Brian Irvine & Music Space: The Imaginary Orchestra
As part of Tectonics festival 2024, we invited composer Brian Irvine to work with members of Music Space to create a new, temporary orchestra. The group rehearsed together and presented a final performance as part of the festival.
Born in Belfast, Brian Irvine’s unique musical world combines the known and the unknown, the free and the fixed, the schooled and the unschooled. His music-making is “spontaneous and irresistibly alive” (Washington Post). For Tectonics 2024, he assembled musicians of all ages, instruments and abilities to be part of the beautiful, monster, music machine phenomena that is THE IMAGINARY ORCHESTRA. The only prerequisite for participants? A sense of adventure! Audiences were invited to come and hear what the group devised, guided by the maverick composer.
You can watch the performance here, a shorter 6 min excerpt can also be found here.
Our thanks to the musicians who took part in the orchestra: Eli Thayer, Louis Opit, Simon Opit, Maia Harding, Lava Fu, Rita Pacheco, Leigh Chorlton, Peter Russell, Dawn Coulshed, Emer Tumilty, Georgie White, Caroline Hussey, Dorothee Nys, Sebastian Taylor, Panos Baras, Laurie Pitt, James Peake, Matthew Nowak, Aditya Rohith, Robyn Haddon, Susannah Stark, Eilidh Su Strachan, Liam Conn, Kai Swarvett , Graham Darnell, Graeme Miller, Elena Grossi, Alex Keegan, Alison Beattie, Esra Hussain, Sam Bellacosa, Solomon Makhatholela, Stewart Smith, Daniel J Urquhart and Joseph C Nwokoye.
With thanks to Tectonics festival who co-presented this project.
We acknowledge and appreciate the support of Creative Scotland and the Scottish Government’s Youth Music Initiative through Creative Scotland in the delivery of this work.
