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Saturday Festival club: Red Note Ensemble

CCA
CCA Courtyard
Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø playing trombone

Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø. Credits: Audry Chen

Programme change: Please note A copy of a copy now appears at Waterstones. 

Composer and film-maker Aron Dahl collaborated with experimental trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø to create a copy of a copy.

The work uses the concept of the traditional children’s game where a phrase is passed around a circle until it mutates into something unrecognisable.

With Henrik’s unique playing as a starting point, both the video and audio take their own paths, with some surprising twists along the way. 

Supported by Arts and Culture Norway 

Inspired by the 1931 publication 'La Anarquia Explicada a Los Niños', an instructional manual for children published during the Spanish Civil War that explained the ideas and practises of anarchy -composer Brian Irvine and director John McIlduff in collaboration with the children of Oakwood Primary School in Glasgow and Red Note Ensemble have created a collection of 7 musical animated video posters that explore key elements of “anarchical” thinking such as autonomy, kindness and human connectivity from a child’s perspective.

The work was developed over a year long process of co-creation involving pupils, teachers, artists and musicians.

Born from Red Note’s 5 Places programme, which targets five locations across central Scotland. This programme aims to properly get to know people in their own neighbourhood at grassroots level, and work with them to make and create new live music together in the heart of their community over a number of years.

This Easterhouse collaboration is based on the ideas and voices of Oakwood Primary School’s pupils and their partnered groups from the wider community.

The project was led by composer Brian Irvine, who wanted to allow young people’s anarchy to direct us, the grown-ups, on ways in which we can uncover the best of what we as humans can be.

CCA Theatre: Red Note Ensemble

Rainy Sundays brings together Ursula Leveaux (Nash Ensemble, Academy of Ancient Music) and David McGuinness (Concerto Caledonia) in improvisations that draw on their shared experience of 18th-century music, spinning old and new tunes into spacious, consonant texture.   

Red Note Ensemble: Jackie Shave (violin), Lionel Handy (cello), Iain Crawford (doublebass), Ruth Morley (flute), Will White (clarinet), Sjors van der Mark (electric guitar), Djordje Gajic (accordion), Tom Hunter (percussion), Simon Smith (piano / electronic keyboard), Matthew Swan (electronics), Simon Proust (conductor)

Red Note Ensemble, Scotland’s internationally-renowned contemporary music ensemble, bring a programme that celebrates the ensemble’s links with the Nordic countries alongside one of its most significant recent Scottish commissions - the award-winning Tanz/haus by James Dillon.

Tine Surel Lange’s Flaskepost was premiered at soundfestival 2023 in Aberdeen as part of Northern Connection, a new and innovative project to connect Nordic countries and Scotland by establishing and strengthening liaisons between composers, ensembles and festivals in contemporary music. 

The world premiere of James Dillon’s Tanz/haus opened Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s 40th edition to great acclaim, with the work being awarded the RPS composition prize and nominated for the BASCA British Composer Awards 2018. It has been recorded by Red Note and is available on Delphian Records.

Tanz/haus has been recorded by Red Note and is available on Delphian Records.

  • Hans Wilkes (Scotland): Sonderscape / Mononoke / Anno 1986 / Urname

Drummer and composer Hans Wilkes performs a set of his own works for hybrid electroacoustic percussion. Blending samples, field recordings, and drum sections inspired by house, drum and bass, jungle, art house film soundtracks, all alongside a hint of nostalgia, this is a set that will round off the Fesitval Club programme in style.

CCA Cinema
Photo of Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir (taken by Derrick Belcham)

A text/graphic score calls for the performers to predetermine a sonic path unique to their own individual interpretation; they are instructed to navigate a sequence of changes in harmony with circular movements. Performers can come to mutual agreements on aspects of their individual performances regarding intensity/tonality/etc., but this is not necessary or necessarily wanted. Seeking to excavate an individual performer’s fingerprint, what becomes interesting here is how they choose to deliberate and deliver their navigation. Their performances are then collapsed together so a listener/observer can experience the contrast of these interpretations of the “same” moment - through conflating time, the activation of the vertical exposes the manifoldness of the horizontal.  

The work is presented in a single screen cinema format for the first time. 

Agape was nominated for “work of the year” in the classical/contemporary category at the Icelandic Music Awards 2022 

Kirsten Adkins (Scotland) & Karoliina Kantelinen (Finland): Singing the Wooden House 

In April 2023 film-maker Kirsten Adkins travelled with a camera to a wooden house near the border town in Eastern Finland. The area was fought over during wars between 1939 and 1944. Some 400,000 people were evacuated as the border between Finland and the Soviet Union shifted. A 30 minute film installation blends film, family interviews, archive photographs, poetry and traditional song. 

The film project comprises original poetry by Max Mulgrew, and composed song by Finnish singer and composer Karoliina Kantelinen. 

The final night of the Festival Club with Red Note Ensemble is an invitation to dance...historically informed experimental improv, Tanz/House James Dillon's jaw dropping masterpiece, hybrid electroacoustic percussion, and Tine Surel Lange's Northern Connection work Flaskepost ...and there's another chance to see a film from Kirsten Adkins and Karoliina Kantelinen as well as Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir installation screening.

Festival Club tickets £10/£6

The CCA has long been a hub for adventurous, innovative, and experimental music making in Glasgow, and its spaces will be crammed with performances, installations and films from 22.00 each evening.

Emerging artists alongside established names, thought-provoking stillness following disco infused social commentary... the festival club could be a walk-through mixtape, or a chance to focus on one gig and then relax with a drink.

Saturday Festival Club programme is presented by Red Note Ensemble and supported by the Performing Rights Society