The short version
- Scotland’s soundfestival runs October 22 to 31 in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, built around one idea, paying closer attention to sound.
- Quatuor Bozzini will play James Weeks’ weatherworld quartets, two of which swap the bow for fern fronds and cypress sprigs.
- A phone-guided soundwalk on a nature reserve pairs new music with a talk on the Gaelic names and folklore of birds.
Scotland’s soundfestival returns to Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire from October 22 to 31 with more than 30 concerts, workshops and installations, and a single theme: listening. “At a time when the world can feel increasingly noisy,” the organizers write, they want to “offer space to listen differently.”
The clearest example is James Weeks’ weatherworld, six quartets of about 10 minutes each about the body’s experience of the outdoors. Quatuor Bozzini plays them at The Lemon Tree on October 30. In two of them the bow is replaced with fern fronds and cypress sprigs, and the writing leans on “rain and wind,” with harmonics, open strings and unpitched noise “sustained, glanced, brushed, tapped.” Tickets are £14, free for under-18s.
Outdoors, the composer Duncan MacLeod’s Cainnt nan Eun (The Language of the Birds) is a soundwalk heard on your own phone and headphones, mapped to Forvie National Nature Reserve (October 24) and Mill of Benholm (October 22). An RSPB Scotland talk on Gaelic bird names and folklore follows. Entry is £5.
The program also lists Claudia Molitor’s installation Silent Seas, about underwater noise pollution, the writer Ali Smith with the New European Ensemble, and a concert in a former nuclear bunker. Dates for those three were not on the festival pages we could read.
