For those who, consciously or not, have come to associate today's exploratory music with small ensembles, electronics or performative physicality, the symphony orchestra can seem an unlikely source of new horizons. The orthodoxy of the concert hall, the uniforms, the absorption of human performers into an abstract whole, the stasis of musicians and audience: these aren't new anxieties but they persist in interesting ways.
Tectonics, which puts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at its curatorial centre, represents a bold response to such concerns. This was the festival's fifth Glasgow edition (nineteenth overall), and as usual, the collaborative energy of conductor and co-director Ilan Volkov appeared to generate an endless stream of exchanges. This year, among other ventures, the BBCSSO dissolved itself into the structured experiment of Eddie Prévost's Spirals; enacted a deliriously maxed-out iteration of James Saunders' sequence learning series; and captured the searing, choreographed turmoil of Shiori Usui's From Scratch.
Perhaps the most anticipated link-up saw the orchestra in dialogue with Australian trio The Necks, whose slow-burn improv has brought them rare popularity over a 30-year career. The fine-grained interplay of Lloyd Swanton's double bass, Tony Buck's drums and Chris Abrahams' piano has always offered much to enjoy, sharing a little in common with the deconstructions of Supersilent or Oren Ambarchi. One danger here was always that a full symphony orchestra might swamp this density of nuance, and Swanton's feverish extrusions certainly receded from focus more than once. Volkov guided the orchestra via a system of loose cues, throwing up Penderecki-like suspensions of texture that mutated and collapsed as they sought the attention of the trio out front. At one point shards of woodwind were thrown into brilliant, warped focus, but in the end these energies seemed just too much to harness over 45 minutes.
As in 2016, the City Halls complex provided a home for the weekend's action, the formal shoebox of the Grand Hall paired with the renovated and dimly lit Old Fruitmarket. Venues are always more than mere vessels, though, and during festivals they become especially active bearers of meaning. In the Fruitmarket, signs for traders and wholesalers point to the building's original function in the mid-nineteenth century, when Glasgow was thriving as a key node in the British Empire. Two performances alluded to the setting, in very different ways. Against the backdrop of a compact trio of improvisers, Ilana Halperin took the Clydebank shipping industry as one theme in a monologue that also touched on volcanoes and hot springs, personal biography and world history. The ‘felt events’ of its title refer to the seismological term for earthquakes, yet for Halperin, delivering her narrative through elastic, jazz-poetry vowels, the phrase afforded a geopoetic linkage of the tectonic and the emotional.
The site-specific allusions of Ash Reid were more contemporary by comparison. Amid broader reflections on patriarchy and exclusion, the artist homed in on the controversial regeneration project that has transformed this section of Glasgow in recent years. With cheap MIDI loops, ironic slogans and participants snaking through the audience, Reid's was by far the most confrontational performance of the festival, even if its strategies never quite seemed to coalesce.
A more prominent theme for the weekend emerged through a thread of works by Linda Catlin Smith, the Toronto-based composer enjoying a distinct surge of interest in the UK following the 2016 recording of her violin and percussion duo, Dirt Road, for Another Timbre. Among her four European premieres given at Tectonics, one dates from 2005 and another from 1991: evidence, if it were needed, of just how delayed the discovery of her work has been this side of the Atlantic.
‘Why the delay?’ we might ask, though a more interesting question might be ‘why the discovery?’ One response, ventured by Kate Molleson during a recent interview for the Daily Herald, has been that Smith's music belongs to ‘a quiet revolution of slow, careful, inconclusive sounds that speak, or whisper, against the noise and dogma of the times’. The analogy shouldn't be taken too literally – slow music as the sound of some refusal of political doctrine – but there's undoubtedly a salience to this vocabulary of restraint. It spoke most vividly in Ricercar, a solo for baroque cello whose searching contours were animated with extraordinary resonance by Alison McGillvray. Smith has described the piece in terms of ‘a melody in search of its harmony’ and, amid the perambulation, a cautious, steeply rising three-note motif appeared to pose unfathomable questions. In Wilderness, equipped with the more elaborate palette of a full orchestra, her concerns seemed more linked to texture. The piece emerged fully formed, a loosely shifting mass of emotional uncertainty that narrated only the slightest of stories.
