As Europe prepares to tune in to a monumental broadcast from Glasgow's Henry Wood Hall Michael Tumelty looks at the logistics of bringing Scotland's contemporary music to the world.

NEXT Monday is a landmark day for Scottish music. On that evening the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will give a concert in Glasgow that will be transmitted live throughout Europe.

The programme for the concert will consist exclusively of works composed by four of the biggest names in Scottish music: Alasdair Nicolson, James MacMillan, Edward McGuire, and Lyell Cresswell.

There have been major moments in Scottish music before, but not one quite like this. Never has such a line-up been put on display, all on the same night, before such an immense audience, and at a time when Scottish music is arguably at its most virile and significant for decades.

The logistics of the concert are worth recounting. The music of Nicolson, MacMillan, McGuire, and Cresswell will be picked up live by 21 broadcasting organisations in countries including the UK, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and Slovenia.

There will be deferred broadcasts of the concert to the Czech Republic, Israel, and Latvia.

The countries and broadcasting organisations are all members of the European Broadcasting Union, founded in 1950 to assist and promote the development of broadcasting in all its forms. Part of the EBU's programme of activities is a series of Monday night concerts through the winter, given by invited member organisations.

The BBC was invited, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra specifically requested to produce a programme of Scottish contemporary music.

The estimated European audience for the concert next Monday night is a staggering four million; Scottish music on display indeed.

But it's more than a flagship display for the nation's top composers. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has spent most of its 60 years championing the music of this country. A showcase appearance on the European network is no more than it deserves.

And it's a flagship display, too, for Scottish soloists. Top British trumpeter, John Wallace - a Fifer born and bred - will play in MacMillan's electrifying concerto, Epiclesis, which Wallace premiered and has made his own.

James Crabb, the Dundee-born wizard of the free-bass accordion, will be soloist in Cresswell's astonishing concerto, entitled Dragspil, which was premiered at the London Proms last autumn and contained music of such originality and virtuosity that it caused a minor sensation.

And veteran bagpiper George McIlwham will once again appear in McGuire's symphonic poem, Calgacus, a work full of the imagery of defiance and optimism, and which - having been written in 1976 - is the relative oldster of the night.

Brand new, and commissioned for the occasion, is Breakdance by Inverness-born Nicolson, the youngest of the four composers. (Though written for the EBU concert, Breakdance will actually have its premiere performance by the BBC SSO this Friday at the MacRobert Centre in Stirling.)

Inspired by the street dance which gave the work its name, Breakdance, says Nicolson, ``is rhythmic, sharp, and brutal''.

The man in charge of getting the music together is conductor Elgar Howarth, doyen of contemporary music direction.

And the men in charge of getting the orchestra's music out of Glasgow's Henry Wood Hall next Monday and en route to simultaneous transmission in a plethora of European countries are Simon Lord, producer to the SSO, Tony Kime, the senior audio supervisor, and several assistants.

The Scottish staff will send the music via a microwave link to the transmitter aerial at Kirk o' Shotts. It will then be passed to Radio 3 in London who will pick up the concert and bounce it up to a satellite above the Equator.

``On the night, it's a complicated but routine exercise,'' says Graham Dixon, the editor at Radio 3 who represents the BBC on the European Broadcasting Union committee.

``The whole thing will be technically co-ordinated through Geneva, which, as headquarters of the EBU, will act as a sort of traffic control. There is a network of satellite transmitting and receiving stations, and EBU countries will take the concert off their own satellite connections.''

As the entire exercise is performed with the baffling magic of digital communications, there is no time delay.

Assuming that the terrestrial and celestial hardware all behaves itself the only problems on the night are liable to be human or linguistic.

Human? ``Well, sometimes a conductor decides at the last minute that he needs to go to the toilet,'' says Lord. And linguistic? That, says Lord, is what can make it a bit hairy.

Unusually, in the EBU concert, every country uses the same script, written by Lord and Radio 3 presenter Geoffrey Baskerville. Each European station will transmit Baskerville's presentation, fade it down, and have their own continuity announcers read the script in translation.

And what takes 30 seconds to say in English doesn't necessarily take the same time in Spanish, Finnish, Icelandic, and so on. ``You do have to accept that there might be some moments when there is little happening,'' says Lord.

That apart, it's all systems go for a remarkable international window display next Monday for the best and brightest on the Scottish music scene.

n BBC SSO: the EBU concert, March 25, Henry Wood Hall and Radio 3, 7.30pm