Mike Vickers' Blog

Red Note performs the established classics of contemporary music, commissions new music, develops the work of new and emerging composers and performers from Scotland and around the world and finds new spaces and new ways of performing contemporary music to attract new audiences”. So says the blurb on the programme for tonight’s concert at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, Glasgow (RCS).

They did all of that tonight, working with MusicLab; “MusicLab is the RCS’s student ensemble dedicated to performing music of the twentieth and twenty first centuries”; also, from the blurb.

Six RCS student pieces: Coachman Chronos, Snapdragon, Daethletics, Nikuda, Turbulences and Die Stucke der Windrose.

The pieces were played by a combination of Red Notes and MusicLab players. We know, Robert Irvine, cello, the principal player of Red Note having met him at Loch Ossian Youth Hostel; he fished while we walked. But this was the first time, from our view point, that Maximiliano Martin, clarinet, from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra joined the group.

The music was great, and I can only hope that the composers will go far, as will the MusicLab players. RCS takes students from across the world and I hope that this is not affected by Brexit. To me, one of the best ways for Scotland to be in the forefront of the world, is by attracting students to Scotland; they will go home knowing one other good country as well as their own.