Nordic Music Journeys 2025: Sweden and Scotland

Tove Kättström - Brassica oleracea
Seyoung Oh - The platform vividly echoes
Gabriel Stenborg – Chanson
Emily Doolittle – Gardenscape
Lina Nyberg - Ascension in Colour
Ida Lundén – Skymlot
Drew Hammond - Water and Slate
Victor Lisinkski - Resonant Shadows

Download programme notes here

Kim Hedås – Tir
Tom Macfadyen – Thread
Mats O Hansson - Within
Pete Stollery - Cullykhan Water
Vera V Almgren - This Is Where I Found Your Shell
Nichola Scrutton - Wave Shift
Viktor Sandström – Patchwork

Download programme notes here

Music writer and journalist David Kettle joined us for Nordic Music Journeys 2025 and then went on to The Night With… Stockholm Chamber Brass. He shared this account of the day:

Glasgow’s Nordic Music Days in 2024 was clearly just the start. The hosting of the more-than-a-century-old new music festival by Scotland’s second city – across five days of concerts, talks, exhibitions, installations and more in October/November last year – felt like quite a coup for the nation. But it also represented an important meeting ground for composers, performers, listeners and music professionals to meet up, connect, get to know each other (and each other’s work), forge new connections and strengthen existing ties.

But there’s evidently the appetite for more. Scotland is nothing if not keen to look north and east (and slightly northwest too – let’s not forget the Faroes and Iceland) for musical inspiration and connection. Hence October 2025’s Nordic Music Journeys showcase day, which took the admittedly less ambitious but more focused approach of drilling down into a single transnational relationship – in this case between Scotland and Sweden, in project organised jointly by Art Music Scotland and the Föreningen Svenska Tonsättare (Society of Swedish Composers).

It was a day of encounters – both formal and informal, musical and personal, local and international – in Glasgow’s Civic House, a former 1920s printworks now reimagined as a co-working and event space. And it can’t have been coincidental that the event’s buzzing atmosphere came at least partly from its taking place in the building’s expansive canteen, with freely flowing tea and coffee, and exceptional cooking from Tom Rathbone, himself a cellist in local ensemble the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He clearly has valuable insights into the particular kind of nourishment that musicians require.

Another form of nourishment came from the buzz of chat and catch-ups happening between existing friends and colleagues, and the sounds of new connections being made. Prime among those, of course, were fresh links between Scottish and Swedish musicians: there were plenty of both in attendance, and a large table occupied by the Föreningen Svenska Tonsättare was piled high with a collection of the country’s recent musical creations – several of which would be heard throughout the day.

Indeed, composers from both countries took up residence across the canteen’s long benches, opening up laptops and spreading out fans of their scores. But while there was an evident focus on promotion – importantly, since getting composers’ work better known and more widely represented was one of the day’s key aims – it wasn’t all about marketing. Instead, advice and ideas passed back and forth between established composers and others just starting out, while discussions with professionals from performing groups (and even a solitary journalist) focused on ensembles’ hopes for future performances, and how composers might be involved. Yes, there was plenty of networking, but also a sense of checking in with others in similar situations, comparing notes (sometimes quite literally), and a genuine sense of exploration and discovery too.

And discovery, of course, was a central idea behind the day’s two concerts – and a third that followed later that evening. A quintet of string players from the Scottish Ensemble had earlier worked with composers from both Scotland and Sweden on a showcase of their work that formed a rich and captivating lunchtime concert, from the evocative sonic history of Seoul-born, Glasgow-based composer Seyoung Oh’s The platform vividly echoes to the wildly contrasting, arch and vivid miniatures of Stockholm-based Tove Kättström’s Brassica Oleracea. Örebro-based Gabriel Stenborg (a graduate of Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) also wove plenty of knowing humour into his grinning Chanson, a merciless but also affectionate send-up of French popular song from the 1960s and 70s, while Vaxholm-born composer and mathematician Victor Lisinski’s Resonant Shadows peered deeply into the nature of sound itself, in its distillation of overtones and rich resonances from five Balinese gongs. Just as evocatively, Glasgow-based Drew Hammond drew on the geology and natural forces of his childhood Kentucky home in Water and Slate, which created shifting, scintillating minimalist textures full of motion and emotion.

It was, in truth, quite a lot to take in – as composer showcases inevitably are – but there was more to come in a mid-afternoon sonic art listening, with four loudspeakers set around an eager audience clustered in the middle of Civic House’s performance space. There was a strong sense of place among the sonic creations here, whether in the warped evocations of Glasgow’s sonic cityscape in Tom Macfadyen’s reality-bending Thread, or the limpid liquid distillations of Pete Stollery’s beguiling Cullykhan Water, founded on manipulations of field recordings made at Cullykhan Beach in northeast Scotland, where Stollery is based. Or, indeed, in the history and memories that echoed through Mats O Hansson’s Within, originally composed to be heard at the 17th-century Kronhuset in his home city of Gothenburg, and drawing on the House’s event-filled past.

For the day’s third concert, it was over to the subterranean Well nightclub space at the Glasgow University Union for another collaboration, this time with The Night With… new music concert series run by Glasgow-based composer and artistic director Matthew Whiteside. But the Swedo-Scottish theme continued in a visit from Stockholm Chamber Brass – headed and introduced by UK-born, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland-educated trumpeter Tom Poulson, now co-principal at the Västerås Sinfonietta and head of brass at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music – in another mix of Scottish and Swedish new and recent music. It might have been quite a intimate space in which to encounter five brass players – not to mention the joyfully clangorous sounds of metal on metal in Piers Hellawell’s exuberant concluding Sound Carvings from the Bell Foundry – but there was no shortage of subtlety in the other works, from the sheer physical experience of air in motion in Stockholm-born Ivo Nilsson’s vivid Pneumatic to the shimmering sonic magic of Gothenburg-born Jenny Hettne’s Mycorrhizal Network, which drew on ideas of fungal threads connecting and nourishing larger plants.

And while comparisons with fungi might not seem overly flattering, you could say something similar about October’s inaugural Nordic Music Journeys event overall, specifically about its aims to offer nourishing connections between the broader Scottish and Swedish musical cultures. It was, admittedly, a pilot event, with as much learning going on behind the scenes as there was between its participants. Maybe a stronger attendance from industry professionals – certainly ensemble and festival programmers – might have shifted the day towards becoming a more outward-facing shop window for composers’ work in the real world of performances. And though the day’s informality and spontaneity served valuable purposes, perhaps a greater number of more formal introductions might have involved participants more fully. Nonetheless, it proved a vital and valuable forum and meeting place for discussions and connections, across an intensive and immersive day where it was possible to sample both new and established musical voices, and to discuss the work with the creators who had made it. Most gratifyingly, there was the clear sense that if you offer musicians the opportunity to sample and discuss new work, they’ll take it up with enthusiasm and insight.