Warming up for our performance at Reid Hall, Edinburgh on Thursday 5 March. Excited to be joined once again by the amazing @cliocassidy to perform her piece Hiatus, as well as sharing some new works of our own. Tickets are free- link in bio! #improvisedmusic #experimentalmusic #newstrings
Join us on the 5th March at 7pm in the Reid Hall, Edinburgh for a performance of Hiatus with the wonderful @cliocassidy , as well as a selection of new works by the collective. This event is free to attend, you’ll find the eventbrite link in our bio.
‘Hiatus’ is my most personal piece, and I’m genuinely excited that I get to do it again with the brilliant, fierce, creative women and men of the New String Collective next Thursday 5th at the Reid Hall, Edinburgh, hosted by the Edinburgh College of Art. LINK TO TICKETS IN BIO and they are FREE. Here’s a note on what it’s about:
HIATUS (2023)
This piece is my response to the traditional classical song cycle structure - a series of songs on a theme, usually performed together, in sequence, in recital.
This improvised song cycle centres the space between the songs - the charged, animated silence between the moving parts, where the audience and performer drop pretence and their experience momentarily merges. The pull towards authenticity is like the pull of gravity. A taught wire releases, and we continue to listen, to watch, while the performer puts down the mask, and we are all alive in the same soundscape.
The three songs of this song cycle are half memories, brought together from past places, into the present, arrested in time. The hiatus between them is both the forgetting and the preserving place - strands of memory, painted in mercury, preserved because there is no breath to make them live or evolve.
As the piece progresses, the hiatus slowly expands, and the balance between Things that Happen* and the wait space of memory, past trauma and forgetting shifts.
* Things that Happen is an epic poem written by my uncle, the Irish modernist poet Maurice
Scully (1952-2023)
(Repost due to change of support)
Join us on Saturday 25 October at @oldhairdressers for our last performance of 2025! We’re super excited to have support from noise musician @boosterhooch and ambient electronic artist @tree.m.c .
Tickets available from Old Hairdressers website and on the door (£10 / pay what you can)
Please join us for an afternoon of improvised dance, music and more at GTAC to raise funds for the artist-led studio and collective.
Anyone who has attended rehearsals, workshops, performances, screenings or classes at GTAC will know what a magical, beautiful and crucially, gorgeous sounding space it is!
This will be the New String Collective’s first performance since Tectonics at The City Halls in May. The ensemble will comprise of Emer Tumilty, Stevie Jones, Joanna Stark, Alistair Quietsch, Rafe Fitzpatrick, Armin Sturm and Jessica Argo, with long term collaborators Jer Reid and Alex South of Collective Endeavours and a brilliant group of dancers and improvisers: Penny Chivas, Brian Hartley, Anne Kjaer, Skye Reynolds, Alma Sua and Aby Watson.
This is promising to be quite the event; space is limited so snap up a ticket in advance on Eventbrite (link in bio).
If anyone is unable to attend but keen to donate, many thanks and please do so at the Eventbrite page.
Sunday 21st September: 2:30pm doors, 3:00pm start.
Pay What You Can Afford. Suggested donation £0-£15.
GTAC is not an accessible venue as it is up several flights of stairs and has no lift.
GTAC is at 7 Water Row, very close to Govan tube station and the new Partick/Govan bridge.
Some snippets from our performance at @tectonicsglas a few weeks ago with the incredible @cliocassidy in City Halls, Glasgow. Thank you @tectonicsglas for having us, we had a blast! Looking forward to sharing more from the performance soon 👀
TODAY!!! I remember sitting in the audience in the main hall at City Halls for Tectonics Festival a few years ago, thinking: How amazing would it be to have an improvised classical vocal piece with orchestra.. even in my fantasy I didn’t imagine it would be my piece and I’d be singing it, but that is happening tomorrow at 4pm!!! With the most amazing group of radical, big hearted string players The New String Collective and paired with Peter Nicholson’s extraordinarily beautiful piece 10th June ♥️ Cannot wait!!!
