Tune Up - Music Touring Across Scotland

Tours: Red Note Ensemble - A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle

Thu 3rd Jun 2010 - Wed 9th Jun 2010

Glasgow composer Bill Sweeney sets Hugh MacDiarmid's great poem to music of great imagination and vibrancy, to be performed by one of Scotland's finest contemporary music ensembles, Red Note. Written by MacDiarmid in 1926, the poem, with its infamously thrawn narrator, explores the state of Scotland, taking in politically charged comment, wild literary invention, humour, inebriation and lyrical beauty. With his background in the European avant-garde, and a love of traditional Scottish folk music and jazz, Sweeney is an ideal candidate to capture the many sides of MacDiarmid: modernist and traditionalist, nationalist and internationalist.
The Red Note Ensemble, directed by John Harris and Robert Irvine, is a newly-formed professional music ensemble, dedicated to contemporary music. Noting how compositional software would turn unplayable or out of range notes red, Harris and Irvine rose to the challenge. As they told one newspaper, "Red Note will be the group that will play the unplayable." Having toured in 2009 with Ligeti's fiendish 'Chamber Concerto' and been appointed contemporary music associate ensemble with the RSAMD in Glasgow, events have moved quickly for Red Note Ensmble. They will be conducted on this tour by rising star Jessica Cottis. At only 29, she is already established as a sensitive conductor, working with the great Donald Runnicles, who describes her as his "extra ears". Add in special appearances from The Andrews Sisters and a black gospel/soul group and you have the perfect team for a night of wild musical and literary invention.

The nervous thistle's shiverin like

A horse's skin aneth a cleg,

Or Northern Lichts or lustres o

A soul that Daith has fastened on,

Or mornin eftir the night afore

Shudderin thistle gie owre,
gie owre.
Hugh MacDiarmid

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle