BBC SSO: Tectonics Glasgow 2026

Tectonics Glasgow 2026

Presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Saturday 2nd May 2026

Sunday 3rd May 2026

• Weekend Festival Pass:  £34.50 / £28.50 concession (includes restoration fund)
• Saturday Pass £24.50 / £18.50 concession (includes restoration fund)
• Sunday Pass  £24.50 / £18.50 concession (includes restoration fund)

Workshop times 

Due to limited capacity, tickets will be first come, first served and must be reserved at the beginning of each day at City Halls Box Office. Performances last c.30 minutes.

Day 1 & 2 – Performances at 14.30, 18.30 and 19.00 

Day 1: SATURDAY 2 MAY 2026

Performances at 14.30, 18.30 and 19.00

Recital Room

FRÉDÉRIC LE JUNTER 

French experimental instrument builder Frédéric Le Junter made a strong impression at Tectonics Glasgow’s virtual festival in 2021. Now, he brings his “weird and wonderful musical contraptions” (The Scotsman) to the Recital Room. Ticket reservation is required on the day. 

15.30

Old Fruitmarket

ANGÉLICA CASTELLÓ

Angélica Castelló is a Mexican–Austrian composer, recorder player, improviser, sound artist and magnetophonic tape weaver. Her music evokes both the beauty and challenge of being alive through electroacoustic spells that summon memory, death, solace, trauma, resilience, fragility, and the oneiric realm of the subconscious. Espacio ∞ is an ongoing composition without a final form. Castelló seeks to create textures similar to swarms, clouds of noise and wind, abysses of sine waves and water sounds, blending the sounds of a live instrument with electronic sounds and, in the electronic mix, those of analogue machines, broken radios, old tapes, and purely crystalline field recordings. The music remains perpetually in motion, continuously transforming, and resisting any sense of final closure.

16.30

Grand Hall

CRAIG TABORN

Born in Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty-five years. In performances and recordings as a soloist, bandleader and sideman, Taborn brings a fearless and sophisticated approach to music-making. He draws from musical traditions as varied as traditional and contemporary jazz, contemporary classical, experimental, electronic, rock, metal, and hip-hop. His constant exploration of genre and style informs his own distinct musical intelligence and voice.

17.30

Old Fruitmarket

DANIELLE PRICE

Danielle is finding Chops. A merging together of tuba, voice and words.

Danielle Price is a Scottish tuba artist and improviser, described as a “magician-musician, whose dexterity, courage and playfulness on the tuba is breathtaking” (Aby Vulliamy). Exploring a range of creative outlets using tuba and voice, she has worked with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, Ali Affleck, Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat, and Scottish Ballet. She is one half of tuba duo Dopey Monkey with Martin Lee Thomson, plays in the band Pejla with drummer Adrian Ortman, and regularly collaborates with Bill Wells, as the Sensory Illusions (Karaoke Kalk). Her debut solo EP “After the Allotments” was released by OTOROKU in 2022.

Hannah Kendall’s work will be performed immediately following Danielle Price in the Old Fruitmarket.

BBC SSO STRINGS

Hannah Kendall …I may turn to salt

Ilan Volkov conductor

British composer Hannah Kendall’s music is “searingly impactful” (The New Statesman), bridging musical cultures while both honouring and challenging contemporary traditions. The title of this work is from Lemn Sissay’s poem Godsell, reflecting on the biblical figure of Lot’s wife. As Kendall explains: “Part of the string ensemble has their instruments altered by dreadlock cuffs, which are malleable metallic Afro hair accessories. The strings are bound together by the cuffs making pitch production unpredictable, as well as creating a harsh, yet often brittle and fragile sound quality... Perhaps I see something of myself in Lot's wife: her ‘disobedience’ lies in looking back; mine in ‘disobeying,’ or at least rubbing up against, the norms of how Western classical instruments are expected to be played and sound.”

19.00-19.30

Scottish Music Centre

MEET THE ARTISTS – DAY 1

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.

20.00

Main Hall

BBC SCOTTISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 1

Laura Bowler  Things Are Against Us* (UK Premiere)  

interval

Angélica Castelló Star Washers (for orchestra and electronics) (UK Premiere)

Christopher Fox Minding the hive (for quartertone accordion and orchestra) (World Premiere, BBC Commission)

GBSR Duo piano and percussion*

Laura Bowler vocalist*

Angélica Castelló electronics

Lore Amenabar Larrañaga quartertone accordion 

Ilan Volkov conductor

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

In Minding the hive, Christopher Fox explores the remarkable tonal resources of Lore Amenabar Larrañaga’s self-designed quartertone accordion. These sounds become a focal point for the orchestra’s music, as different groupings of instruments create swarms of sonic activity around her. The music takes inspiration from the ways bees communicate, interrelate, work, and even “dance” to convey the precise location of food and water.

Laura Bowler, a “triple-threat composer-performer-provocatrice” (The Arts Desk), offers a humorous yet incisive reflection on the pressures of everyday life, inspired by Lucy Ellmann’s essay ‘Things Are Against Us’. “The work is propulsive, unrelenting, and overwhelming for the soloists as they battle through the eventually overpowering surrounds,” Bowler explains. In this setting of Ellmann’s text, the GBSR Duo embodies the “things,” while the orchestra (representing the global) extends and amplifies these forces. Bowler herself stands for “us”: the human experience, caught in the midst of a turbulent rollercoaster ride.

In Star Washers, Angélica Castelló contemplates stars in all their manifestations, “from the ones we find, one afternoon, crushed on the street, to the ones in the sky… It’s also about stars in my life: stars who inspire and accompany my creative path,” she explains. Castelló blends orchestra, electronics and the recorded voice of the supremely gifted Barbara Hannigan, which emerges as a mysterious appearance… like a voice from outer space.

c.21.30

OLD FRUITMARKET

CALLIE ROSE PETAL (ⁿᵒᵗBorges)

*Content warning* In this performance, the artist seeks to portray the overwriting of a survivor’s pain, exploring themes relating to sexual and domestic abuse.

Callie Rose Petal is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and semiotician from Glasgow. She is the creator of a theory-fiction field ‘Lexicomythography’ comprising language art, ritual composition and software, a critique of the exclusionary nature of academic publishing. She confronts the violence of language through the language of violence. Releasing sound/noise/durational works under the pseudonym ⁿᵒᵗBorges, her praxis engages distortive breakdown as compositional force, as a mirror of the disabled trans body. In all her works, loss, grief, otherness and survivorhood emerge as structural generators of affect and form. Released on Venalism, the label describes the performance of ‘lamb.’ as a “swirling vortex of tumultuous discord and flagrant, rapturous emotion that cleaves itself open and allows the incandescence and volatility of its intention to spill out—and fully overwhelm—the listener”.