Nordic Viola: Pathfoot Project Performance at Art Collection’s Open Day

This month there’s news of a new collaboration between the University of Stirling Art Collection, RCS Composition Department and Nordic Viola as well as some exciting presentations and concerts as On A Wing and A Prayer gains momentum.

Pathfoot Project – Inspire

Over the years, Nordic Viola has become known for performing music by emerging composers and for working alongside some of Scotland’s best creative writers such as Lesley Harrison . In addition, in my work with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra I helped to develop the Notes from Scotland programme, a 6-month- long scheme where young composers are mentored by composers Oliver Searle, Jay Capperauld and Helen Mackinnon with me as player-mentor.

On 25^th May I’ll be drawing all these strands of my work together in a new partnership with the Art Collection at the University of Stirling, the composition department of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Stirling University’s Creative Writing department. Not only that, but two of the composers, Nancy Johnston and Leo Dillon, are alumni of Notes from Scotland.

Copyright Craig Sinclair

We’ll be performing music for flute, clarinet, viola and cello in the Pathfoot Building as part of the Art Collection’s Open Day and the university’s theme is Inspire. Each composer has chosen a painting to base their music. The scores look wonderful and varied and I look forward to hearing the writing, too. With some of Scotland’s best writers (including Kathleen Jamie) on the teaching staff, I’m expecting some really inspiring and thought-provoking work.

Our performance is at 2pm, but doors are open all day and there are a variety of art workshops that you can join in with. All this for free and, of course, Stirling’s gorgeous campus with its trees, loch and gardens is a thoroughly nice place to spend a spring day. Oh, and if sport’s your thing, you might just catch some of the musicians on the Park Run in the morning!

Sign up for your free open day ticket here.

On A Wing  and A Prayer Shetland at Music and/as Process Conference

Copyright Gaby Giacchino

Nordic Viola seems to be doing a lot of work with universities just now. Last month Renzo Spiteri, Arnannguaq Gerstrøm and I  were at UHI’S conference on the Northern Isles and the Arctic and next month Renzo Spiteri, Lesley Harrison and I will be presenting our piece Windfarm at the Music and/as Process conference at Glasgow University.

Windfarm

Windfarm is one of our On A Wing and A Prayer Shetland pieces and has a really interesting genesis. It dates back to Renzo and I’s first experiments with building a piece online – back when we had to in 2020! These recordings were later resurrected during our residencies in Shetland last year. Using a metal sheet played in a multitude of different ways, creating a variety of sounds, a spikey massage ball and a range of extended techniques on the viola d’amore, we create an ominous, metallic, industrial sounding soundscape that, we feel, evokes the damaged landscape around Shetland’s new Windfarm.

(I should introduce the caveat at this point that I am not against renewables. I live near a windfarm and enjoy watching the turbines turning from my kitchen window. However, I have huge misgivings about schemes on the enormous scale of the one in Shetland. Renewable energy sources are clearly needed but I’d love to see schemes located more locally and at a scale proportionate to local usage.)

We then sent our sounds to poet Lesley Harrison who composed a poem inspired by the music which, in a circular process, then influenced the final touches to the music, where we incorporate some of Lesley’s most potent lines into the electronics, spoken by Shetlander Billy Mail.

If you’re interested in new forms of music creation and want to attend the conference in Glasgow, which takes place 28th-30^th June, you can sign up for free here.

You can also learn about the processes behind our music here:

Performance at Scottish Music Centre

Copyright Gaby Giacchino

At the conference we will just be discussing Windfarm but Renzo and I will be performing the full On A Wing and A Prayer – Shetland in a lunchtime concert at 1pm at Scottish Music Centre in the Merchant City, Glasgow. It’s not so often we perform in the Central Belt, so I’m looking forward to catching many of you there. Buy your tickets here or turn up on the day.

There’s a trailer of our music here:

Future Plans

On A Wing and A Prayer is growing, well, wings I suppose! This is our first repeat performance and I’m about to embark on part 3 with Lisa Robertson in Morvern at the end of this month. Many of you enjoyed Pete Stollery’s wonderful recording of the Deeside concert and we will be releasing this as a digital album.

I will also be meeting online with all our composers to consider all the wonderful responses we’ve had from our audiences about their own concerns about our changing habitats and climate. We’re looking at ways to explore these in workshop or soundwalk settings and perhaps to create some new soundscapes and recordings with communities of all ages. We’re very much open to your ideas, thoughts, concerns and comments, too, so please feel free to contact me here. If you’d like us to bring any of our On A Wing and A Prayer performances to your area, please get in touch, too.

