Deep Time Festival Pass
By donating £25 here you can enjoy all four nights of new music at Deep Time with a festival pass.
You can book tickets for individual nights here for free or for a suggested donation of £10.
Deep Time is Fruitmarket’s first festival of new music featuring commissions and performances from some of the leading radical and experimental composers, musicians and improvisors working today. They are brought together in the context of deep time to explore ideas of time and temporality, stasis and movement, provocation and play, ritual and activism in art and music, drawing their inspiration from geology, philosophy, popular culture, the natural world, and with the need for art to engage with the reality of the climate crisis.
The festival will premiere two inventive new commissions by Germany-based Croatian composer Sara Glojnarić – most recently the winner of the Ernst von Siemens Förderpreis 2023, Erste Bank Composition Award and Darmstadt’s Kranichstein Music Prize – and Dundee-based Japanese composer and improvisor Shiori Usui – a BBC Proms commissioned composer and recipient of a 2018 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists – as part of four days of performance, improvisation, talks, late night DJ sets and curated playlists that will open up Fruitmarket to some of the most innovative and boundary-challenging new music being made today.
In partnership with the Sir Charles Lyell Collection, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
●●●Performers ●●●
Angela Wai Nok Hui, Yshani Perinpanayagam, p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r., Plus Minus Ensemble, Simone Seales, Pat Thomas, Katherine Tinker
●●●Composers ●●●
Uri Agnon, Laurence Crane, George Crumb, Davíð Brynjar Franzson, Sara Glojnarić**^, Esin Gunduz*, Jenni Hogan**, Bernhard Lang, Liza Lim, Jessie Marino, Claudia Molitor, Njabulo Phungula, Max Syedtollan**, Berglind María Tómasdóttir, Shiori Usui**^, Gillian Walker**, Jennifer Walshe
*UK premiere
**world premiere
^ commissioned by Fruitmarket for Deep Time
Thursday 16.11.23
p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r // d.e.e.p.t.i.m.e @ f.r.u.i.t.m.a.r.k.e.t
● 6–7pm: Sara Glojnarić in conversation with Kate Molleson
Ahead of the premiere of her new work commissioned by Fruitmarket and p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r, composer Sara Glojnarić will be in conversation with journalist and author Kate Molleson, presenter of BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show and author of the award-winning book Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century (Faber, 2022).
● 7.30–8.30pm: p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r // d.e.e.p.t.i.m.e @ f.r.u.i.t.m.a.r.k.e.t
p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r. present a programme for Deep Time that explores the fragility of stasis, slowness, and the natural world amid the clamour of clickbait, short attention spans and the Information Age. From the disparate to the hyperconnected, the timeless to the ever-changing, the audience will be drawn from internal moments to an extroverted and hyperactive present.
Through the lens of selected composers whose themes include deep listening, movement, popular culture and ritual, p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r. invite the audience to pay attention to the quiet as well as the noise, and experience minute and sometimes frantic changes in their bodies alongside more spacious meditations. The programme opens with a new work, seconds, minutes, hours, eons by composer Sara Glojnarić – commissioned for Deep Time by Fruitmarket and p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r – which contextualises the concept of deep time by making seamless jumps from the Big Bang to Brexit through a hybrid form that combines a concert scenario with scripted reality and musiktheater, to reflect on the history of time through the eyes of a millennial in a post-internet world.
Programme
Sara Glojnarić Title tbc, 2023 (new commission for Fruitmarket, world premiere)
Berglind María Tómasdóttir My Favourite Things, 2023 (UK premiere)
Jennifer Walshe EVERYTHING YOU OWN HAS BEEN TAKEN TO A DEPOT SOMEWHERE, 2013
Jessie Marino Jesus f*cking Christ Linda, 2020
● 8.30–10pm Join us in the bar for drinks and late night DJ/curated playlists by musicians in the programme
Friday 17.11.23
Pat Thomas / Angela Wai Nok Hui / Simone Seales
● 7.30–9pm Fruitmarket presents an evening of improvisation brought together around the theme of deep time featuring pianist Pat Thomas, percussionist and multi-disciplinary artist Angela Wai Nok Hui, and cellist and improvisor Simone Seales.
