BBC SSO: Tectonics Glasgow 2024 (Sunday 5 May 2024)

Tectonics Glasgow 2024

Presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Weekend Festival Pass:  £32 / £26 concession

Saturday Pass £22 / £16 concession

Sunday Pass  £22 / £16  concession

A limited number of advance passes are available for the Festival. They allow entry to all events across the two days and are the best way to save money. Passes are only available to buy until Friday 26 April 2024 and subject to availability. No refunds are available for partial use and passes are not transferrable.

Concessions are available to students, unemployed and registered disabled. Proof of status is required.

15.30 & 1915 

Recital Room 

KATE ARMITAGE & CO. 

Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kate Armitage and her entourage perform six improvised pieces across the Tectonics weekend: “Common sense will not prevail”. Ticket reservation is required on the day.

15.00 

Old Fruitmarket 

BRIAN IRVINE & THE IMAGINARY ORCHESTRA 

Born in Belfast, composer Brian Irvine’s unique musical world combines the known and the unknown, the free and the fixed, the schooled and the unschooled. His music-making is “spontaneous and irresistibly alive” (Washington Post). And for Tectonics 2024, he’s assembled musicians of all ages, instruments and abilities to be part of the beautiful, monster, music machine phenomena that is THE IMAGINARY ORCHESTRA. The only prerequisite for participants? A sense of adventure! Come and hear what they’ve devised in just a few hours, guided by the musical lunacy of this maverick composer. 

c.16.00 

Old Fruitmarket 

KOICHI MAKIGAMI & ROGER TURNER 

Avant-garde vocalist and theremin player Koichi Makigami is the leader of one of Japan's longest running underground bands, HIKASHU. He’s collaborated with the veteran improvising percussionist Roger Turner a few times in Tokyo since 2008: “we enjoy ourselves, but with voice and percussion no doubt the earliest instruments in the music of humankind. we don’t want to let evolution down. maybe we have the bones of song and dance to throw into the pot, but there’s city junk in there too… aaah yes, music of the modern era: a strange floating world indeed, stinging like a drone.” 

c.17.00 

Main Hall 

Yaron Deutsch 

Pierluigi Billone  Sgorgo Y for electric guitar  (UK Premiere) 

Andreas Dohmen  FPP I (leçons du mardi) for electric guitar (UK Premiere) 

Yaron Deutsch electric guitar 

Yaron Deutsch is a guitarist and the Founder and Artistic Director of Ensemble Nikel, a chamber quartet that fuses electric and acoustic sounds into a unified sonic organism. Most often, he plays with Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Musikfabrik. Pierluigi Billone states that his 2012 composition Sgorgo Y (part of a triptych for solo electric guitar) was written for the left hand of Yaron Deutsch, and quotes Mokurai: “You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together, now show me the sound of one hand”. It’s paired with a UK Premiere by German composer Andreas Dohmen, also written especially for Deutsch. 

c.18.30 

Main Hall 

Ka Baird 

New York based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Ka Baird performs an extended solo version of their new release Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos. It’s been described by Boomkat as “a heady trip informed by their ecstatic live performances, rocketing classic Downtown minimalism towards far-flung galaxies.” Baird describes Bearings as a meeting of streams; where the theatricality and spirituality of art reckon with impermanence and embrace the cycle of life and death. 

c.19.15 

Scottish Music Centre 

Meet The Artists – Day 2 

Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists and music performed in Day 1 of Tectonics, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson. 

c.20.00 

Main Hall 

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 

Jack Sheen  Lag (BBC commission, World Premiere) 

Carola Bauckholt   Im Auge des Klangs (UK premiere) 

Charles Uzor   Breaking of the Vessels for orchestra and tape (BBC commission, World Premiere) 

Mirela Ivičević  Überlala. Song of Million Paths. for violin and orchestra (UK premiere, I&I Foundation commission)* 

Ilya Gringolts violin 

Ilan Volkov conductor 

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 

Through its temporal uncertainty, Jack Sheen’s new BBC Commission explores uncanny glitches in our use of digital technology. Your expectation of how things may unfold is gently confounded by the notion of ‘lag’, in both obvious and imperceptible ways. The starting point of Carola Bauckholt’s ‘In the Eye of the Sound’ was the first bar of Mussorgsky's With the Dead in a Dead Language. A central aspect of her work is a fascination with the phenomenon of perception and understanding of music, noting that “just as complex connections can be built up from words in a story, this is also possible in music.”  

More than two decades after his work Zimzum, Nigerian-born composer Charles Uzor revisits two existential questions: Why are we here? How did everything come to exist? His BBC commission explores the vigorous duality of good and evil, and chaos and clarity. Unrestricted, energetic, explosive – Mirela Ivičević is one of the most enthralling composers of her generation and works with ensembles including Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Nikel. Tense and anarchic, Ivičević's compositions resemble rebellious acts.