Tuesday 3 April 2012

Away with the Birds

I attended the Edinburgh Enlightenment Exchange at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on Saturday. You can read my blog post about the event here and also on Clicket here.
I found out about loads of interesting projects at the event and thought I would share some of those over the next couple of weeks on this blog and over on my website.

I enjoyed the presentation from Suzy Glass about the need to allow ourselves to fail and to learn from that failure. I was also very interested in her work with Trigger, a Glasgow based arts organisation, particularly in the work in progress Air falbh leis na h-eòin (Away with the Birds in Gaelic). We heard an extract from this vocal piece at the Enlightenment Exchange. It builds on the relationship that the Scottish Gaelic tradition has with birds, particularly the way that Gaelic folk songs imitate birdsong to evoke the landscape. The piece recombines archive songs and rhymes into a new composition and will become a site-specific performance for a small Hebridean island.

The project is conceived by artist Hanna Tuulikki , created by an interdisciplinary team and produced by Trigger in association with Cape Farewell as part of Sea Change a programme of research and creativity across Scotland’s islands.

Air falbh leis na h-eòin was premiered at the New Music Scotland Showcase in October 2011. Since then it has been performed a number of times and no doubt there will be many other performances in the future.

As ever, red text in this post contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more

4 comments:

Christina said...

You do the most interesting things Juliet!

Carol Steel said...

This intrigues me. I'm envious of your time spent with these people and am grateful that you are sharing these links and ideas. Thank you.

EG CameraGirl said...

Hmmm. I could use some advice on learning from failure. How wonderful that you found this talk so inspirational.

shoreacres said...

I came along last night and read this, and started following links - forgetting to come back! I listened to Hann Tuulikki, and some of the other musicians she works with. Reading your description, I had to laugh - some may enjoy recombinant DNA, but here we have recombinant art!

I'm a great fan of failure, myself. Alan Kay, one of the great hackers of our age, once said, "If you don't fail at least 90% of the time, you're not aiming high enough".