Live recording from Glasgow's Old Hairdresser's, May 2025.

Nordic Resonance is a duo performance by Renzo Spiteri (percussion, electronics, field recordings) and Richard Craig (flutes, electronics), shaped by the raw beauty of Shetland, where land, sea, and sky meet in constant motion. Drawing its breath from the edge of the Nordic sphere, the work invites deep listening and intuitive response, unfolding through free improvisation and layered interplay.

The island's diverse soundscapes—wind-carved coastlines, shifting weather, birdsong, silence—form both source material and inspiration, resonating through acoustic and electronic textures. Instruments, found sounds, and live processing blur the lines between the human and the elemental. Nordic Resonance is not only a musical performance, but a conversation: between environment and artist, between sound and sensation, between what is heard and what lies just beneath. Each performance is immersive and attuned to the moment— a quiet invocation of place through sound, presence, and listening.

Nordic Resonance - part 3

Richard Craig, bass flute & speaker
Text: Amelia Rosselli
Additional speakers on fixed medium: Bettina Wenzel, Cassandra Quave, Harald Muenz
Live recording from 5 June 2009, Cologne, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter

Programme note:
Three articulatory spaces, one text, three imaginary worlds, one poetess: born in Paris as the daughter of an Irish mother, her father, an Italian anti-fascist, was assassinated when she was seven years old. She grew up first in England, subsequently in New York, studied literature and music (!) in Rome and London and finally settled down in Florence. Thanks to this polyglot background, Amelia Rosselli, from time to time, composed her poetry in three languages at the same time, in Italian, English, and French.
Following this inspiration I recorded an excerpt from her ‘Diario in tre lingue’ (‘Diary in three languages’) with respective non-native speakers (Bettina Wenzel, Cassandra L. Quave and myself) on tape and added a score for the sounding, articulating and filtering tube of a bass flute. Carin Levine, the American flutist who premiered the work, had to deal with a lot of Italian, but not with the English idiom. She pursues a for the most part determined musical-phonetic score, while the CD player’s random generator controls the 22 tracks of the CD. In this manner changing their order each time ariche is being performed, the sequences and voices coming recall dram sequences from the sphere of the subconscious. In fact, in several passages Amelia Rosselli’s text speaks exactly about this. Contrarily to the wide spread understanding of music as ‘a language, which everybody understands’ I am choosing a different approach: speech is a type of music all of us are concerned with.

ariche

"ariche" for bass flute and random controlled CD (2001)

Ann Cleare, eyam iii (if it’s living somewhere outside of you) for solo bass flute shadowed by one low wind instrument and one string instrument (2013/15) Performed by Helen Bledsoe, Bass Flute; Carl Rosman, Contrabass Clarinet; Hannah Weirich, Viola

Ann Cleare,   eyam iii (if it’s living somewhere outside of you)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra were invited by China to participate in the Shanghai International Festival of the Arts 2000. I arranged my Chinese Dances for the tour which started in Shanghai on November 18 that year. The Shanghai concert in the Grand Theatre, including my encore, was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. The tour went on to Beijing, Guangzhou and Taiwan. This recording is from The Great Hall of the People, Beijing, on November 22, 2000. The poster is for BBCSSO in Taiwan, final stop of their China tour. The dances I arranged are Purple Bamboo Melody (Zi Zhu Diao) and Song of Happiness (Xi Yangyang), learned from erhu player Zhou Yao Kun when I toured China with The Whistlebinkies in 1991.

BBCSSO China Tour 2000

Chinese Dances (BBCSSO in Beijing Great Hall of the People)

musician - flute player - composer - improviser

Nordic Resonance - part 3

Richard Craig - Flute

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