This year marks the 10th anniversary of Tectonics, Glasgow’s experimental and new music festival curated by Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell. The weekend-long event operates under the aegis of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and is hosted at its City Halls home, though it mainly presents smaller-scale performances showcasing some of the leading figures of the international contemporary music world.
On Saturday evening, the BBCSSO took to the stage in a bold programme billed as four world premieres, including two BBC commissions. In the event, however, Somei Satoh’s advertised Prelude was substituted for one of his earlier works, On Emptiness (with no reason given).
The performance began downstairs in the Old Fruitmarket with Rufus Isabel Elliot’s the stones in the river by our camp / the space on the ground where we lay for upper strings. Performed hipster-style in front of a standing, drinks-in-hand audience, it was occasionally difficult to fully appreciate the subtleties of Elliot’s introspective score. The piece explores the very nature of consonance and dissonance, with microtonal glissandi covering everything in the cracks between. The effect is akin to an image moving slowly in and out of focus.
Upstairs in the main auditorium, the full orchestra performed Linda Buckley’s Mallacht (curse), the evening’s second BBC commission. A programme note alluded to the piece being steeped in Buckley’s musical background of traditional Irish unaccompanied sean-nós singing; Mallacht combines imaginative orchestration and subtle electronics within which eerie, almost-comprehensible human voices emerge and recede back into primordial textures. The violas break the spell with a raw, highly charged figure that is taken up by the full ensemble, leading from the timeless stasis of the opening to a cathartic conclusion.
Scott McLaughlin’s The Dirac Sea: Folds in Continuous Fields inverted the stage layout, bringing three percussionists to the front to play bowed cymbals, which created a visceral friction against the softer sounds of the ensemble.
Featuring legendary Japanese contemporary music specialist Aki Takahashi on prepared piano, Satoh’s 1997 work On Emptiness was the most approachable piece in the programme. Satoh’s music is characterised by its fusion of European and Japanese soundworlds, and On Emptiness integrates unabashed Romantic tonality with a childlike curiosity for textural exploration. Takahashi brought real beauty and poise, the strings of the BBCSSO were equally entrancing, with pinpoint intonation and hypersensitive dynamic subtlety – qualities embodied by the orchestra as a whole across all four pieces.
Surely no other organisation has the resources – or the audacity – to stage such an event in the UK. In their welcome note, Volkov and Campbell state dauntlessly, “Tectonics Glasgow isn’t big on nostalgia. We like to look forward rather than back.” With standing room only in City Halls, there’s evidently an audience in Glasgow looking forward with them.
