ALL AROUND was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for first performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov at City Halls, Glasgow, on 5th May 2019, as part of the Tectonics Festival.

ALL AROUND is about combining and accumulating the familiar and the arcane, and looking for correspondences. Our everyday lives are full of random sequences, the everyday comes at us from all directions at any time. When we decide to stop in the middle of all that and go into a concert we leave much of the everyday behind, but also of course it keeps popping up. ALL AROUND is all about ubiquity - it doesn’t work to turn to classical concerts to escape the noise of modern life, because we use the same pair of ears wherever we go. This piece wants to acknowledge the listener’s experiences with ambient listening alongside the musicians’ concentration on creating very specific musically shaped events for those same ears. So, the sounds inside and outside the concert situation get mixed up a bit. The piece is also about close and far away. Powerful pounding rhythms, heard from a distance, may come across as subtle, while something introduced originally as a background resonance reappears in deafening proximity. So, it’s surround sound with dispersed musicians and urban field recordings, and of course the main star - the orchestra on stage.

ALL AROUND is published by Edition Wilhelm Hansen, Music Sales Classical.

"Some things worked really well. ... Juliana Hodkinson’s All Around made exciting use of every available space in the Grand Hall from the galleries to the gangways and the foyers."
- The Times