CoMA Glasgow invites you to take part in one-off sessions or multiple-session projects organised throughout the year – at different venues such as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) and also online. The Club is open for musicians and sound-makers of all abilities: professionals, students, amateurs, composers, instrumentalists and sound-artists.
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On July 26 2026 we organised a performance called “Scribbling Scores” in The Hidden Gardens, facilitated by composer and improviser Hannah Siddiqui. It was a relaxed concert exploring a series of experimental text scores with an invitation to the audience to join in with the music as well.
We showcased existing pieces as well as new work developed across a series of creative sessions exploring text as a prompt for musical creativity under the guidance of Hannah Siddiqui.
On March 20 CoMA Glasgow presented work by Sonic Bothy and Florence Maunders as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music for All.
Click here to watch the YouTube playlist of the concert.
All of music is translation. Translating ideas into images, images into sounds, and sounds into a form of understanding, connection, or emotional response.
In our contribution to the UK-wide Festival of Contemporary Music for All, CoMA Glasgow performed two pieces.
Verbaaaatim Renga was composed by members of Sonic Bothy, an all-abilities music organisation here in Scotland. With a name inspired by Japanese link poems, in which different poets each add a verse to develop from the last, this fascinating piece shifts from one performance to the next through live captioners, whose captions describing one performance form a score for the next performance, creating a piece which changes across performances but maintains a continuity with itself. It is an incredible example of an all-abilities practice spawning new creative processes.
This was paired with a selection of pieces from the collection Dendroforms by Florence and Reuben Maunders. This piece utilises found imagery from trees utilised in collage and with negative space breaking these found images into distinct lines and shapes which also reference tree shapes.
On Friday 24th October 2025 we held a free book launch event presenting the publication earlier in 2025 of A Year of Deep Listening by Terra Nova Press.
– On Saturday 25th October we took a deep dive into the practice of Deep Listening with an immersive workshop, held at the Listen Gallery with accredited Deep Listening facilitator Susanne Olbrich.
September 18 2025, Centre for Contemporary Arts
For this performance we played a piece by Rebecca Lee, called “Making it up, this moment of June.” Mixing text and graphic instructions has had our group exploring their contrasting mix of musical styles and aesthetics through improvisation, and finding space to learn and develop around previous sessions.
Alongside this we performed Kevin Leomo’s Solace, which has us considering the vitality of music in the face of the challenges and atrocities we are faced with as a species.
ARCO, a London-based experimental group led by Neil Luck, invited CoMA Glasgow to join them on this project.
MenCon is a radical reinterpretation of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto Op.64, wherein the solo part remains completely intact (realised by violinist Chihiro Ono), and the orchestral parts are reinterpreted and recomposed by a chamber orchestra of creative musicians from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, led by composer Neil Luck. The work is chameleonic, unrepeatable, inclusive, unpredictable, creative, brilliantly risky, and probably (possibly) exactly how Mendelssohn himself would have wanted it to be played in the 21st century!
Performed in the Pianodrome in Edinburgh, March 22 2025.
The video of the performance will be posted to youtube soon, so a link will follow.
Performance by CoMA Glasgow at the Scottish Music Centre, December 2024.
Compositions
Performers
Watch the performance on youtube (playlist)
Oracle of many winds, performed by the CoMA Glasgow group in The Old Hairdressers on July 19th 2024, is a piece composed and directed by Rūta Vitkauskaitė.
Watch the performance on youtube
CoMA Glasgow’s Festival event on 12th March 2024, which was a livestreamed performance of a new score workshopped by our nonclassical artist-in-residence Harry Gorski-Brown, amongst other exciting pieces.
Watch the YouTube live stream again here
In December 2023, CoMA Glasgow held a series of workshops working up to the creation of an online ‘greetings card’ installation. This resulted in recordings of our favourite festive sounds, and the creation of musical responses.
Throughout June 2023, CoMA Glasgow worked with Helen Julia Minors to explore the practice of ‘soundpainting’. Soundpainting is a signed gestural language which directs a performing musical group in exploring and experimenting with their group sound. In these sessions we learned the core gestures in order to work together to explore timbre, develop material, relate material between our instruments, and learn to utilise this gestural approach to explore our own creative voices.
Led by musical director Rūta Vitkauskaitė, Decarolizing gathered seasonal music both from the UK and beyond and re-composed them. Over three sessions, participants played, recorded, and discussed music and visual to create a collaborative and seasonal musical experience, contributing, deconstructing, and visualizing music to create a new and innovative audiovisual work.
In collaboration with Sheena Phillips and Janet Oates, we devised and performed two new compositions: StorySpace was an immersive online concert experience inspired by the myths and forces of our planet, and Chains of Connection was a new chain score project.
This online project reached participants from Shetland to India and was devised and led by composer and sound artist Duncan Chapman. Over the course of four 2-hour zoom sessions Duncan took the group on a journey of shapes, spaces and sounds found in our surrounding landscapes.
Ether/Real was our online exploration of graphic scores, connecting a group of musicians from across the world to explore work by Julius Eastman, Rūta Vitkauskaitė, Yannis Xenakis, Heidi von Gunden, Christian Wolff and Janet Oates. The project culminated in our Christmas concert, Avantgarde Advent, which you can watch back at the link below.
During the lockdown, CoMA Glasgow developed its newest interactive project – Postcard Pieces. Inspired by our desire to bring a sense of personal connection back to remote music-making, our members created 14 utterly unique pieces written on physical postcards to then be exchanged by post – from the Shetland Isles to the English south coast, and even reaching as far as Berlin.
Led by composer Dr Rūta Vitkauskaitė, the ‘YouCreate’ project invited musicians of all instruments, composers and sound creators to come together to create and perform a collaborative and unique piece of contemporary music for the lockdown-generation. We developed the piece over four video calls during May/June, and held an online premiere of the completed composition, titled Remote Connections, on 20th June 2020.
CoMA Glasgow launched in November 2019, and held our first pilot project in early 2020 at the Scottish Music Centre in Glasgow. Tying into the Festival of Contemporary Music for All 2020, we held an open rehearsal and performance session exploring a selection of pieces written for the event and for CoMA, alongside an exciting and informative session on John Cage’s ‘Concert’ delivered by Philip Thomas. You can listen to some excerpts of our open rehearsal here.
Stay up to date with future CoMA Glasgow projects, by joining one of our mailing lists:
Participants Mailing List (if you are interested in participating in future projects)
Audiences/General Mailing List (if you are interested in hearing about events)
If you are able to donate and support the work of CoMA Glasgow, please click here to donate online. We run our projects on a pay-what-you-can-afford model for those taking part, so every pound is gratefully received and helps us to keep our projects truly open to all.
CoMA Glasgow is growing into a large new music collective with members of all abilities. We meet for specific projects throughout the year, alongside our two Open Score Clubs per month, and encourage our members to contribute ideas and lead the facilitation of our projects.
If you are interested in subscribing to the ensemble as a player, click here to find out more.
If you want to find out more about us, or are interested in collaborating with us on a project, you can get in touch with us at the details below:
Email: glasgow@coma.org
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