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Making Tracks at The Queen’s Hall Edinburgh tonight features music from an ongoing project that since 2010 has brought world-class and diverse music from all corners of the globe to a network of leading venues throughout the UK.  This however is “Making Tracks” first visit not only to Edinburgh, but to Scotland.

Our programme started with a brief introduction to what “Making Tracks” does and the music that it has been involved in over nearly a decade.  The original programming ethos was to present established musical performers from around the globe, but funding cuts have forced “Making Tracks” to rethink everything that they do as an organisation, and the focus is now on developing emerging talents from a global musical background.

For this show,  the concert featured  solo and collaborative performances from each of the project's eight 2019 Fellows: Kaviraj Singh (santoor, vocals), Louise Bichan (fiddle), Rapasa Otieno (nyatiti), Melisa Yildirim (kamancha), Barbora Xu (guzheng, kantele, vocals), Arsen Petrosyan (duduk), Katariin Raska (torupill, parmupill, saxophone) and Luna Silva (vocals, ukulele, cavaquinho).   Much of the music tonight is the product of an intensive creative programme held in Wales recently and when you take into account that music performed tonight often not only came out of that residency, but that these musicians had not played together before that meeting, the results were surprising and often very interesting.

The format of this show, like all “showcase” shows allowed each performance only a limited time, but that was still enough for us to have the briefest of introductions to Indian classical music from Kaviraj Singh and find out more about the santoor that he was playing.  The name of the instrument literally means 100 strings, although this one had 91.

Our musical experience in “Making Tracks” gave us sounds from India, read the rest of the article here.