Remembered/Imagined: Women Make Music
Maverick ensemble, Mr McFall’s Chamber, is commissioning composer Amble Skuse in a unique and exciting project which sees three composers pair up with three writers to create new work. The artists are: Amble Skuse & Angus Peter Campbell, Mike Vass & Charlotte Murray, Ailie Robertson & Rebecca Sharp. During the Autumn of 2013 they will spend time working in the beautiful archive at The School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The archive is a treasure trove of materials relating to the cultural life and traditional arts of Scotland. Over the past sixty years fieldworkers have collected thousands of recordings of songs, music, tales, verse customs, beliefs and oral history.
The artists will create their own responses to this special source material, resulting in three new works for strings, singer and/or narrator and electronics. McFall’s looks forward to touring the new programme across Scotland in March 2014, bringing a little bit of the archive back out to the communities from which it originated. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to work with singer Maeve Mackinnon on this project.
Amble Skuse
Amble works as a composer and has a broad background in Diversity and Inclusion. Her interests lie in the various ways in which power is created and maintained through exclusive structures. After working at the Arts Council England on the Diversity and Inclusion team, Amble spent time working in Central and South America. Her work there supported social enterprises engaging with issues around race and language with the indigenous people of Guatemala and Brazil. She has also developed innovative Gypsy and Traveller training and outreach projects in the UK. These projects aim to support people in gaining the skills and knowledge to empower their communities to counter negative stereotyping. Her diversity work explored relationships between the rural and the urban, the central and the isolated, the connected and the disconnected.
Her recent work has been focusing on developing strategies for work as a disabled artist. Since 2007, Amble has refocused her work on composing and exploring the various musicological frameworks around traditional and electro-acoustic musics. Her composition centres on the tension between traditional acoustic performance and interactive technologies, received traditions and contemporary technological immediacy, isolation and communication, both in terms of the realisation of the composition and the musicological framework.
Amble works with Logic, MAX/MSP and Supercollider to create sculptural sounds which augment and support the traditional music performers. She is interested in ways in which the past and the future come together and merge to create the now.
Amble’s work has been performed internationally by ensembles such as Mr McFalls, Chamber, Red Note Ensemble and Rarescale. She was recently chosen for a large scale community inclusion project with Making Music and Ty Cerdd, working across the whole of Wales developing a series of intergenerational site-specific works.