Severnside Composers Alliance: The Open Fund for Organisations
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Severnside Composers' Alliance Music on the Edge 2018
Severnside Composers Alliance (SCA) is a group of composers based in the Bristol, Bath & Gloucestershire area. Our object is to promote performances of our own music & to stimulate a wider interest in the composition & performance of new music in the region. Music on the Edge is our annual programme of contemporary concerts & educational events. Our 3-day New Music Festival in May featured a concert at the Royal West of England Gallery by the locally-based Roaring Fork Wind Quintet as well as a recital of new art song. Later in the year there are two unique creative projects featuring the Gemini Ensemble & leading virtuoso contemporary viola player Richard Crabtree. In the autumn we collaborate with Gemini to renew a historic relationship with Bristol’s Arnolfini. Gemini was formed nearly 40 years ago as the resident ensemble for the Arnolfini Music Workshops before achieving its current international reputation. SCA Chairman Jolyon Laycock was Music & Dance Co-ordinator at Arnolfini during the 1980s. SCA composers will collaborate with Gemini’s fascinating line-up of clarinettist Ian Mitchell, percussionist Joby Burgess and singer Sarah Leonard to create site-specific music exploring the potential of sounds moving in space. Richard Crabtree’s concert in the New Year is a return visit by popular demand following his spectacular performance of Gilbert Biberian’s “The Poet Makhtum Kuli” at a SCA concert in Cheltenham in 2017. His programme sets classics of the viola repertoire like Berio’s Sequenza alongside brand new works written especially for him by SCA composers.