Aspects of Smith's music reverberated through other parts of the programme, too. Andrew McIntosh has also found inspiration in both Feldman and a range of baroque composers, and his Hyenas In The Temples of Pleasure shared something of Smith's uncluttered sensibility. It turned out to be among the most engrossing compositions of the festival: two pianos began in cautious, contrary motion, while later an array of unconventional percussion – tuned aluminium pipes, a bowl of water, a pair of wine glasses – produced a drifting, sparsely populated panorama. The members of Yarn/Wire dealt meticulously with the strangeness, spread out in mysterious isolation from one another across the stage.
Meanwhile, Saturday night's closing set from Triangulum stretched the paradigm of unhurriedness to a limit of sorts. Combining Julia Holter, Catherine Lamb and Laura Steenberge – all CalArts graduates with far-reaching and distinctive practices – the performance unfolded as a kind of experiment in harmonic ratios. Long, minimally audible tones were conjured from viola, viola da gamba and synth, as well as the players’ own voices, each sound drifting into and out of the next with almost monastic restraint. The inner logic remained cryptic but presumably links to earlier projects such as Singing By Numbers, an experimental women's choir formed by the same trio in Los Angeles in 2009.
If the intimacy of Triangulum was thoroughly human, an installation by Rie Nakajima and Pierre Berthet, by contrast, offered a closeness inhabited by automata and found objects. Tin cans hung suspended from metal wires, inflated bin liners wheezed in gentle chorus, and smaller plastic bags fluttered and rustled in currents of warm air emanating from the radiators below. Vibrations unmasked themselves as we gained proximity to each of these ‘living objects’ in turn. ‘Touch only with the ears’, urged a handwritten sign, capturing something of the close listening such environments reward. During periodic performance slots the artists intervened more actively, coaxing miniature motorised items into contact with an archipelago of jars, plates and springs arranged across the floor.
Much as it wove its way through the programme, this fascination with the unobtrusive also found vital moments of counterpoint. Duos by James Saunders and Tim Parkinson were wryly paired with Smith's Ricercar: there's a primary-colours directness to their work which felt especially bracing here. Another kind of agitation was to be found in the rarely heard orchestral work of Roscoe Mitchell, better known for his sinewy, vital wind playing in the Art Ensemble of Chicago. In the mid-1960s, through the Association for the Advancement of Colored Musicians (AACM), Mitchell helped shape a new intellectual ferment in avant-garde jazz. Cageian approaches to indeterminacy were interrogated, and community education programmes fostered radical, communal visions – see George Lewis's illuminating 2009 account A Power Stronger Than Itself. The Art Ensemble of Chicago became known for its use of whistles, harmonicas and other ‘little instruments’, but by comparison Mitchell's ‘CONVERSATIONS’, performed indefatigably here by the BBCSSO, proved less idiosyncratic. Reworked from a pair of 2014 albums recorded with Craig Taborn and Kikanju Baku, this was big, bold, American writing: sassy brass unisons shoved their way through a crowd of syncopation while a larger-than-life percussion combo rolled out fearsome, fragmented grooves. And amid the cacophony I couldn't help but hear Varèse, even Ives, as much as the junctures of a later cityscape.
Good, high-energy fun, but more compelling were Mitchell's two solo improvisations at the very start of the festival. Writing in The Wire, Meredith Monk recently characterised Mitchell as a ‘rugged individualist’, and here the description seemed apt. His first solo, for soprano saxophone, began with an astonishing fluidity, swooping vertiginously and perching on microtonal ledges before arriving at a territory of more discrete utterances. Lines of flight were punctuated by sharp diversions, but in the second solo, now on sopranino, Mitchell was limitlessly kinetic.
Hosting a panel discussion on the first day, Robert Worby relished the sense that Tectonics ‘is not a safe place to be’. If only that were truer: rarely were comfort zones transgressed. Still, few festivals can boast such thoughtful juxtapositions. If Mitchell's dynamism and Smith's ambiguity seemed to crystallise a distinct polarity, there was also something shared across the programme, something more than an obvious refusal of narrative logics. Perhaps it's what Smith gestures towards when, in the same Herald interview quoted above, she suggests that her experiment ‘is always about whether something will hold’. As for whether the orchestra itself will ‘hold’, the festival proved my wariness somewhat naïve: at its best Tectonics approaches the symphony orchestra as a constellation of possibilities, something to be reconfigured and unwound: an open resource more than a tightly framed format. Not as unsafe a place to be as might be hoped, then, but an intelligent tapestry of unclassifiable musics nonetheless.
