Going Places (2020)

video, 21’

Commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and co-composed completely online with young creatives from all over Scotland

Premiere June 16, 2020

Going Places” is about a group of creative people, and all the places we have traveled, could travel to, and the importance of home. But watching and listening to this work over the course of its 20 minutes, it’s hard to fit it into a category.

As a music composition, let’s call it a “TV Opera”. It has six Scenes, each with its own mood and instrumentation. It’s scored for flute, oboe, viola, trombone, spoken voices, and some sparing percussion and other instruments. It has solos, duos, and multitracked compositions. It has through-composed music and completely improvised music inspired by graphic notation. 

As a multimedia work, let’s call it a video collage. It has teams of creatives who portrayed locations at home and abroad in six non-linear ways, from animations to sound collages to recorded performances and slide shows. 

As a narrative, let’s call it a collaborative diary. Each chapter was written by multiple voices, then handed off to other voices, who interpreted the original writings in their own ways--a game of Telephone, or maybe Exquisite Corpse. There’s many languages here--not to mention accents. 

As a work that might be hard to put into any category, I helped realize this piece with the help of 20 young creatives around Scotland. We dared to be vulnerable at an isolating time of the world, and reach out to each other. We shared a process of idea-generating, music-making, and image-creating, to go someplace new. And that process is a journey in itself.