Name: TECTONICS: New String Collective & Clíona Cassidy
Start: 2025-05-04T16:00:00
Location: Glasgow City Hall

Cliona Cassidy

New String Collective

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Steve Reich’s music is made of movement. Patterns shift, collide, and reform. The smallest rhythm grows into something vast. A single chord can shimmer like glass.

In Three Movements, the music constantly moves and turns. Repeating figures stretch and ripple until you lose track of where the downbeat lands. Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards is a kaleidoscope of colour. Chords slide past one another, glowing one moment, dissolving the next.

Electric Counterpoint, written for both pre-recorded and live guitars, turns repetition into a trance. With Bryce Dessner at its heart, expect a sound both mechanical and deeply human. Then The Four Sections pulls the whole orchestra into Reich’s pulsing universe – strings, winds, brass and percussion stacked into layers that vibrate with raw power.

Steve Reich at 90: The Four Sections

The Glasshouse International Centre for Music

Comprising some of Scotland’s most radical string players, improvisation is at the heart of the New String Collective’s process and practice. Founded in 2023, the group has established a reputation for its mesmerising performances of new graphic scores and instruction-based pieces. Unbound by the hegemony of notation, they’re free to interrogate sound and form, mining the rich sonic landscapes of violin, viola, cello and double bass. For this set, the New String Collective are joined by soprano, composer and experimental vocalist Clíona Cassidy (a regular performer with Scottish Opera and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra) to perform her anti-song cycle Hiatus, alongside new works devised by members of the Collective.