Dales Park School and Peterhead Central School will perform two  shows that celebrate the benefits to a maritime community as well as warning of the dangers.

The performances are the result of a nine-month collaboration between children, their teachers and professional musicians and composers,  Kenneth Dempster, Joanna Nicolson, Pete Stollery  and Ross Whyte.

sound, North East Scotland’s festival of new music, is forming soundlab, a collective of musicians who will rehearse and perform existing new music, newly commissioned works and works composed by local composers/members of the group.

The group will be run by clarinettist Joanna Nicholson and flautist Richard Craig, both regular performers in sound.

The first meetings of the group will be in Johnston Hall at the University of Aberdeen on:
Saturday the 2nd June (12.30-5pm) and Sunday the 3rd of June (12.30-5pm)

If you’d like to take part or want more information please contact: richard@sound-scotland.co.uk

ACOUSMATIC MUSIC BY:
PETE STOLLERY, ROSS WHYTE, TROND LOSSIUS and SUK-JUN KIM

MUSA, EXCHANGE STREET, ABERDEEN
Sunday, 22 April 2012  

The Three Cities Project links three northern cities, Aberdeen, Bergen and St. Petersburg. All three are seaports and both Aberdeen and Bergen are heavily involved in the North Sea oil industry. All three cities are also the hub of special music festivals: sound in Aberdeen, Music Factory in Bergen and Sound Ways in St. Petersburg. All three are also home to internationally recognised centres of excellence in the music world: the University of Aberdeen, Grieg Academy in Bergen and Rimsky Korsakov Conservatory in St. Petersburg.

Sunday’s event in Musa was more than just a concert; it was an EVENT, part of a work in progress which will see its ultimate culmination at the sound festival in November.

Three of the composers taking part were in Musa to present their pieces: Pete Stollery and Ross Whyte from Aberdeen and from Bergen, Trond Lossius. Also present was Mark Higgin whose piece Lift was performed and the evening concluded with Three Returns by Suk-Jun Kim which interwove material from all three cities.

Central to Sunday’s performance was the theme of Place. Pete Stollery’s brilliant introduction explained the three notions of place in the different composer’s approach to their creative work. He compared the three ideas to visual art. Place at referred to simple unchanged recordings, what in visual terms would be a photograph. Place of involved the artist’s individual interpretation, say Turner’s seascapes and Place for involved the artist’s creation of new imaginary places. All of these could be powerful in their impact and Pete Stollery mentioned his own straight recordings made at the Glendronach Whisky Distillery which so impressed the workers there. This was a unique and important historical document in sound which preserved memories of an older way of working.

The first piece we were to hear on Sunday however was Pete Stollery’s ABZ /A which used recordings made at Aberdeen Airport and at or near the Aberdeen Docks. Unchanged sounds (Place at) along with the composer’s shaping of these sounds (Place of), the composer’s interpretations of the original sound material gave the work its shape and artistic significance.

Ross Whyte’s Crossing was developed from the sounds surrounding a ferryboat in Bergen. The development of chordal sounds and of rhythms within that musical colour, along with dynamic changes, gave the piece its special impact.

Pete Stollery’s piece Crossing – Bergen used the same basic recorded material but produced a very different result – a beautifully shaped piece with bell-like sounds and a suggestion of tuned percussion – a fascinating interpretation of pure sound away from its origins.

Two of Trond Lassius’s pieces were straightforward recordings, Ågotnes Terminal and Wind, Water, Helikopter. There is, of course, still considerable artistry involved in the composer’s choosing and presentation of his sound sources and I was surprised that the second of the pieces had not been edited in any way because the impression was of different shots in a film that had been carefully edited together. Trond’s first piece was especially fascinating in the way that the natural sound merged imperceptibly into sculptured sound. Listening to this, I was reminded of the way in which visual artists like David Hockney take a basic landscape and by altering the range of colours he uses gives his paintings their artistic significance. Are these artists in sound not doing something similar?

Ross Whyte’s Hermitage was his imaginative sound transformation of material recorded during a walk through the celebrated gallery. Footsteps and conversations could still be heard beneath the developing aura of new sound which reminded me of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna before its crescendo developed even greater levels of abstraction.

Mark Higgin’s Lift was based on the squealing sounds of a tap in the men’s toilets of his workplace. Birds, sirens, animal cries, a train whistle and the crackling of fires were all developed from this basic sound.

The Event concluded with a three part work by Suk-Jun Kim bringing sounds from all three city sources into play – a fascinating adventure in sound exploring all three ideas of place. This was but a beginning however and it will be fascinating to discover what the completed project brings to fruition in November in the sound festival.

© Alan Cooper 2012

Pop (and definitely not classical) critic Alexis Petridis took his five-year-old daughter Esme to Whitstable to find out.  Read more here

Not music … just sounds: maybe the hum of a fridge or the clunk of a front door; the whirr of a bicycle wheel, the drone of a motorway, the polyrhythmic tapping of an office full of keyboards. If you live in a city, think of the noises particular to its streets – the ones you’d recognise as home if you moved away. Sounds so familiar you’d only really notice them if they went silent.

Read more here.

Please send your proposal to fiona@sound-scotland.co.uk before 30^th April 2012.

Light and sound will travel along the installation at the speed of the world record holder – 9.58 seconds from start to finish.

We are looking for a sound artist to work with a community group/s to create one or more audio works for the installation of 9.58 seconds in length. The audio will run alongside the light in a wave of sound.

Members of the public will be involved by being challenged to run alongside the moving light, to pit themselves against the fastest person on Earth, Usain Bolt, as well as being involved in the making of the sound.

The work will tour various sites around the period that the Olympic torch relay comes to Aberdeen in June.

We are looking for a sound artist based in Aberdeen with experience of working with community groups, available during the period April – May 2012. The audio pieces must be completed by end May.

There are two commissions, each with a fee of £500

Please send expressions of interest to  johodges@tiscali.co.uk with CV, detailing how you would approach the commission.

 Deadline March 16th 2012

Further info: Jo Hodges Tel 01848 200044 / Robbie Coleman Tel 07908607480

Lightspeed is commissioned by Aberdeen City Council

sound (North East Scotland’s festival of new music) is seeking to appoint a part-time freelance Education and Outreach Officer.

The Education and Outreach Officer will deliver existing activities and develop a strategic multi-year framework for workshops/projects involving new music performance and composition.

The successful candidate will have a background in the arts sector, ideally in a similar post, experience of working with local community organisations as well as local councils, and will have knowledge of the Curriculum for Excellence. He/she will be a self-motivated individual, capable of  working on their own initiative and able to think creatively as well as work as part of a team.

We are looking for someone strategic, very organised and flexible, with excellent project management skills (including fundraising), written/verbal communication skills and IT knowledge.

The post will be offered initially as a fixed-term one-year freelance contract. Our long-term aim is to have a permanent post if sustainable funding can be found.

The closing date for applications is 5pm on Monday 12 March 2012 and interviews will take place in the week of 19 March.

You can download a full job description here

Letters of application accompanied by a CV should be e-mailed to: fiona@sound-scotland.co.uk  or posted to:

Fiona Robertson
sound
c/o Woodend Barn
Banchory
AB31 5QA