human performers bring to a performance which technology cannot match, as well as their concepts of interpretation.” Janet Beat
This event showcases Beat’s interest in human and technological interaction - as well as works purely electronic and acoustic. One of her works for synthesizers, tape machines and acoustic instruments is followed by Apollo and Marsyas featuring Yann Ghiro, the BBC SSO’s Principal Clarinet. Beat’s 1974 work for solo viola, is performed by her former student (she taught at what is now the RCS) and BBC SSO Principal, Scott Dickinson; and this composer portrait ends with Piangam, made up from the words piano and gamelan, and was inspired by Beat’s life-long love affair with the East and pitches a piano against sounds of birdsong, bells and gongs.
Kaja Draksler & Susana Santos Silva
Of Slovenian origin, but based now in Copenhagen, pianist and composer Kaja Draksler combines classical and jazz motifs, elements from the traditional music of her country and the study of the inner structures of Cecil Taylor’s improvisations. Active in both the mainstream and the avant-garde scenes in Porto and Stockholm, trumpeter Susana Santos Silva brings to this duo, in a more intimate context, everything she has been known for in her many other projects, namely, her warm, tightly focused, lyrical and yet highly geometrical style.Meet the Artists
Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists involved in Day 2 of Tectonics (Limited capacity).FUJI||||||||||TA in Performance: Noiseem
Strictly Limited Capacity: please register for this event at the Box Office on the day of performance. Places will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.Tashi Dorji
“Improvisation as a practice is always shifting, becoming and disappearing and I hope my music and the practice is too.” Guitarist Tashi Dorji plays out of pure instinct. Self-taught in his native Bhutan, where he soaked up classic rock and heavy metal via shortwave radio, Dorji’s improvisations have an innate sense of artistry. For over a decade he has explored the guitar’s possibilities, recently returning to acoustic performance, and we’re delighted to welcome him to Glasgow for this solo set.BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 2
Liza Lim Sappho/Bioluminescence (2019) (BBC Co-Commission, UK Premiere)James Weeks Weligwic (World Premiere)
interval
Cassandra Miller/Silvia Tarozzi Bismillah Meets the Creator in Springtime* (World Premiere)
Silvia Tarozzi violin/voice* Cassandra Miller voice/toy trumpets* Ilan Volkov conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Liza Lim’s Sappho/Bioluminescence is the first part of her Annunciation Triptych celebrating icons of women’s spiritual traditions (in this case the Greek poet Sappho). Fond of fusing seemingly incompatible elements and stories together, Lim brings ‘the bioluminescence of creatures who produce light in their bodies next to Sappho in order to understand even more intensely the irradiated nature of her poetry.’
James Week’s World Premiere Weligwic (from the Anglo-Saxon, meaning ‘place of willows’) is ‘concerned with images of light and foliage as well as the theme of our indwelling within the natural world... [it] takes place in a half-light and is overcast and subdued in atmosphere.’
Bismillah Meets the Creator in Springtime is “a concerto of sorts, the duo not above but inside the ensemble, carried as if on a full river—improvising, automatic-singing, mimicking... it is made from a mixture of sources including a 2007 recording of Bismillah Khan performing the Raag Malkauns (mimicked and transcribed for material); The Creator has a Master Plan of Pharoah Sanders (the form of the piece, the role of the ‘band’, improvisations made while listening to this music, and the wish for peace and happiness through all the land); some Bach for good measure.”
Bismillah Meets the Creator in Springtime was made possible by a Research & Creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh with members of the BBC SSO Douglas R Ewart & Joëlle Léandre
In her first work for orchestral instrumentation, Nic Oireachtaigh explores ideas of temporal flexibility and spatial potential in the Old Fruitmarket. Taking timbral focus as a starting point and dissolution of definition and specificity as compositional spurs, she creates an enveloping sound environment for both listeners and players. Listeners are invited to experience sound without analysis.To close the festival, a meeting of two major figures in contemporary music. Joëlle Léandre has worked with the likes of John Cage and Merce Cunningham as well as having performed with a huge amount of key figures in free jazz and improv from Derek Bailey to Anthony Braxton to John Zorn. She’s joined for the closing set by composer, improviser, sculptor and all round visionary Douglas R Ewart, whose music finds natural extensions in the instruments he makes himself, which run the gamut from wind to percussion.