Marking a decade Distilling essences to create a powerful blend By JIM GILCHRIST Published on Thursday 3 May 2012 00:00 AUDIENCES at the Tolbooth Arts Centre in Stirling tomorrow night will sample a particularly potent distillate - not a drop of the hard stuff, as such, but the latest products of Distil, an initiative established to enable traditional musicians to learn from and collaborate with practitioners from other genres. The Stirling showcase marks the tenth anniversary of Distil, which is funded by the Performing Rights Society Foundation and Creative Scotland, and delivered by the Hands Up for Trad organisation. Some 130 musicians have now passed through Distil's New Lanark gatherings since the initiative's co-founders - guitarist and traditional arts administrator David Francis, and concertina virtuoso (and the man behind Hands Up for Trad) Simon Thoumire - first came up with the concept. "Initially we had this idea of a sort of mad strathspey and reel society," recalls Francis, "although we were going to call it a "strathspey and surreal society." But then we thought, "Well... what would they play?" It was really that question that prompted the notion of introducing traditional musicians into the world of long-term composition. The idea wasn't entirely new: Celtic Connections had already introduced its "New Voices" commissions, Thoumire himself was writing works for large-scale forces such as his Music for a New Scottish Parliament, and harpist Billy Jackson had premiered his ambitious piece for "folk orchestra," The Wellpark Suite, as far back as 1985. But most people had just jumped into those things on a kind of give-it-a-go basis. We thought it would be nice to offer something that allowed them to be a bit more prepared. At the time, the PRS Foundation was anxious to become more active in Scotland, while Nod Knowles - at that time music director of the Scottish Arts Council - was interested in the cross-genre nature of the venture, so Distil attracted funding from the word go, and now comes under Creative Scotland's Creative Futures artist development scheme. Francis points out that the programme for tomorrow night's showcase is dominated by young musicians: "There are now people coming through who were still at school when we started. We've shifted from the situation where we were inviting people to come on the residentials to now having a list of applicants, because word is spreading about the value of it. To describe Distil's four-day sessions at the Mill Hotel in New Lanark as "courses" sounds unduly formal, says Francis. It's more a kind of retreat - a chance for musicians to get away from the everyday hustling for gigs and weeping over their bank balances and all the rest of it. Participants work with composers and communicators as diverse as composer Sally Beamish, Hungarian Mihály Borbély and bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra. Asked about highlights over the past decade, Francis calls to mind Sandy Stanage's composition combining Burns's Tam O" Shanter with Matthew Fitt's contemporary response, Kate O'Shanter's Tale, Hamish Napier's moving chamber piece from last year, marking the tragic death of a family friend, and how Marie Fielding, a fiddler more usually associated with dance bands, came up with a piece which involved Concerto Caledonia's David McGuinness shattering a pane of glass offstage. Saturday night's showcase at Stirling, featuring a "house band" of Mr McFall's Chamber plus soloists, may not involve such dramatic noises off, but the 13 new compositions won't be short on originality, including as they do Lorne MacDougall's 8 Bit Bagpipes, for pipes and electronics, fiddler Iain Fraser's Zen-sounding Sitting Beside Myself, for string quartet and loop pedals, and Mairearad Green's Rural Design Concept, which forsakes her usual accordion for piano and string quartet. Francis has stressed in the past that Distil is not an attempt to "dilute" the traditional music of Scotland: "It's not a dilution but a distillation, and we hope it has something potent of offer the world." l For further details, see distil.ning.com