You Can't Get There from Here

Abstract

You Can’t Get There from Here was commissioned by the Sound Festival 2015 with funding from Creative Scotland. The idea, emerging initially from New Music Scotland’s 2014 ‘Time Out’ composer residency, was to experiment with a method of collaborating on music that was fully integrated but at the same time allowed for some emergence of individual voice. This resulted in a process whereby the six composers in the group each started a fragment of music, and each passed that fragment on to another member of the group, according to a predetermined schedule. Each composer then altered, added to, or took away from, the material that they were given, and then passed it to the next. This process continued until the transformed fragment arrived back at the composer it started with. The performance of the final six-part collaboration occurred on October 22, 2015 at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen, Scotland. BBC Radio Scotland broadcast a feature on "Classics Unwrapped" with Jamie MacDougall in early November 2015