There’s a lot going on with Nordic Viola just now. I’ll update you as we  go along, but take a look at our Forthcoming Performances page for advance notice of events into the autumn and subscribe here so you don’t miss any of our exciting events, especially with Nordic Music Days Glasgow on the horizon!

On A Wing and A Prayer Deeside Online and other exciting (Arctic) news!

Wow, time seems to have flown by since I last wrote on here and there is so much to talk about!

First of all, and most importantly, On A Wing and A Prayer – Deeside will be streaming as an on-demand online concert 12th-14th April inclusive. Recorded at our performance at The Barn Banchory last month, Pete Stollery has created an incredible binaural sound recording of music by him, Joe Stollery, Charles Ross, Paul Anderson and I. Listen through headphones and you can really feel yourself in the middle of what our audience members on the night described as

“a truly immersive experience that offered a sense of insignificance when confronted with the forces of nature.“

I’ve absolutely loved working on this project based on an area of Scotland that I’ve long loved and with a new commission from Charles Ross from Egilsstaðir, the place in Iceland that most reminds me of home.

You can book the online performance, which will be streamed on Soundcloud, via eventbrite. We are asking for donations to cover the recording fee and online licence.

Don’t worry too much about booking a specific day (an eventbrite quirk!). Once you receive the link, you can listen when you like up to and including 14th April.

Arctic Science Summit Week – Edinburgh

What an absolute honour it was to perform alongside clarinettist Alex South and poet Lesley Harrison at the Arctic Science Summit Week Arts Plenary at Edinburgh University, where we played CETACEA by Alex and I with poetry by Lesley, Karen Power‘s Sonic Cradle and a new piece on changing patterns of whale migration by Alex.

It’s not so often you meet fellow Arctic travellers so it was a joy to make new connections and exchange experiences with composer Michael Begg and artists Georgia Rose Murray and Mary Walters, all of whom have visited and interpreted the Arctic and Antarctic in their own work. It’s impossible to travel to these special places without them making a mark on you and your work so there’s always a feeling of kinship when we get to meet – that feeling that the other person deeply understands what it is that draws you to the farthest northern regions.

There were also books available to take away outlining current Arctic scientific research, all of which will feed into future work.

Ummannaq Polar Institute

The absolute highlight for me, though, was watching and listening to the young people of Ummannaq Polar Institute. I have long admired the work carried out by Ann Andreasen and her team at the children’s home. These young people have been through a lot in their lives and music is a valuable social and therapeutic tool. (They also use the “El Sistema” teaching method, whose sucess we’ve also witnessed here in Scotland through “The Big Noise.”)

The pride, assurance, love and commitment with which they delivered their programme was an absolute credit to them. They’re great musicians and it was an emotional experience for me to hear the sound of Greenlandic music and language live for the first time in 5 years. To talk to Ann as well as a lovely young lady from the choir afterwards was an honour and I sincerely hope to visit them in Uummannaq in the not too distant future.

Here’s one of their music videos from earlier this year on youtube so you can hear them for yourselves:

Greenland/Shetland project – Nordic Music Days

Well, the ASSW was the perfect kickstart to our next project which will start with a residency in Shetland in a couple of weeks’ time.

With the support of Creative Scotland, I’ll be working once again with Shetland resident Renzo Spiteri and Greenlander Arnannguaq Gerstrøm, who is currently living in Denmark, towards a performance at Nordic Music Days in Glasgow in late October/early November. We’re interested in the intersection of cultures between Shetland and Greenland at 60 degrees latitude. There are a surprising number of parallels between these two places with histories and music intertwined from the early Norse settlers, through whaling and fishing voyages in the 18th and 19th century to modern industries such as fishing, tourism and renewables. Even the coastal landscapes bear a remarkable and, perhaps, surprising resemblance. Here are two pictures I constantly return too:

Shetland

Greenland

I first met Arnannguaq in Nuuk, Greenland, in 2017 and commissioned a piece, “Ukioq”, from her which we premiered in the RSNO chamber series in Glasgow 2018. We subsequently recorded it last year and it’s on our album Elsewhere, Elsewhen which you can buy here. I’m really excited to be working together again and, this time, performing together with Arnannguaq on flute as well as Renzo on percussion. We’ll very likely be bringing in field recordings from both islands to our work, too.

