New Recording
A new recording of the guitar piece Cancion features in a CD entitled Anfangs, on the MSR label Number MS 1214. It can be purchased in the UK from Amazon, priced at £11.49. The soloist is Finnish guitarist Tuomo Tirronen.
Upcoming Events
Incunabula will be played by Richard Deering during Arts Week in Dorking, Surrey in October 2008. More details will be available at a later date.
A commemorative CD is in the process of being compiled, and will feature some of Tom's major orchestral works. Further details will be posted on this page as they become available.
Archive of recent performances
The St Kentigern Suite opened the fourth event of the A Concert, a Cocktail and a Canape series by the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra, under conductor Peter Cynfryn Jones, at Oran Mor on Monday September 24 2007.
The Edinburgh Quartet played the Third Quartet at Edinburgh University's Reid Hall on Tuesday October 2 2007 and at Glasgow University Concert Hall on Tuesday March 4 2008.
The voice and piano version of Tom's setting of Seven Songs from the Chinese, The Willow Branches, was one of the pieces performed on Sunday October 28 2007 by Sandra Porter (mezzo) and Graeme McNaught (piano), in a recital under the umbrella of North East Scotland's annual contemporary music festival sound.
An excerpt from The Confessions of a Justifed Sinner was included in a programme broadcast by Radio Scotland at 5.05pm on Sunday November 11 2007.
The RSAMD Brass performed Sinfonietta on Thursday November 22 2007.
There Is No Rose featured in the Glasgow Hospitals' Carol Concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in December 2007.
The Violin Concerto was played by the internationally renowned American violinist Kurt Nikkanen on Friday January 4 2008 in a concert given by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
The Fifth Symphony was performed at Glasgow City Halls on Friday January 18 2008 and at Edinburgh's Queen's Hall on Saturday January 19 2008 by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Garry Walker. For details of the Glasgow concert click here. For details of the Edinburgh concert click here.
The Chamber Symphony was played by the RSAMD on February 16 2008.
Pas De Quoi was performed by The Glasgow Philharmonic Orchestra in Oran Mor, Glasgow on February 18 2008.
Homage to Thomas Wilson by John Maxwell Geddes
Gemini, a full-scale orchestral work by John Maxwell Geddes, was premiered by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday 4th August 2007, prior to a tour of The Netherlands and Berlin. Michael Tumelty, writing in The Herald on 25th July, describes Geddes's piece as "a homage and an elegy to his great friend Wilson". The article, which explores the unique relationship between the two composers, is reproduced in full below with the kind permission of the newspaper.
Writing music, most composers would agree, is ultimately a solitary experience. Even with such a gregarious and communicative bunch as the new and phenomenally productive Glasgow school of composers at the RSAMD, at the end of the day it comes down to the individual facing up to a blank sheet of manuscript, armed only with inspiration, or lack of it.
Historically, there has been in Scotland one striking exception to the norm: the relationship between John Maxwell Geddes, now 65, and the late Thomas Wilson, two of the country's finest composers. Each was highly individual and quite distinctive from the other, both in character and in their music.
They didn't collaborate as such. They didn't write joint pieces or work as a collective. But they had a deep friendship that extended back to the time they met in the 1960s. They would share ideas. They used each other as sounding boards. They would pass to each other completed scores and works in progress. Everything was up for discussion and debate, from detail to philosophy. I was privileged to attend, in a fly-on-the-wall capacity, several of their evening meetings, which ran late into the night, and was struck by the openness with which each would lay out his musical creations and ideas to the other's critical gaze.
"We were musical twins, or perhaps I was the younger brother," reflected Geddes, chewing over the origins and inspiration of his new orchestral composition, Gemini, a commission from the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland that will be premiered in Glasgow next Saturday.
Gemini, a full-scale, 20-minute composition, is a homage and an elegy to his great friend Wilson, who died in 2001. The piece didn't start out that way. Geddes was commissioned by NYOS to write a 20-minute orchestral piece, but not a symphony (he already has three to his name).
Without any real certainty of what his new NYOS piece would be about, or what form it might take, Geddes found that as he worked last year on other commissions, something started to happen. "Unbidden came the sort of motivic writing associated with Tom; not from specific compositions, but his thumbprints, his hallmarks, as it were."
Parallel with this experience came the impulse to write a dualistic music that would couple a traditional "high-energy, high-activity music", which is one characteristic of Wilson's music, with its opposite: music that appears to be still and timeless, which is a strong and enduring feature in Geddes's orchestral and smaller-scale music.
As all of these strands came together, Geddes seemed to realise he was thinking more and more about Wilson. "Tom and I talked often and long into the night about the idea of stasis in symphonic music. Was it possible? Or did music always have to be an interminable march to the coda?"
The two friends did not agree (as any familiarity with Wilson's more propulsive, driving, energetic music will confirm). "Tom always argued that stasis was an illusion, and that the illusion was only possible if you had activity or kinesis all around it."
It wasn't all they disagreed about. Wilson was a man of deep religious faith. Geddes has no religious faith. Wilson wrote religious music. The idea of composing religious music is alien to Geddes. Wilson was drawn to the medium of opera. Geddes has no interest in it; symphonic, chamber, and instrumental music are his preferred genres.
But there was no real dispute between the two men, nor between their two very different types of music.
All of this has fed into the creation of Geddes's homage to Wilson. The references to Wilson are internal, beneath the bonnet of the orchestral engine, as it were. Those who know Wilson's music should not go hunting for signs. There are no direct quotes, though some of the senior composer's trademark motives, rhythms and general dynamism will colour Geddes's Gemini.
Apart from any technical considerations, Gemini is a tribute, memorial, elegy - call it what you will - from one of Scotland's best composers to another. "Tom, in my lifetime, was a central figure in 20th-century music, and a great influence on Scottish music generally."
Geddes's four-section piece might be a personal homage, but is in no sense a Wilson pastiche. "It's not a directional, developmental symphonic piece." In Wilson's hands it might well have been. There's no intrinsic conflict between passages of high activity and passages which appear to be motionless, says Geddes. "In the four sections the same materials are presented in different ways. They co-habit. There's no real confluence. They just stand next to each other." All of this playing with perceptions of time and movement will be familiar to those who know Geddes's music. It strongly colours elements in his three best-known orchestral works, Lacuna, Ombre and Voyager, and appears frequently in other pieces, not least his iconic cello piece Callanish and his near-eternal, 100-year composition, Find Two Stones (a bit of a story in itself).
The concept of movement and stasis is one of the toughest to pull off in music. Geddes, a master of orchestral ingenuity and manipulation of perception in music, has done it repeatedly. He strikes the analogy with a galaxy. "A galaxy doesn't appear to be going anywhere. It does, however, rotate." In that pithy comment is a critical guide to any unfamiliar listener at the NYOS concert. And I can just see the wise, kindly, and philosophical shade of Tom Wilson puffing on the ever-present pipe, nodding sagely at that one, and instigating yet another discussion.