Lindsay Davidson
Breaking frontiers... Concerts Why not? Liberation? Distance? Please read the vision page to better understand what is below. Lindsay believes that concerts are special ceremonies that serve special functions. We go to concerts to be enriched by the experience of participating in them as listeners. We may want to hear a new interpretation, or a new idea, or be challenged by a piece or artistic idea we don't yet know. We can use listening to music as a mental challenge to develop self discipline. This can be through playing or perception of music (finding structures, understanding absolute musical practices). Lindsay tries to create and present music which somehow provokes us to think of recontextualisation, and through this to model the process of believing in the possibility of the unexpected and unlikely. This is a kind of conceptual blend. Lindsay comes from a tradition where music is ften omposed to mark an event. Taking thi sfurther, we can write music to tell a story either from history or from literature, and create a union of aristic forms between at least two domains which communicates in a fuller way, either a statement or a provocation or a reflective work. These contrasting forms can also be amodel for our self of today and the version of ourselves for tomorrow, and help create an actual mechanism for becoming the successes we want to be. Bagpipes and the orchestra don't usually go together... Why not? They can.This is a metaphor for people doing and achieving things which we so often believe just don't go together. We also go to concerts in order to be able to escape our day to day lives and devote a moment just to listening and engaging with the artwork. Every concert must have a moment of timeless calm, and moment of unbounded joy, of a whole array of emotional states. During listening and playing we can exercise consciousness of emotion through engaging musical rhetoric with performance/reception. It is this consciousness and engagement with both rhetoric/musical devices and emotion at the same time that allows us to navigate our emotions and thus guide ourselves onto a positive and stable path. Through escaping our day to day lives we can see ourselves as we are, and as we aspire to be, from a safe distance. This gives us a moment to plan the pathway between who we are today and what we dream of for a better tomorrow. So a concert is a model of a journey - why not dare to dream of what we can achieve, then take a moment to step back and contemplate the improbable or the impossible, so that we can plan the pathway and start the journey towards that better tomorrow. Music (art) makes us human. --------- Lindsay plays bagpipes of various types and composes. You can expect to hear, Great Highand Bagpipes, Scottish smallpipes, Scottish borderpipes, Galician Gaita, Medieval bagpipes, rauschpfeif, renaissance bagpipes. His compositions combine many different paradigms and genres: Symphony, Opera, Suites, string quartet, piobaireachd, mantroch, strathspeys, jigs and reels, chamber music, sonoristic works with extended tehniques and works in the traditional sound pallete. Lindsay favours instrumental combinatons:
Lindsay is an optimist and encourages listeners to come to concerts with an open mind, an open heart and a willingness to be optimistic, to take optimism away from the event and nurture it. Lindsay wants you to leave his concerts with a feeling of hope, hope that you can look forward to making your dreams come true, hope that you will always find the strength to make those dreams come true, and the distance you need from the storms of life to be able to find your way to that better tomorrow you dream of. |