Suite Uist: Traditional music

Twenty five minutes of new traditional music written and arranged for 3 violins, viola, flute, accordion, guitar, piano, Scottish small pipes, vocals. Written in traditional Gaelic music forms including: March, Slow air, Waulking song, poetry, rowing song, two sets of reels this music is inspired by the landscape, culture, history, community of Uist in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, which has been the base for my practice as a musician, composer and pedagogue for the past 17 years. My aim in this music was to be able to write music as a non-native, which could be as close to the traditional forms as possible and to see if it was possible through my art form to demonstrate a strong sense of identity and understanding of this particular space and traditions. Traditionally many Gaelic musical forms would be unaccompanied, or sung in unison, played on the pipes – and in this respect my music as ‘arranged’ and orchestrated departs from this. However I have adopted the approach to accompanying traditional music as identified by Bartok, Grainger and Stevenson which endeavours to use notes generally found within the melody itself – essentially using the same musical DNA in the accompaniment as a form of preservation, retaining the integrity of melody and indeed highlighting it. I subscribe in my practice to the term folk song collector Hamish Henderson’s referred to as the ‘carrying stream’, of traditional music in which repertoire is passed on, re-interpreted; and a healthy living tradition is one that is contributed to. Suite Uist provided a wonderful teaching and collaborative tool, modelling to my student collaborators, contemporary creative practice in traditional music; composition, arrangement, performance and recording and to discuss the cultural sensitivities. I am as passionate about teaching, passing on tradition as I am about the creative practice itself; indeed I see all these elements as interrelated and interdependent and so this project represents to me somewhat of a liminal zone where I have brought these elements together in praise of the place where I have dedicated most of my professional life in the development of tertiary music education and arts engagement. Suite Uist has been performed in Scotland and Canada and was recorded as part of a collaboration between myself, UHI staff and students and with musicians from Dorset’s Soundstorm Music Education Agency, with whom I have formed the Far Flung Collective. Tunes from Suite Uist have now made their way into the carrying stream of traditional music – appearing as parts of other musician’s performance sets and recordings.