Northern Connection
The Scottish Music Centre and sound are delighted to announce that Scottish composer Timothy Cooper has been awarded the commission for the second edition of Northern Connections. Timothy will create a new work for solo instrument/voice and electronics, inspired by the theme of "Borders and Boundaries,” and this piece will be premiered at the Ultima Festival in Norway in September 2025 as part of the Northern Connection project.
Music Finland, Music Norway and Scottish Music Centre are the founding partners of Northern Connection with the aim to establish creative links and build international collaboration between the participating countries. The project has a strong focus on sustainability through strengthening and establishing new contacts, ideas, and networks within the contemporary classical music scene in the northern area. Each country is represented by a composer, a musician or an ensemble, a contemporary music festival, and a music export/information centre.
Timothy Cooper is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. His compositions reflect a passion for performance rooted in his studies as a euphonium player and his childhood experiences with his parents' radio. This love of performance informs the types of sounds he seeks out and the way he utilizes them both instrumentally and in the electroacoustic studio.
In 2015, Cooper began lecturing at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he teaches music technology. Prior to that, he taught composition and creative approaches to music technology at Edinburgh College from 2012 to 2019.
In 2010, he co-founded Edit-Point, a group dedicated to the presentation and performance of electroacoustic music. Find out more about Timothy here.
“Scottish Music Centre are proud to partner with our international colleagues from Music Finland and Music Norway in this brand new initiative to share our culture and music with our close neighbours. We look forward to the festival performances in all three countries and to further expanding this new northern network to more countries”.
- GILL MAXWELL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SMC
Timothy Cooper is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. His compositions reflect a passion for performance rooted in his studies as a euphonium player and his childhood experiences with his parents' radio. This love of performance informs the types of sounds he seeks out and the way he utilizes them both instrumentally and in the electroacoustic studio. In 2015, Cooper began lecturing at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he teaches music technology. Prior to that, he taught composition and creative approaches to music technology at Edinburgh College from 2012 to 2019. In 2010, he co-founded Edit-Point, a group dedicated to the presentation and performance of electroacoustic music.
timothy-cooper.co.uk
Composer Profiles
Timothy Cooper (Scotland)
Asta Hyvärinen (Finland)
Finnish composer Asta Hyvärinen has described her composition style with the term “surrealist-cubism”. This means that the structures are based on the surrealistic (subconscious) process and the sonic details appearance as cubistic. She uses also the term “whole tonality” that means of equality of any kind of sounding material (chromatic; micro tonal; noises & any kind of unpitched sounds). Most of her works composed during past 20 years are some kind of cross-sections of a shattering world.
Asta has been worked as a freelance composer since mid 80’s, and as a full time composer since 2000. Her list of works contains nowadays more than 120 composition which has been performed widely in Europe and also in Canada, Americas and Asia.
Elias Nurmi Schomers is a composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist based in Oslo, originally from Germany. His compositional work is concerned with combining different media and instruments, resulting in works for video/tape, instruments, or both, as well as works of music theater/performance. His main interests at the moment are conceptual approaches to and experiments with form, as well as microtonality.
Elias Nurmi Schomers (Norway)
Formed in 2009, defunensemble has established ifself as one of the most important contemporary music groups in Finland. The ensemble's vigorous mission is to systematically delve into the world of electroacoustic music. Defunensemble gives Finnish premieres of the most essential electroacoustic repertoire both classic and current, while simultaneuosly actively commissioning new works incorporating the latest technologies. With artistic director Sami Klemola the ensemble's concert concepts have proven to be highly innovative, blending different sub-genres of the electroacoustic persuasion with an unprecedented street credibility—any dusty notions of classical music are soon forgotten. A serious professional undertaking, the musicians and sound desingers of defunensemble are some of the most active personalities in the Finnish contemporary music scene.
Ensembles
Defunensemble (Finland)
Ensemble Temporum (Norway)
Ensemble Temporum is a contemporary music ensemble based in Oslo. The ensemble had its debut at the Ultima festival in 2016, performing Gerard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum and a commission from Tim Mariën, and it was broadcasted on Norwegian radio (NRK P2). Since then, they have given concerts in Norway and Finland, performing works by Spahlinger, Ørjan Matre , Kúrtag, Crumb, Grisey, Streich, Dusapin, Messiaen, Ravel, and a commission by Jon Øivind Ness. The ensemble consists of a sextet and the conductor Kai Grinde Myrann.
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. 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. Red Note also undertakes an extensive performer and composer development programme within schools, universities and conservatoires nationally and internationally.
Red Note Ensemble (Scotland)
"It's been a pleasure to plan a new type of cooperation with our northern partners. It's especially gratifying to have Scotland with us in the project. Everyone is excited to join in and inquiries have already come in about when the project will expand and whether we can add more partners to the Northern Connection network,"