fbpx

Glasgow Barons

Programme

Linda Buckly – Exploding Stars

Gareth Williams – How

Claire McCue – Flicker

Kaiji Saariaho – Mirrors

Bill Sweeney – Sharakan

Stepan Rostomyan – Symphony No. 3

Linda Buckley – Exploding Stars written in 2011 for Darragh Morgan, premiered at the Spatial Music Collective Event,  National Concert Hall, Dublin. Exploding Stars was included in the film “Living in a Coded Land” by Pat Collins (2014).

Gareth Patrick Williams – HOW 

I: How to Sleep

II: How to Dream

III: How to Dance

 

William Sweeney – Sharakan 1989

Sharakan is an ancient Armenian melodic chant. This work is a tribute to the survival of Armenia’s people through periods of natural and man-made tragedy. Sharakan was commissioned by “New Beginnings” with financial support from the Scottish Arts Council.

https://www.scottishmusiccentre.com/william-sweeney

Claire McCue – Flicker 2016

What happens to a flame when it blows out?

Kaiji Saariaho – Mirrors

Stepan Rostomyan – Symphony 3 1989

Artist biographies

Govan faces tremendous economic and social hardship. Named after the ship building barons, The Glasgow Barons have been helping make music in Govan since 2017 with schools, community groups and local people. We put on performances that fit our wide range of venues, be it Fairfield Club, Govan & Linthouse Parish Church or the Billiard Room Sessions in the Pearce Institute.

Local groups build music programmes with our support, such as our asylum-seeking Musicians In Exile and The Linties’ golden oldies singalong group. We also support local singer-songwriters and rappers to tell Govan’s story. We pay local residents for goods and services. We align closely with the Govan-Partick Footbridge project, NSPCC Together for Childhood and other local partners to maximise and sustain our impact.

The Glasgow Barons are based in Govan where our Artistic Director is also a resident and community councillor.

Artist biographies

Linda Buckley is an award winning Irish composer (born in Cork, 1979) who creates electronic and acoustic music, and has a particular interest in working across many disciplines, most notably film and in the realm of drone and dark ambient music. Her NMC record From Ocean’s Floor was featured by Iggy Pop on BBC Radio 6 as “beautiful music – here is somebody really special”. Her work has been described as “sublime and brilliant” (BBC Radio 3), “engaging with an area of experience that new music is generally shy of, which, simplified and reduced to a single word, I’d call ecstasy” (Bob Gilmore, Journal of Music). She has written extensively for orchestra (BBC Symphony Orchestra, RTÉ NSO), was elected to Aosdana in 2021, and is a member of the Screen Composers Guild of Ireland.

 

She has worked in many collaborative contexts including scoring film by Kathryn Ferguson (Nothing Compares co-composed with Irene Buckley, nominated for Best Score at the IFTA Awards and Cinema Eye Honors), Mark Cousins (Like a Huge Scotland and A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things), Pat Collins (That He May Face the Rising Sun co-composed with Irene Buckley, Living in a Coded Land, Henry Glassie: Field Work) and Tadhg O’Sullivan (To The Moon). Awards include a Fulbright scholarship to New York University, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Frankfurt Visual Music Award (for Silk Chroma) and Gold at the New York Festivals Radio Awards (for Mother’s Blood, Sister Songs documentary with Athena Media).

 

Recent collaborations include new work for Liam Byrne and Crash Ensemble, Gudrun Gut (Einstürzende Neubauten), Andrew Zolinsky (for Dark Music Days, hcmf and New Music Dublin). She was invited by John Schaefer’s New Sounds Live (WNYC) to present the New York premiere of a new live score to the silent horror film Nosferatu (co-composed with Irene Buckley) at Brookfield Place. Linda holds a Music Degree from University College Cork, a Masters in Music and Media Technologies and a PhD in Composition from Trinity College Dublin. She has lectured in Composition at Trinity College Dublin, Pulse College at Windmill Lane and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In September 2020 her NMC record, From Ocean’s Floor was released: “The Irish composer combines traditional séan-nos singing with an electronic soundscape, connecting past and future … It’s clear how much Buckley deeply connects her past to her present, opening up possibilities for our mutual musical futures.” Guardian – Album of the Month, ‘a masterpiece in connecting the past and future.’ Evening Standard

(born 1977) is an Irish composer based at Edinburgh College of Art. He was the first composer in residence for Scottish Opera from 2012 to 2015. His work spans from opera and music theatre to chamber music.

