When Anne Wood visited Pakistan to meet the father she had never known, the experience opened up another world that stayed with her. More than thirty years later, the renowned Scottish violinist tells her story in When Mountains Meet, a cross-cultural hybrid of storytelling and song that bridges continents and musical styles. Told as a conversation between Scottish and South-Asian music, a vibrant live score composed by Wood combines alap, raag, reel and strathspey, with vocals performed in a mix of English, Gaelic and Hindustani to tell Wood’s deeply personal story. When Wood first wrote to her father, ‘He didn’t know I had been born, but replied quickly to my tentative letter introducing myself, completely accepting me into his life as we developed a fiery but loving father-daughter relationship. ’ Wood’s musical pedigree stems from her Sutherland roots, and as a founder member of folk/jazz fusion group, The Cauld Blast Orchestra up to her current tenure as a member of ‘godmother
When Lynn MacRitchie gave a public lecture at Edinburgh College of Art in February this year titled The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy, it shed light on one of Scotland’s lesser known avant-garde art happenings that might finally have found its time. Instigated by MacRitchie while a student at ECA more than half a century ago, The Participation Art Event (PAE) explored the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. Over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023). Medalla was a Filipino artist and activist who in 1964 co-founded the kinetic art based Signals London gallery, and was one of those behind hippie/counterculture collective the Exploding Galaxy. It was through the latter that Medalla met Dugger, an American artist who landed on the scene in 1967. The pair c