The RMA Study Day on Musical Glocalities and their influence took place as part of Wintersound Festival on 16th,17th and 18th January 2025 at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU). Evening performances were given by The Six Tones at Free Range in Canterbury on the 16th, Union Division and Free Range Orchestra at CCCU on the 17th, and individual improvisers at The Mooring in Canterbury as part of Deep Listen on the 18th. The event explored the impact of geography and community on the practices of free improvisation and experimental music. It asked what relationships exist between geographically diverse new music groups. How does the individual musician relate to the group, and how does the group relate to the wider new music community, if there is such a thing?
Representatives of the Wandelweiser collective, Free Range Orchestra, Union Division and The Six Tones, together with Professor Matt Wright (Canterbury Christ Church University), composer Sophie Stone, Free Range Artistic Director Sam Bailey, and Maureen Wolloshin (UCA PhD candidate) discussed and performed responses to these questions.
Approximately 80 attendees participated and listened with us across the three days. Speakers and delegates discussed their responses to the questions. Sophie Stone’s new work ‘Strata’, an open score, was specially commissioned for the event. Delegates at the daytime event performed the work together. It was performed again by Free Range Orchestra in the evening.
Topics discussed included the purpose of community formed around a central issue such as free improvisation, the politics and ethics inherent in the practice of experimental composition, improvisation and performance, and the fragile web of networks that grow locally and internationally between such formations. Agreement emerged that the intangible fragility of such networks was also its strength. Performances from Moss Freed and Union Division, Free Range Orchestra, Matt Wright and Evan Parker, poet Kat Peddie, and flautist Paul Cheneour made these networks audible for us.
Maureen Wolloshin