Art at Stirling/RCS

Next time I’ll tell you about a new collaboration between Nordic Viola, Art at Stirling University and the composition department of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I’ve just received a set of freshly minted scores for flute/clarinet/viola/cello inspired by the art collection and it’s going to be a fun, fresh and exciting project

Meantime, enjoy listening to On A Wing and A Prayer Deeside next weekend and I look forward to hearing your responses.

A little taster!

On A Wing and A Prayer – Deeside is this Thursday 14th March at 7:30 at The Barn Banchory and Pete, Joe and I are really looking forward to sharing the music we’ve created from our residency in Braemar this January with our friends and supporters in Aberdeenshire.

Today I want to share with you a short video showing the wonderful nature and soft, snowy scenes we experienced in January in Glen Quoich set to a short fragment of our music as well as a few words from Pete about how he used the sounds we collected in January to create the elecroacoustic sounds over which Joe and I improvised and composed music for viola.

Of course this video can’t get across the wonderful spatialisation in sound that Pete has created for the room, so to hear the music to full effect, make sure you book yourself a ticket from: https://thebarnarts.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173652872

For those of you who live too far away from Deeside we will be recording the concert here, so subscribe here to make sure you don’t miss it.

A word or two about the electroacoustic sound… by Pete Stollery

Most of the sounds you will hear were recorded during our three-day residency in Braemar in January earlier this year. They will be presented over eight loudspeakers which surround the audience in order to provide a kind of sonic immersion where you witness the sound from within. Sometimes the sound will seem to come from everywhere at once, and sometimes from specific places but the dynamic nature of the movement of the sound is designed to allow the audience to perceive it from a different viewpoint (hearpoint?), not as if it were merely happening in front of you.

Open…, the sound of a tiny stream we discovered on our way up to the Quoich gradually fills the space, enveloping the audience before a discernible note slowly rises from the texture. Grain is a short study on the sonic characteristics and behaviours of water, its graininess, its dynamic movement, with hints of what lies under the water. The New Bridge – Frozen Solitude explores the coldness of the place and Muckle Spate charts an imaginary journey through the water at the height of Storm Frank, gradually settling into Alluvial Fan – Dissipation – The Birds Return. Listening is central to all my creative output – it is a sense that we under-use and one which can provide a huge amount of information and detail if we only give it a chance. You are invited to listen in – more than you would normally do – to discover the movement, the shapes, the behaviours of the sounds, in a musical way.

Podcast on Wing and A Prayer – Deeside

with Pete and Joe Stollery

With just a month to go to our performance at The Barn Banchory, find out more about our residency in Braemar in January, during which we made field recordings, met the National Trust for Scotland conservation staff at Mar Lodge and started to form our collaborative approach to creating new music about the changing ecology of Glen Quoich in the Cairngorms.

Violist Katherine Wren joins with composers Pete and Joe Stollery in conversation with composer and podcaster Aileen Sweeney.

The performance will take place at The Barn Banchory in Aberdeenshire on 14th March at 7:30pm. Tickets here.

On A Wing and A Prayer Deeside

A New Year and already Part 2 of On A Wing and A Prayer is well underway. This time we’re focusing on the  Caledonian Pinewoods and rivers of Deeside with a particular focus on Glen Quoich near Braemar. The composers I’m working with on this project are Pete and Joe Stollery. Pete is a longstanding composer and sound artist fascinated by sound and how it relates to place and Joe is an emerging composer who is interested in the local environment, its history, and nature (particularly animals).

Cairngorm National Park

The Cairngorm Mountains are very dear to me and I’ve long followed the debate on how we should manage human activity (leisure and sporting) whilst protecting and maintaining this very special habitat, which contains many rare species (wildcat and capercaillie to name but two) and has the largest remnants of the ancient Caledonian Forest. As someone who spends a lot of time outdoors, I’m acutely aware of changes to our climate, observing rapid fluctuations in winter temperatures and an increase in flooding events, often caused by rapid thaw.

Glen Quoich

It was a combination of these factors that drew us to Glen Quoich and, in particular, the story of Storm Frank in 2015, which caused massive flooding all along the Dee, damaging infrastructure, homes and businesses and cutting off communities. The Quoich Water itself took out the bridge at the Linn of Quoich and rerouted itself along the  alluvial fan as it joins the Dee, necessitating a brand new bridge. However, what intrigued us most was how nature made good of this situation: the increase in wetlands led to a rise in the number of wading birds in the area – oystercatcher, redshank and sandpiper and other birds such as the ringed plover and snipe.

Mar Lodge Estate National Nature Reserve

Joe, Pete and I spent an afternoon at Mar Lodge talking to Shaila Rao, conservation manager for the National Trust for Scotland and Ben Dolphin, ranger. We were quite surprised to learn that the  Quoich Water frequently changes course. As it joins the floodplain, it has no constraints really, other than the bedrock. I guess that, as humans  we’re so used to talking about how we shape nature that we’re often surprised when nature changes course herself (not the case in Iceland, of course, where the land is constantly changing with volcanic and seismic activity). What is changing, however, is the frequency of these events caused by rapid thaws and extreme rainfall events.

We were also interested to hear about deer management and the regeneration of woodland on the estate. Shaila pointed out that there are quite different ways of approaching this on the eastern and western parts of the estate. Towards the Linn of Dee, further east, deer are hunted for sport , meaning that numbers there are relatively high. There is still woodland regeneration in this area, but new trees need to be protected from deer grazing by being fenced off. In Glen Quoich, deer numbers are much lower, resulting in a quite different feel to the landscape. Even in midwinter I was struck by how lush this glen felt with its mix of pine and deciduous trees.

Recording sounds

Aside from visiting Mar Lodge, we spent the bulk of our time outdoors listening to and recording the sounds we heard there. Pete will be using many of these recorded sounds in our finished work, working his magic with electronics. I wanted to understand how my sound on the viola might fit into this landscape, so took along a very cheap instrument that I didn’t mind playing as the snow fell. There was one wonderful moment under the new bridge when a curious robin came and sat by me. I like to think he was drawn by the music , and I think initially he was, but he seemed to take an equally keen interest in my cheese sandwich! Click on the image below for video:

Robin Glen Quoich

The weather on the first day necessitated a long walk to the glen in heavy snowfall, which I think was a good thing. It helped prime our ears to the environment and Pete and I took several recordings as we walked and talked. What struck all three of us was how the falling snow deadened the sound  – almost like being in a soundproof studio. We felt (and were!) quite alone out there. Joe is really interested in the wildlife in the Cairngorms and his keen eye picked out red squirrels as  well as identifying footprints in the snow. The snow really does give away the secrets of its inhabitants!

Bluebird Day!

Our second day in Glen Quoich was quite different: bluebird skies and dazzling white snow set against the bottle green of the pines. We recorded at the site of the old bridge on the floodplain before walking up to the Earl of Mar’s Punch Bowl. Wow, what an incredible and beautiful place. The water roared down the glen and we captured some really interesting 360 degree recordings.

Glen Quoich

Pulling it all together

On our final day, we were really grateful to Andrew Braidwood of Braemar Gallery for letting us use his studio as a base as we explored ways of bringing all that we’d seen, heard and learned about into a programme of music. This is always the daunting part for me. I can never just sit down and put things on a page, so I set off in the blue light of a sub-zero morning for a walk in the Morrone Birkwood prior to meeting Pete and Joe to do some thinking, watching as the mountains and river reflected pastel pinks from the sunrise.

In the studio, Pete had already been working magic with river sounds, turning them into something quite otherworldly. Together we improvised with these and talked with Joe about composing a fixed viola line that can be recorded for me to improvise against live in performance. Joe has already composed a piece for me, called Deer Tracks, and we explored ways of exiting this acoustic world into the electroacoustic one.

Slowly a plan for the show emerged and we each have a list of compositional tasks to take away as we build our collaborative piece at a distance over the next few weeks. I like that this way of working, imposed on us during the pandemic, has become a way of working sustainably, avoiding the need for constant travel. Pre-pandemic we’d never gave thought to work in this way. Out of adversity….

Since we arrived home, we’ve multitracked a mock-up of how our river  improvisation might sound, with Joe delivering a short written fragment for me to record and improvise with. Here’s a very rough, early sketch edited by me at home to give you an idea of where we’re heading with this:

Pete and I need to work on our piece about the “Muckle Spate” next. Speaking of which, we’d barely left Braemar when the river went into spate following a rapid thaw, as captured here by Ben Dolphin.

Our programme will also be including a new commission from Icelandic composer, Charles Ross and Deeside fiddler, Paul Anderson but I’ll tell you a little more about those pieces nearer our concert date.

