It has been several months since I have managed to post here, and fortuitously the silence has been due to several projects landing at the same time, or last-minute requests to jump in and play for groups. Since we are in 2025, I’ll focus on the upcoming, but for the curious my concerts page will have details of dates and events including Nordic Music Days, LCMF and much more.
This year, finally, my disc of Telemann Fantasias will be released almost five years after it started. It has been a welcome challenge to approach a completely new repertoire, and the choice of Telemann might confuse those who know me as a musician who performs new music? Why I am bothering with Telemann Fantasias? The longer answer will become clear when the disc is released, but the intermingling of improvisations and my own thoughts about the ‘Baroque’, through the guise of Telemann, are a part of my approach to a period of music history (and mainstream flute-playing) that seems to be ossified by what we consider to be a sense of style or authenticity. The title for the release will be (Quasi Una) Fantasia. Many thanks to Ulysses Arts and to Chiaro Audio for being part of the project and their support.
There are more recording projects to follow this year with the Riot Ensemble, The Night With… and a new project with the composer Stuart MacRae and Stephanie Lamprea. I am happy to say that the majority of these will happen in the north and The Night With… being one of my first tours in Scotland! There is a call for proposals if there are composers who want to write for the line-up of Darren Gallacher (percussion), Stephanie Lamprea (voice) and myself.
There are exciting discussions in the works regarding concerts, in particular an appearance at the TECTONICS festival (again, something on home turf!), and as ever, performances with the Riot Ensemble. One very important appearance in February will be the Riot Ensemble at the Distat Terra Festival in Argentina. I will be teaching flute at the festival, as well as participating in the Riot’s concert of new works by student composers, and a portrait concert of Patricia Alessandrini‘s work. My visit to the festival will culminate in working with composer/researcher Bruno Mesz on his research – together we will present the OSMO machine and a new composition – Chaosmosis.
Towards the end of last year I composed two solo works for the Glasgow Experimental Music Festival. These works are for flute (with electronics) and tape, and take very different sources for their inspiration, but try to provoke the same questions about music-making and our inherited ideas of the classical canon. For DB is a type of performance-lecture for instrumentalist and tape, using the voice of the well-known improviser Derek Bailey as he expounds his thoughts on improvisation. The performer interacts with Derek’s disembodied voice as if he is alive and in the room with us, or a form of consciousness in the performance space. Derek Bailey was an important member of the free improvisation movement in the UK and one of the first musicians to articulate his practice as an improviser for the public, often taking aim at the status quo of composer and performer. The other work I composed for GEM was Sgraffito: Vorspiel which is in the main the music of Richard Wagner’s Prelude from Tristan und Isolde, upon which I overlay live musical interjections with the flute and live electronics. The effect of all of this in concert perhaps best given away by the title ‘Sgraffito’, which is of course related to the term graffiti. Sgraffito is an artistic practice, predominately in pottery or painting, where the surface material is scratched off to reveal the under layers of colour.