● 9–10pm: Join us in the bar for drinks and late night DJ/curated playlists by musicians in the programme
Saturday 18.11.23
Yshani Perinpanayagam and Katherine Tinker: Provocation vs Play
● 7.30–8.30pm
With society’s ever-increasing political polarisation, the temptation to shout louder in order to reach those who feel ideologically far from us is immense. However, as the battles over the climate crisis continue to rage on, it is clear that this combative communication structure often results in those in opposition feeling more defensive of their existing view.
In this concert, Yshani Perinpanayagam and Katherine Tinker will explore an alternative way forward, turning to art for one of its strongest powers: bringing people together, through cooperation, collaboration and play. It is no mistake that we play games and play music; the idea of play can make concepts too-messy for words far more accessible. Play is connection. Play demands concentration, imagination and innovation, the very qualities that can lead us towards solutions to the challenges that face us today.
The programme will start with George Crumb’s epic Celestial Mechanics [Makrokosmos IV] Cosmic Dances for Amplified Piano in which a rich and expansive kaleidoscope of sound is created, exploring the timelessness of the universe.The programme then moves to the urgency of the present moment: Claudia Molitor’s Polymer Hauntings is a requiem to fossil fuel, using one of its most day-to-day, visible manifestations: plastic. Ideas of activism, cooperation and play are then investigated in pieces by Max Syedtollan, Gillian Walker, and finally in Uri Agnon’s Put Your Hands Together [for late capitalism]: light-hearted and mischievous in its use of a simple gesture from both performer and audience member – a clap – to affect change.
Programme
George Crumb Celestial Mechanics [Makrokosmos IV] Cosmic Dances for Amplified Piano, 1979
Claudia Molitor Polymer Hauntings, 2022
Max Syedtollan Electric Organ Duo, 2023 (world premiere)
Gillian Walker Corridor, 2023 (world premiere)
Njabulo Phungula Playground Postcard, 2020
Uri Agnon Put Your Hands Together [for late capitalism], 2022
● 8.30–10pm Join us in the bar for drinks and late night DJ/curated playlists by musicians in the programme
Sunday 19.11.23
Plus Minus Ensemble: Morphing Time
● 7.30–8.30pm
Plus Minus Ensemble presents a programme that invites the listener into contact with the material nature of sound, rather than what it represents. The evening opens with the premiere of Dundee-based Japanese composer Shiori Usui’s commission for Deep Time, written for Plus Minus Ensemble while Usui was composer-in-residence in the Charles Lyell collection, in a partnership between Fruitmarket and the University of Edinburgh.
Usui’s new work explores the layering of instrumental and electronic sound, drawing on the theory of uniformitarianism established by Lyell – the theory that changes in the Earth’s crust during geological history have resulted from the action of continuous and uniform processes – and inspired by a rock specimen collected by Lyell which carries the impressions of raindrops from millions of years ago. Developing this sound world, Franzson’s time-stretching work slows down the body and mind to draw one into the grain of sound. Lim’s duo is titled after the Viking rune symbolising fertility and imagines a ritualistic creation of sound itself, while Crane sustains the most elemental of musical objects to create a feeling of timelessness and space. Closing the evening, Lang’s Game series creates a dynamic and reactive environment for the performers who negotiate an overlapping stack of interacting loops.
Programme
Shiori Usui Morphing Time, 2023 (new commission for Fruitmarket, world premiere)
Liza Lim Inguz, 1996
Davíð Brynjar Franzson Ideation # 2.1, 2018
Bernhard Lang GAME 5-4-2, 2019
Laurence Crane Riis, 1996
● 8.30–10pm Join us in the bar for drinks and late night DJ/curated playlists by musicians in the programme