Simon Thoumire and I set up Distil in 2002 in response to the fact that there was a growing number of adventurously inclined musicians from the traditional music community who were writing and performing new music, often collaborating with musicians from other disciplines. So Distil was conceived as a space for creative development for professional, tradition-based musicians who wished to acquire new skills, spend time with like-minded musicians, reflect on their work and refresh their artistic practice.
We work with traditional musicians because that’s the community we come from, and because we believe that traditional musicians have unique cultural connections to the past, to place, and to a way of understanding music which derives from community and collective memory. Distil mixes traditional musicians (some of them conservatory trained, and all of whom have reached a high level in their own field) with mentors who work in areas of music which have an energy that complements the energy of traditional music – be it some contemporary classical music, free improvisation, or modern expressions of traditional music from cultures originating outside the British Isles.
The Showcase represents one of the main outcomes we are looking for from Distil: new work by traditional musicians which takes account of musical possibilities from outside traditional music. We want to be clear, however, that our hope is that this new work will represent a distillation of ideas from a dialogue between musicians, not a dilution of traditional music itself. If music in general is to be enriched by traditional music, then, as Hamish Henderson put it, ‘pedigree traditional stock must still be bred for the hybridisation’.
We also hope that the other musicians will gain from their work with British traditional musicians. While we would support Peter Maxwell Davies’s contention that ‘all performers, to be really alive, must be in a mutually constructive and beneficial relationship with contemporary thought and culture, and this means with real, live composers’, we would add this also means with real, live traditional musicians.
This year’s Showcase mainly features work from participants in the most recent Distil residential, who enjoyed (we hope) a ‘mutually constructive and beneficial’ encounter with composer Karen Wimhurst, theatre practitioner Kath Burlinson and Dutch-Surinamese improviser Andro Biswane. Others have worked at previous residentials with composers Eddie Maguire, Alasdair Nicolson and David McGuinness and improvisers Paul Rogers, Mihaly Borbely, and Simon Fell.
A vital element of the Showcase experience is the support and encouragement the composers get from our house band, Mr McFall’s Chamber. Mr McFall’s are a key part of Scotland’s creative ecology, and we’re delighted to have them with us again this year.
http://tolbooth.stirling.gov.uk/tolbooth/whats-on-at-tolbooth-stirling/march_2013/distil_2013.htm