22nd October 2021

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Red Note Ensemble, conducted by William Cole, will tonight perform my new work, '37 Otago Street' at sound festival, Aberdeen (https://www.rednoteensemble.com/event/red-note-at-soundfestival-2021/)

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The sextet – for Alto Flute, Bass Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello and Double Bass – takes its inspiration from a 'ghost sign' located in the West End of Glasgow. In the programme notes to the composition, I write: 

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Cracked and fissured, reds, whites and earth-like colours dispersed across the frame. Letters, even complete words, hand-painted in the 1920s, just discernible: now faded – still fading – into apparitions. The ‘ghost sign’ at 37 Otago Street became a familiar sight on my daily lockdown walk through Glasgow. Revisiting this image with routine, almost ritual, I became fascinated by its complexity and changeability: its disparate elements enhanced, recoloured, embroidered by the light, affected by the time of day and year. When captured on camera, zoomed in and examined – a method famously employed on the streets of Chicago by ‘abstract expressionist photographer’ Aaron Siskind in the 1950s – the sign betrays an intricate and heavily textured inner world. Inspired by my daily encounters with the street mural, 37 Otago Street offers several perspectives on what becomes a familiar, even nostalgic, timbral palette. Glimpses of ghostly lettering and flecks of crimson-hued paint emerge in the fragile ensemble textures and concrete sonorities of the auxiliary instruments. Shifting from foreground to background, fractured musical images are interwoven and drawn into focus as we pass them by.