November 13th and 14th, 2010 - Glasgow

A tribute to James Dillon

2010 sees the 60th birthday of one of Scotland’s most admired and widely performed composers: James Dillon, born in Glasgow in 1950. Most people take such key dates as an opportunity for retrospectives and new commissions, but we are marking this birthday by bringing to fruition one of Dillon’s most ambitious and epic undertakings: the first performance of his immense collection of nine pieces, Nine Rivers. The metaphor of a river works its way through the nine pieces shifting focus and meaning, from a meditation on time to environmental concerns to the nature of musical language itself. The piece is superbly well suited to the City halls building as Dillon deploys very different scales of ensemble, allowing us to programme different pieces in different spaces within the complex.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, James Dillon worked on Nine Rivers, an ambitious group of large-scale pieces that the composer conceived, not as a cycle, but as a collection of works with certain ’internal symmetries’. The nine works are scored for various forces, ranging from the solo percussion and electronics of La coupure, through ensemble pieces such as East 11th St NY 10003, to the largest works - Viriditas, for sixteen solo voices, and Oceanos. This last piece, the ’ocean of oceans’, is Nine Rivers’ delta, bringing together all the forces previously deployed throughout the series and including more than fifty musicians and live electronics. Oceanos was commissioned for the BBC Proms 1996, and the first performance was given by conductor Richard Bernas and Music Projects/London. As well as the BBC, commissioners for other pieces in the Nine Rivers series include IRCAM, Ensemble InterContemporain, the Oslo Sinfonietta and Glasgow 1990 European City of Culture.

Further information here