Schedule
Day one
Jump to day two
Installation: shimatsu 13
Visit the Recital Room to see Ryoko Akama’s shimatsu 13. Her installation will be accessible throughout the festival, with a performance at c.18.45.
INGE THOMSON & CALUM MCINTYRE / SEMAY WU
Tectonics 2023 opens with multi-disciplinary musician Inge Thomson’s new work Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn. Inspired by the natural law - “If you push on it, it pushes on you” - it blends composed sound representations of human emotional responses to trauma with improvised reactions to manipulated interview excerpts. She’s joined by drummer and percussionist Calum McIntyre, ‘..without doubt one of the best and versatile skin-smackers in the country’ (The Scotsman).Cellist-improviser, composer and artist Semay Wu’s live performances focus on an improvisational framework that encourages a space for spontaneity within dynamic scenarios. Building on the relationships that emerge, new collaborations and nuances unfold during the timeframe and become, themselves, players.
CORY SMYTHE
Pianist Cory Smythe’s music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader) and here improvises on the jazz standard Smoke Gets In Your Eyes — or some semblance of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: its swirling, spiralling vocality, its portrayal of deceit and disappearance, its fluidic memorial to acrid, heart-breaking loss. In addition, he attempts to add to (and undermine) the piano’s resources of sound with extensions of concealed computerized origin. The piano here, like the love affair lamented in the Kern/Harbach standard, isn't quite what it seems.
CARL STONE
Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” His most recent release, Wat Dong Moon Lek, made The Wire’s Best of 2022 list, where they asked: “Carl Stone is a half-century into his career – so how is it that his music still sounds fresh?” For this set, celebrating his 70th birthday, he’ll perform some works for computer-based electronics including the premiere of pieces to be released in July on a new recording from Unseen Worlds.MEET THE ARTISTS
Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists involved in Day 1 of Tectonics.BBC SCOTTISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 1
Rufus Isabel Elliot New Work BBC Commission, World PremiereLinda Buckley Mallacht BBC Commission, World Premiere*
Scott McLaughlin The Dirac Sea: Folds in continuous fields World Premiere
Break -
Somei Satoh Prelude World Premiere ‡
Linda Buckley electronics*
Aki Takahashi piano ‡
Maayan Franco conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
The BBC SSO presents 4 World Premieres for orchestra, conducted by Maayan Franco. Rufus Isabel Elliot’s music has been called ‘fluid and ambitious’ (The Wire) and ‘stunningly intimate’ (The Quietus) and its newly commissioned work for the BBC SSO’s strings has a buried refence ‘to a plea a woman makes in a traditional ballad, to give her attacker her daughter instead, or as much money as there's stones in the street’. Linda Buckley’s new work is also steeped in her own background of sean nós (old style) unaccompanied Gaelic song, taking as inspiration ancient Pagan and Druid chants and texts, ritual and incantations, aural illusion and immersion.
Scott McLaughlin’s music ‘ is about the physical nature of sound; the contingent ways that acoustic phenomena unfold in time to form patterns shifting between predictability and unpredictability, and how we perceive pattern and organisation.’ His BBC commission receives its World Premiere, delayed by the pandemic. And to close, a new work from one of Japan’s most celebrated voices, Somei Satoh, with the dazzling Aki Takahashi on piano.
Lucrecia Dalt
Following widespread critical praise for her new album ¡Ay! – which made Best Of 2022lists in Pitchfork, New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Wire, Crack, Electronic Sound
and DJ Mag - the Colombian composer, musician and vocalist closes the first night of the festival. Now residing in Berlin, Dalt often seeks inspiration in the worlds of fiction, poetry, geology and desire, excavating nuanced references to untangle and respond to in her music. At times, this exploratory impulse surfaces like an introspective call and response experiment with her source material, forming new perspectives on ideas rooted in Colombian mythology to German New Wave cinema.
Day two
Installation: shimatsu 13
Another chance to visit the Recital Room to see Ryoko Akama’s shimatsu 13. The installation will be accessible throughout the festival, with a performance at c.18.45.
LIMPE FUCHS
Limpe Fuchs has been at the forefront of experimental music since the 1960s and is one of the most imaginative female sound artists on the international music scene. She is considered an influence on the “Krautrock” scene of the late ‘60s and ‘70s and later became an inspiration for the experimental psychedelic underground of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (HNAS, Nurse with Wound, etc.). A professional percussionist, she creates handmade instruments and sound sculptures, using bronze, granite and hardwood material, performing with a rare, alert sensitivity.
AKI TAKAHASHI
Bunita Marcus ...but to fashion a lullaby for you...Peter Garland The Birthday Party
Aki Takahashi piano
Associated with contemporary music for over six decades, Aki Takahashi started a craze for Satie in Japan and is particularly associated with the works of Feldman and Cage - but she is just as at home in Schubert. For this solo recital she plays works by two US composers she considers friends, Bunita Marcus and Peter Garland.
LUCY DUNCOMBE & FERONIA WENNBORG
Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg are artists and composers working together on an ever-morphing project which explores voice-based technologies as a starting point for performance and music. They work collaboratively through methods of writing, vocal processing, cloning, transcription, and composition to create intimate, tactile sonic experiences set within fictional frameworks.MEET THE ARTISTS
Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists involved in Day 2 of Tectonics.BBC SCOTTISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 2
Margriet Hoenderdos Hunker, schor & hasselaar UK PremiereIan Power BYE BYE LOVE World Premiere
William Dougherty dreams of imagined homelands World Premiere
-break -
Ingrid Laubrock Drilling* UK Premiere
Ingrid Laubrock tenor saxophone*
Cory Smythe piano*
Adam Linson electronics*
Ilan Volkov conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Known for her sparse, probing chamber works, Margriet Hoenderdos’s piece for symphony orchestra opens this second concert from the BBC SSO, and highlights a voice that’s been neglected since her death in 2010. ‘Love of life, or of others, is an abject experience,’ writes Ian Power. ‘The abject response to human body fluids is viscerally similar, bringing an uncomfortable awareness of the body, and mortality.’ In his new work, musicians and listeners are drawn together to ‘share an unease about what is meaningful and what might be waste.’
Fellow US composer William Dougherty’s piece explores nostalgia by means of a damaged 1907 wax cylinder recording of Home, Sweet Home, a popular tune in the United States throughout the American Civil War and after. Finally, saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock’s Drilling is from a series of pieces inspired by dream diaries and composed in a quasi-dreamlike state, as a haunting, slow harmonic progression becomes increasingly corrupted by electronics and detuned piano chords. Ilan Volkov conducts.
