On the back of a fascinating visit to Sonica festival in Glasgow back in October, I asked the team who lead the festival, Cathie Boyd and Claire Moran of Cryptic, for a quick chat about how it came to be, how they put it together, and how it has evolved.
These were the headlines for me:
- The festival originated as a move away from presenting monthly nights, which could sometimes feel relentless to programme.
- Their audience is pretty young in comparison to my festival and to audiences for more ‘challenging’ music in general. I didn’t notice this at the time but looking back, there were a lot of people in their 20’s and 30’s.
- Their audience loves to discover new spaces in Glasgow, so they try and add a new venue each year e.g. in 2017, the Titan Crane (an actual crane, pictured above).
- Primarily they commission new work from their Associate Artists who are all Scottish, but last year they commissioned some international artists for the first time.
- They try to showcase some of the talent on offer outside Europe because it often gets overlooked. I think that’s something the jazz world could learn from, given our strong focus on Europe and the USA.
- I need to work harder to utilise the few unusual spaces we have in Cheltenham: in the space of 5 minutes, Cathie gave me three different ideas for how to use the bandstand in the middle of our festival site, which is something we’ve struggled with for years!
Since this blog is an arts scrapbook, here are a couple of lovely pieces which cropped up during the course of our chat:
Heather Lander – Nearer Future (Sonica 2017):
Kathy Hinde – Luminous Birds (audio version commissioned by Cryptic):
Sarah Kenchington – pedal-powered musical instruments:
A Million Different Ideas 