5 October 2025
Two big, long-gestated projects reach their first performances this Autumn – with a combined run-time of over four-and-a-half hours this is certainly the most music I’ve unleashed on the world in a short space of time.
On 26th October, GBSR Duo premiere Blue Hours, for piano, percussion and sine tones, at Sound Festival, Aberdeen.
The piece is three-and-a-half hours in length and starts at 6am – extreme festival-going perhaps, but all part of the idea of the work, an immersive vigil-meditation drawing on ancient monastic embodiments of temporality through the canonical hours.
The idea of making a long-duration work was GBSR’s, and Blue Hours has come about through close collaboration between us. Making something of this length is necessarily a leap of faith, and I’m very excited to find out how it feels. Many thanks to Fiona Robertson at Sound for her own leap of faith in programming it.
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A month later on 25th November I will be at Durham MUSICON for the first performance of weatherworld quartets by Quatuor Bozzini. This project has had an even longer gestation than Blue Hours, having been first conceived in 2022 and gradually finding a final form earlier this year.
weatherworld quartets is a cycle of six string quartets (around 10 mins each), exploring our sensory and bodily experience of the outdoors – the ‘weatherworld’, in Tim Ingold’s phrase. Two of the quartets continue my exploration of using plant materials to play string instruments (also seen in weedweaver and hwítland), but beyond that this is my most thoroughgoing exploration of strings as a medium for an immersive connection with the natural world.
Durham and Aberdeen – both of these events feel decisively Northern, which is far from a coincidence. A nice parallelism is that weatherworld, premiered in Durham, was inspired by the Aberdonian Ingold, and Blue Hours, premiered in Aberdeen, draws on Bede and the Northern Saints, several of whom rest here in Durham. It had to be…