Tickets now on sale!

Tickets are now on sale for our performance in Banchory at The Barn on 14^th March and you can book them here. If you live too far away to come to our live performance, we will be recording it for a special online concert at a later date.

Podcast

Part 2 of our podcast series in which Joe, Pete and I chat to Aileen Sweeney will be coming shortly

If you missed part 1 from Shetland with Renzo Spiteri, you can listen here:

Supported by:

On a Wing and a Prayer Project launches

On a Wing and a Prayer is a new two-year project from Nordic Viola taking place in small communities around Scotland. To do something “on a wing and a prayer” means to do something in the hope that you’ll succeed despite being insufficiently prepared” and I’ll be taking this as  a starting point for exploring humankind’s approach to the climate crisis.

Going back to Nordic Viola’s roots, I’ll be working with local composers living in habitats under threat. In this first year until June 2024, I’ll be working with percussionist, composer and sound artist Renzo Spiteri in Shetland, Pete and Joe Stollery in Deeside and Lisa Robertson in Morvern in the West Highlands of Scotland. Through a process of musical conversation and improvisation, we’ll be creating new pieces of music in response to the environment.

Alongside these I’ll be introducing works by Nordic composers who write in a complementary style and/or live in similar habitats. These composers will include Kristian Blak from the Faroes and Charles Ross and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir from Iceland.

The focus of this project is small rural communities, but you’ll be able to join in if you live further afield too. In a new initiative I’ll be launching a series of podcasts hosted by Ear to the Ground’s Aileen Sweeney (also a composer) where the composers and I discuss the impetus behind our work ahead of our performances. We’ll also be recording the performances in audio to be released as online concerts. Be sure to subscribe here so you don’t miss any of these!

Additionally, I’d love to hear your concerns for your local environment and any sounds you have captured that resonate with you. You can either comment publicly on this post or on my social media channels, or use the contact form to get in touch.

Renzo Spiteri in Shetland

On a Wing and a Prayer kicked off last week in Shetland with Renzo Spiteri. We spent an intensive three days at his home in West Mainland exploring the sounds of Shetland’s moorland and sea habitats. Our music includes recordings of Shetland’s birds, especially species that are struggling with the current bird flu outbreak such as the great skua – known as the Bonxie in Shetland.

As I travelled across Mainland, I was immediately struck by the extent of the new Viking windfarm and the speed at which it’s been erected since my last visit in March. Once over the hill from Lerwick you can see it from almost everywhere. This is, of course, an emotive issue. There is an undisputed need to lower our carbon emissions. How to balance that against a respect for the landscape, nature and the environment is a very difficult question. It’s not my place as an outsider to judge on this particular windfarm (though it is an issue close to my home too) but in our music we hope to open a space for reflection in a piece that includes some quite industrial sounds and the sense of humankind marching across the landscape.

Reflecting on the idea of prayer, our first piece, “Serenity”, is influenced by the contours of Faroese hymn “O Aegtestand”. We’ll be finishing our performance on a lighter note with an arrangement of an ancient tune, “Winya Depla”, that comes from the small island of Fetlar on the north-east tip of Shetland.

Shetland and Faroe share many of the same birds and my Nordic pick for this programme is a couple  of movements from Kristian Blak’s “Drrrunnn”.

Drrrunnn comes from the Faroese word for storm petrels. I was lucky enough to experience these amazing little birds for myself at Mousa Broch last Wednesday. The whole island seemed to be resonating with their purrs and tiny hiccups. It’s stunning to watch them fly into the Broch, of course, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the beach where they’re nesting between the stones. They’re like little electronic composers in their own right. Listen to these incredible looping sounds:

Boat Hall Shetland Museum 20^th September 6:30pm

The first performance from “On a Wing and a Prayer” will take place at Shetland Museum in the beautiful Boat Hall at 6:30 on 20^th September and tickets are now live via Eventbrite.

In the open, relaxed space of the Boat Hall, you will have the opportunity to meet us and our instruments before and after the show and to share your own experiences of Shetland’s nature and environment.

All are welcome at this relaxed performance and there is space to move in and out of the performance setting if desired. The venue is fully accessible.

Finally a big thanks to Orla Stevens for her striking graphics once again for this project. We’ll be releasing some merchandise soon and we’d love to hear what your preferences are: cards, prints, T-shirts, mugs, bags. Let us know!

Finally, our thanks go to Creative Scotland for supporting this project.