Tectonics is a Music Festival curated by Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell, proudly presented by BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It takes place at City Halls, Glasgow, 1-3 May.

As with the last two editions of Tectonics Glasgow, 2015 brings together music and musicians that span a dizzyingly broad spectrum of sounds that make up, in some sense, what contemporary music in the 21st century might sound like. Again we are encouraged by the support the festival has garnered from all quarters, so it’s clear that there is a desire out there to discover new things.

This year’s festival continues Tectonics’ ambition to bring local artists together with their international peers, and to highlight some outstanding musical contributions from across the last thirty years or so. Once again, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will show what an extraordinary flexible and generous beast an orchestra can be when tackling new music.

The intensely beautiful music of Éliane Radigue will feature strongly throughout the programme, and with her pioneering work for electronics behind her, Tectonics 2015 brings her most recent work for acoustic instruments into the spotlight, with new works created especially for the festival. Radigue uses a close understanding with her collaborators to develop her music, and the festival features four of the most accomplished soloists and practitioners of her music today: Charles Curtis, Rhodri Davies, Robin Hayward and Dafne Vicente-Sandoval.

Bringing artists together is a continuing aspect of Tectonics and there are mouth-watering collaborations ahead from artists from various genres, of the calibre of Peter Brötzmann, Ben Patterson, Attila Csihar, Heather Leigh, Mariam Rezaei and the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. There will be solo sets too from Brötzmann, Justin K Broadrick, and Joel Stern, while over the weekend renegade artist/lecturer/performer Goodiepal takes up residence in the Recital Room.

There are BBC Commissions and World Premieres from leading contemporary composers such as Peter Ablinger, Joanna Bailie, Cassandra Miller and Paul Newland, while Christopher Fox and Rhodri Davies will create a work that blends orchestral writing and improvisation. Several of the new works are conceived to be sitespecific, so we have Hild Sofie Tafjord, Julia Scott and Daniel Padden
all creating works specially for the Old Fruitmarket.

Keep your ears (and eyes) open…

Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell curators