 Born in Glasgow, on Jan 5th, 1950. William Sweeney is a Scottish composer. He studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (1967–70), and at the RAM (1970–73) with Alan Hacker (clarinet) and Harrison Birtwistle (composition). He worked as a woodwind tutor for a number of years and later taught composition at the University of Glasgow. He won the Aeleph Prize for composition in 1981, and has twice been awarded the McEwan Commission from the University of Glasgow (1981 and 1989).
Sweeney’s interest in Scottish traditional music is audibly present throughout his oeuvre. The textures of Salm an Fhearainn (1987), for 18-part a cappella choir, are derived from the heterophonic style of Gaelic psalm-singing, while Nine Days, for clarinet with drone, is cast in the form of a piobaireachd. The melody is varied not only in its ornamentation, as in traditional pibroch, but in its contour; also modified is the instrument’s tone-colour, through alternative fingerings. In An rathad ùr (1989), for tenor saxophone and orchestra, the concern is with a reconciliation of art music with jazz, and a blurring of the distinction between improvised (or more freely structured) and precisely notated music. In the rhythmic language of such works as Maqam (1984) and The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1988), with their exploration of ostinato and other techniques of varied repetition, Sweeney has been influenced by ancient Greek poetry as well as by Indian and Arab traditions.
Biography from Oxford Music Online

What happens to a flame when it blows out?

Claire is a Scottish composer, orchestrator, lyricist, and music educator currently living in Glasgow., Claire originally gained a first class BSc(hons) in Maths Statistics & Management science before returning to her passion for music. With support from the Ian McGlashan trust fund, she completed a BA Applied Music, studying a range of subjects including piano, trombone and composition, and playing in the university orchestra and Big Band. She graduated with 1st class honours and was awarded the Alexander Stone award in her final year. 

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics.

Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater and Emilie. Around the operas there have been other vocal works, notably the ravishing Château de l’âme (1996), Oltra mar (1999), Quatre instants (2002), True Fire (2014). The oratorio La Passion de Simone, portraying the life and death of the philosopher Simone Weil, formed part of Sellars’s
international festival ‘New Crowned Hope’ in 2006/07. The chamber version of the oratorio was premiered by La Chambre aux echos at the Bratislava Melos Ethos Festival in 2013.

Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards in The Grawemeyer Award, The Wihuri Prize, The Nemmers Prize,The Sonning Prize, The Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she was honoured with the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 2015 she was the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Always keen on strong educational programmes, Kaija Saariaho was the music mentor of the 2014-15 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was in residence at U.C. Berkeley Music Department in 2015.

Saariaho continues to collaborate for the stage. Only The Sound Remains, her most recent opera collaboration with Peter Sellars, was premiered in Amsterdam in 2016. In the same year her first opera L’Amour de Loin was presented in its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera in a new production by Robert Le Page. The Park Avenue Armory and New York Philharmonic presented a celebration of her orchestral music with visual accompaniment. February 2017 saw Paris come alive with her work when she was featured composer of Radio France Festival Presences.

Her new opera, Innocence, will be premiered in July 2021 at Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence.

In 1989, Armenian composer Stepan Rostomyan was invited to work at Glasgow University’s electro acoustic music studio, experimenting with environmental sounds from his homeland, children’s chorus, prayer chant and burvar, a liturgical instrument.  Paragon Ensemble of Scotland commissioned the resulting Symphony No.3 with support from the Scottish Arts Council for the “New Beginnings” International Festival. They premiered the work in the Stephenson Hall of the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in November of that year.

Ticket Type Price Buy
Two Day Ticket Pass
£35 - £50 Book Now
One Day Ticket Pass 14th
£25 - £30 Book Now
One Day Ticket Pass 15th
£25 - £30 Book Now
Two Day Pass & shadows that in darkness dwell. 10% off bundle
£40.5 - £54 Buy Now
Two Day Pass & Mix and Match CD
From £45 Buy Now
Pay it Forward Two Day Ticket
£50 Book Now
Email matthew@thenightwith.com to claim a pay it forward ticket