The Hermes Experiment & Red Note Ensemble
Biography The Hermes Experiment & Red Note Ensemble
The Hermes Experiment
Winners of the Royal Over-Seas League Mixed Ensemble Competition 2019, Tunnell Trust Awards 2017, Nonclassical’s Battle of the Bands 2014, Making Music Selected Artists 2019/20 and Park Lane Group Young Artists 2015/16 , The Hermes Experiment is a contemporary quartet made up of harp, clarinet, voice and double bass.
Capitalising on their deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments, the ensemble regularly commissions new works, as well as creating their own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation. The ensemble has commissioned over 50 composers at various stages of their careers. They were shortlisted in the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards 2019 in the Young Artists Category and their debut album HERE WE ARE will be released in July 2020 on Delphian Records.
Recent highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall, BBC Radio 3 Open Ear at LSO St Luke’s, Tallinn Music Week, St Petersburg’s Sound Ways Festival, Southbank Centre, Kings Place and Spitalfields Festival. The Hermes Experiment were one of the showcase artists at the Classical NEXT Conference 2019. In January 2019, they celebrated their fifth birthday with a concert supported by Arts Council England and RVW Trust, and recorded for BBC Radio 3.
The ensemble is dedicated to the value of contemporary music in education and community contexts. They are ensemble in residence for the Young Music Makers of Dyfed 2018-19, and as part of their fifth birthday project they recently ran composition workshops in state schools in and around London. In 2017-18, they worked with composition students from both The Royal Academy of Music and Trinity Laban. They are running similar projects in 2018-19 at both institutions. In 2014-15, they took part in Wigmore Hall Learning’s schemes.
The ensemble also strives to create a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration. In June 2015, they created a ‘musical exhibition’ with photographer Thurstan Redding, and in September 2016 during an Aldeburgh Music Residency, they developed a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. They also worked with poet Ali Lewis in 2016 & 2019, devising new pieces with him.
The quartet has received funding from Arts Council England, Aldeburgh Music, the RVW Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation, Britten-Pears Foundation, Future of Russia Foundation, Oleg Prokofiev Trust, Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust, PRS for Music Foundation and Help Musicians UK.
Red Note Ensemble
Since its formation Red Note Ensemble has taken up a leadership position as Scotland’s contemporary music ensemble, performing and developing an extensive, highly varied and critically-acclaimed programme of new music to the highest standards, and taking new music out to audiences across Scotland and internationally.
Red Note performs the established classics of contemporary music, commissions new music, develops the work of new and emerging composers and performers from Scotland and around the world, and finds new spaces and new ways of performing contemporary music to attract new audiences. Within Scotland the ensemble has performed from the Outer Hebrides to the Borders in concert halls, bothies, pubs, clubs and aircraft hangars, amongst other unusual settings. Outwith the UK it has a growing international reputation, performing to great acclaim at festivals in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland and Australia in recent years.
The ensemble also undertakes an extensive programme of Access, Engagement and Participation (AEP) work, focusing particularly upon working with younger and older people, people with multiple disabilities, people living in areas of multiple deprivation, and also working to address inequalities of access and representation due to race/ethnicity and gender imbalances. We also undertake an extensive performer and composer development programme within schools, universities and conservatoires nationally and internationally.
As part of our core programme, we run an informal new music series, Noisy Nights, featuring new works from emerging and amateur composers selected from an open call.
Red Note is Associate Ensemble of the soundfestival in Aberdeen where we perform each year. We also work with them on composer development opportunities with the Go Compose! and Composer Development Workshops programme.
We are also Associate Contemporary Ensemble at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow where we take parts in programmes such as the Leverhulme Conducting Fellowship and PLUG festival.
We regularly perform at hcmf// and Lammermuir Festival and collaborate with organisations such as Artlink.
Red Note is a Delphian Records recording artist, releasing CDs of music by Eddie McGuire, John McLeod, David Wilde and Lyell Cresswell and James Dillon.
Red Note is supported by Creative Scotland and is a is a PRS Foundation Talent Development Network Partner supported by PPL.
