Black Glass Ensemble

We're delighted to announce the first full length release from The Queen's Hall Associate Artist in Residence, award winning composer Michael Begg’s groundbreaking ensemble, Black Glass, which captures the group’s debut performance at QH in the final days before lockdown.

Black Glass, comprises members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra alongside Begg and fellow experimental artist, Ben Ponton (:zoviet*france:). Here, they invoke an immersive and deeply moving medium of ambient sound in which processed electronics, field recordings, atmospheric receivers and live streaming data from environmental and earth observation agencies combine with elegiac passages of strings, brass and tuned percussion to realise Begg’s vision of a new music that speaks to our growing sense of solastalgia, the term combining solace and pain, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005 to articulate the sense of existential distress caused by living through environmental change.

As musical director, Begg provides his troupe with both scores and the encouragement and support which enables the world class players to step out of their comfort zone and into an uncharted territory requiring them to improvise with satellite positional data, live weather systems, and audio streams of calving glaciers. Begg and Ponton deploy a far reaching array of sounds and signals with all the subtlety and suppleness that their decades of experience in the marginal territories of music can afford them.

'Arise From The Twilight' captures the realisation of one of the most compelling new fusions of contemporary classical and experimental music of recent times. Buy the album here.

The Black Glass Ensemble are: Michael Begg (scores, samples, data feeds, erosions); Ben Ponton (receivers, recordings, forensics); Clea Friend (cello); Aisling O’Dea (violin); Julia Lungu (violin); Neil Cuthbertson (trumpet); Jen Cuthbertson (French horn); Douglas Caskie (tuned and bespoke percussion).