BY MYLES OAKEY, EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
Tectonics Festival (presented by the Scottish Symphony Orchestra)
Various locations, Glasgow, 4-5 May
Crowded on the red-carpeted stairs of Glasgow’s City Hall foyer, an inquisitive audience surrounds a mismatched ensemble of featured composers and performers prepared with graphic scores, violin, flute, synthesiser, keyboard, melodica, and strange aerophones.
Tectonics Festival curator and BBC SSO conductor Ilan Volkov announces the opening piece, Burdocks by Christian Wolff, welcoming in the festival. Volkov points out the hidden ensemble members scattered over the staircases that extend above and below: “Feel free to move around the space” Volkov says. Along with the child sitting beside me, I peer over the railing searching for the sounds below.
The rearrangement and subversion of performance space and performer-listener roles is an identifiable trait of Tectonics. As a listener, I am constantly asked to be disorientated, unassured, and challenged. Through two days of exhilarating and exhausting back-to-back programming, I bounce between two uniquely beautiful and juxtaposed spaces that have become a core of Tectonics’ identity: the 19th Century Grand Hall, home to the BBC SSO; and the Old Fruitmarket, a dimly lit multipurpose warehouse dressed with strings of blue lightbulbs.
Over several years of commissioning, curating, and performing, Tectonics Festival has established a reputation as a leading festival of new and experimental musics. Co-directors Volkov and Alasdair Campbell are the heart of Tectonics Glasgow; their lungs, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The collaboration is committed to expanding the sonic possibilities of the orchestra conceived through the diverse perspectives and original voices within contemporary compositional practice. This year, the festival features commissions from artists whose compositional approach centres on concepts of indeterminacy and choice, debilitating psychological and emotional states, online textual sources and media, psychoacoustic frequencies, folk ballads, and spatial orientation.
Working at the intersection of performance art and classical music, Netherlands-based Scottish artist Genevieve Murphy gives a world premiere of her BBC commissioned work Calm in an Agitated World – a sonic manifestation of fear, drawing on associations with arachnophobia and fear of the ‘other’. Researching the artist prior to the performance, I found Murphy’s compositions often seem to place her at the centre of her performances, exploring psychological states and disabilities, including obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, neurosis, and fear.
Beginning in the darkness of the Old Fruitmarket, Calm in an Agitated World pairs the intimidation of bagpipes, played by Isle of Skye piper Brighde Chaimbeul, with the performative manipulation of a reel-to-reel tape, much like a spider’s web. Murphy’s narration throughout the work details the bizarre processes of therapy, such as nailing her feet to the roof, while orchestral textures of twisted melodies move with emotional states of flux.
Arranging texts, news articles, internet posts, and language from the real world, Irish composer Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation directly interacts with and reflects on human expression and desire in our very strange world. Physically navigating her way through the body of the orchestra, Walshe’s chosen text and performative voice becomes the focal point of the work. Her impressionistic mocking, slang, sarcasm, and parody is equally intelligent and hilarious. While the orchestration is often light and comical in character, the disturbing reality of the texts becomes more apparent. Set to a dark and ominous descending string figure, Walshe talks microplastics penetrating our cells, before a mournful lullaby in woodwinds shifts the context to Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil’s human desire for immortality, and AI digital regeneration of deceased loved ones: Walshe’s advice, those people are in our memories; “Just take a nap, bro. Sweet dreams”.
Tectonics gives composers from outside the classical tradition access to and creative freedom with the orchestra. Performing electronics in her world premiere of Oscen, written for the SSO, electroacoustic composer Sarah Davachi alters our perception of time and spatial awareness. Through ethereal and sparse textures of sustained and layered orchestral instruments, voices evolve through manipulation in the tradition of ambient minimalism. Her compositional style challenges the listener’s attention with a characteristic ‘slowness’ or ‘stillness’ in which static layers of acoustic and electroacoustic instruments shift under our perception, extending spatial depth that is evocative of its title Oscen, a birdsong to omens.
As the featured performer of Tectonics, contemporary harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani performs explosive new works for harpsichord written by American George Lewis, Iranian Anahita Abbasi, and Czech Miroslav Srnka. Never before have I seen or heard contemporary music for the harpsichord that pushes the instrument to its structural limits, the instrument rocking on its timber frame as keys are pounded with fists and forearms. Esfahani’s virtuosity leaves lasting impression. His dexterity, speed, intensity and stamina demonstrates a commitment to these heavy works for harpsichord that was totally convincing and inspiring.
Other performances include premieres of Old Shoe, New Shoe, by Christian Wolff, an exponent of the New York experimental school associated with John Cage and Morton Feldman. Wolff democratises the orchestra through scoring based on a set of tasks or instructions to the performer relating to their instrument or interactions with other performers, and features two guest performers: drummer Joey Baron and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. Danish artist Julia Hodkinson utilises the entire space of the Grand Hall with her piece All Around, enveloping the audience with sound and field recordings, and turning the orchestra into sound of café; in Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, Italian Mauro Lanza brings on the sound of the apocalypse in some of the most dense, dark, and shattering I’ve experience from an orchestra; Irish Andrew Hamilton composer’s c is a score in reverse that captures the effect of a suctioning vortex; and Martin Arnold unifies the timbre of his melodica with the voices of Sharron Kraus and Angharah Davis in sleepy Scottish folk ballad The Gay Goshawk.
Throughout the festival these orchestral and larger scale performances are interspersed with experimental and electronic artists of ambient drone works, sonic explorations, and various approaches to improvisation. The Old Fruitmarket takes advantage of how physical space influences attitudes and reception of a performance. Alex South and Nichola Scrutton – facing one another from opposite sides of the warehouse – create a confusing bidirectional effect in their experiments of breath improvisation. And from a network of radios, synthesisers, pedals, and a guitar, spanning a full desk, Glasgow artist Andrew Paine and Kevin McCarvel manipulate static noise and ambient drones that take time to settle into: “We are a slow process:,” recites Paine. In the recital hall, Czech artist Lucie Vitková interprets colourful scores drawn with expired makeup, walking the line between performance art, composition, and the truly bizarre.
Volkvov and Alasdair Campbell can continue to be humbled by the longevity and support for Tectonics, celebrating its seventh iteration. Tectonics will not be a festival that pleases everyone. For those who commit to the program, it’s an exhausting two days, and unless you willingly miss a performance, you’ll go hungry, too. Whatever your sensibilities, the varied, unfamiliar, and unexpected sonic experiences require you to constantly reset and realign your engagement with each work. In saying that, if you’re opening to it, the programming is sensational. Beyond that, the festival exists to commission and perform new music, recorded live and published by BBC Three for the benefit of the community. Whether you’re an avant-garde devotee or a classical music traditionalist, the unique circumstances of Tectonics continue to allow composers, performers, and listeners to be inspired by the possibilities of new music.
Listen to highlights from Tectonics Glasgow online at BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show (while available).
Images courtesy BBC. Featured image of Old Shoe, New Shoe by Christian Wolff at Tectonics at City Halls in Glasgow on 4 May.
