Tectonics 2025 TECTONICS: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1

a vapor (no body, no image) is a seance meant to conjure a terrain in which to house an awkward, absent, and collective mourning. Timothy McCormack’s work articulates and reckons with how queer individuals learn of, reconcile, grieve, and hold space for the lost generation of queer and gay individuals who died during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and '90s. What is the source of grief when lived experience was not shared with the dead? How do we grieve a ghost? Soloist Ty Bouque helps to articulate this peculiar and devastating mode of mourning, using the journals of writer and AIDS victim Hervé Guibert.

Inspired by Dorothy Molloy’s lyrical and evocative poem My heart lives in my chest, Clara Iannotta’s work is similarly an exploration of loss. “Some strange flapping bird” drifts from place to place in empty skies without ever landing or finding its destination.