About Tectonics Glasgow 2021

Welcome to Tectonics 2021. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s annual festival of new and experimental music returns with a line-up featuring many of the artists scheduled for 2020. Tectonics Glasgow once again sees international, UK, and Glasgow-based artists come together to blur musical boundaries and question what music can be.

BBC SSO Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov

This eighth incarnation of the festival is made up of unique, specially-recorded audio and video performances streamed on this site; but each day will also climax in live broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds from Glasgow’s City Halls, from 10pm to 12 midnight.

The BBC SSO remains at the core of Tectonics Glasgow and will give the world premieres of a new BBC Commission by Michael Parsons and a new work for the festival by Scott McLaughlin, along with works by Egidija Medekšaitė, Tania León, Arnulf Herrmann and Graciela Paraskevaidis. The orchestra will also record works by Cat Hope and Marc Yeats, while violin virtuoso Ilya Gringolts premieres works for solo violin by Yu Kuwabara and Sky Macklaycommissioned by the I & I Foundation.

Also performing live at City Halls will be Iain Findlay Walsh and Close Scrape (aka Adam Linson and Matthew Wright), both of whom also contribute pre-recorded work. Olivia Furey and the duo of Hannah Ellul & Rebecca Wilcox take to stage on Sunday, both sets live on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds.

Composer Yu Kuwabara

There will be unique recorded performances from US composer and performer Zachary James Watkins, pianist Angelica Sanchez, brass ensemble Zinc & Copper with Ellen Arkbro, and Scotland’s inclusive new music ensemble Sonic Bothy. Multimedia composer/performers Andrea Pensado and Ain Bailey will bring their own sound worlds to the festival along with the unique musical instruments of Frédéric Le Junter. Frieder Butzmann’s Street Music will explore the sounds of Berlin’s traffic, while Manuel Pessoa de Lima’s Skip Ad critiques the world of online advertising.

Ingrid Lubrockcontributes a new tape piece while Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua perform works by Michael Bonaventure and Huw Morgan as well as two of their own pieces. Øyvind Torvund’s Untitled School will be performed by, aptly, four students from the Freiburg Musikhochschule and a number of artists will come together to perform Philip Corner’s MusicArt Ideal.

All performances are available on this site for 30 days, with the two live broadcasts available on BBC Sounds for the same period. The festival is completely free to access.