Welcome to Tectonics 2026

2&3 MAY 2026

City Halls & Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

Music has so many different traditions, heritages, genres and geographies to offer. Each May, Tectonics offers an opportunity to bring these into the orchestral world, offering intensely diverse programmes and ideas. This year, alongside the solo sets performed by artists from across the world, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra presents three BBC commissions and world premieres, plus three UK premieres.

Across the 2026 festival, many artists reflect on the beauty and difficulty of being alive: its fragility, instability, tension, hope and resilience. Laura Bowler and Oliver Leith’s imaginative responses to the pressures of everyday life (both with the fearless GBSR Duo), as well as Angélica Castelló’s mesmerising electroacoustic world, are just three examples of this.

True to Tectonics, there’s a spirit of resistance… not rebellion for its own sake, but a reimagining of how music might sound, behave and be made. Hannah Kendall literalises “disobedience” by combining string instruments with dreadlock cuffs, deliberately disrupting Western classical expectations and opening new sonic territories. In the Recital Room, Frédéric Le Junter’s hand-built sound machines embrace unpredictability and imbalance, creating what he calls “a rumour… where randomness and determination merge, the wanted and unwanted.” And traditional instruments themselves are reimagined, as in the world premiere of Christopher Fox’s ‘Minding the hive’, written for Lore Amenabar Larrañaga’s fascinating self-designed, quartertone accordion.

I look forward to welcoming two pioneering American collaborators to Glasgow. An orchestral world premiere by creative flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell marks the festival’s culmination, featuring Nicole and jazz pianist–electronic musician Craig Taborn as soloists. Earlier, Craig brings his fearless, wide-ranging musical imagination to a solo set, before returning in duo with Nicole.

The music draws on lived experience as much as abstract ideas. Glasgow-based Callie Rose Petal makes trauma and survivorhood audible through textures of increasing intensity. The music of Scottish tuba artist, Danielle Price, emerges from the physical labour of making sound, where improvisation and breath are the music’s core material. And Naomi Pinnock’s orchestral work takes inspiration from the unrealised possibilities hidden beneath the layered surfaces of paintings.

For all its moments of intensity, the 2026 festival also offers hope, reflection, and resilience. Martin Smolka’s BBC commission draws inspiration from one of the oldest known complete musical compositions from Ancient Greece: “As long as you’re alive, shine… Life is short, and time asks for its due.” And Saint Abdullah’s sonic storytelling is a powerful blend of geopolitics, religion and social behaviour, suggesting that optimism endures in the act of making, listening and imagining a better future.

No two Tectonics festivals offer the same experience! As always, bring a thirst for discovery and surprises. Thank you very much for continuing to support Tectonics Glasgow and the BBC SSO.

Ilan Volkov, Tectonics Glasgow curator