Among Olive Trees is a short piece for string quartet, intended to be developed into a larger composite work involving video and electronics. It is intended as a direct and sensual aesthetic experience, a sense of warmth and presence inspired by the experience of extreme heat amongst the olive trees in central Portugal. The composition uses broad spaces of rich textures which dissolve from one to the next, and an intricate interweaving of lines which are sometimes independent and sometimes bundled together in buzzing sonorities.
Composer: Gregor Forbes
Gregor Forbes (b. 1993) is a composer, pianist and concert organiser from Edinburgh, Scotland, but currently residing in Leipzig, Germany. In 2019 he was the inaugural recipient of the Scholarship and Composer-in-Residence Programme at the Hanns Eisler Haus, Leipzig, which culminated in the performance of a major new work, 'Dissonance of Emancipation', by Ensemble Avant Garde at the Gewandhaus. Other recent composition premieres include 'A Spacious Room' for string quartet and timpani, written for Ensemble01 of Chemnitz and 'Study in Solitudes' for violin and cello at the Druskomanija Festival, Vilnius. Upcoming performances include commissions from guitarist Martin Steuber ('Diffuse Planes') and Nuno Pinto ('Clouds After Tiepolo') and Portuguese soprano Filipa Portela ('Cantos de uma - '). Since 2014, Gregor Forbes has been the Artistic Director of Glasgow Experimental Music Series, which also presented a weekend-long festival of concerts and a free public workshop in November 2019. Gregor is a graduate in Music from the University of Cambridge and in 2016 he completed a Master's Degree in Composition from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.