The final concert in the current series of On A Wing and A Prayer is just over a fortnight away and will take place in St. Columba’s Chapel, Drimnin on the Morvern peninsula on 27th July at 3pm.
Throughout the On A Wing and A Prayer series, we’ve been looking at changing habitats and manmade impact on Scottish Highland and Island habitats as well as those in Faroe and Iceland and this project in Morvern has proven to be very special indeed.
Lisa Robertson
For this part of the project, I’ve been working with Lisa Robertson, a composer from the West Highlands of Scotland who is particularly interested in combining sounds from nature and traditional music, examining relationships between people and the land and highlighting environmental concerns. Lisa is fast gaining a reputation on the national and international scene, with recent performances at the St. Magnus Festival, Orkney, King’s Place London and in Finland and Sweden.
However, it’s relatively rare that Lisa gets to create and perform her music at home in Morvern, so this has been a very special project for both of us as we explore Morvern’s rainforests and the community’s relationship to the land. You can learn much more about what inspired us in the podcast with Aileen Sweeney at the top of this page.
The Music
Our programme ranges from coast to mountain via stream and woodland, exploring a range of emotions from the bleakness of habitat loss through the teeming life of the rainforest and towards the hope of a more harmonious existence between humankind and nature as we explore how the community of Morvern has worked with it’s most abundant natural resource – water!
We are joined by cellist Ruth Rowlands for this unique and reflective soundscape and our music will be a blend of instrumental and natural sound including poetic fragments by Kathleen Jamie, who has so generously granted us permission through Clutag Press to use poems from “The Green Room”, also inspired by the rainforests of Morvern. We will also be featuring fragments of recordings made by the participants in our woodland workshop back in May as well as Judith Weir’s Atlantic Drift and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Reflections.
Concert information
Drimnin is easily accessed from Oban, Mull and Fort William, so why not book yourself a weekend away in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland and come and join us? Entry is by suggested donation of £15 (U18s free) and you can either book a place in advance here or simply turn up on the door.
Forthcoming Events
We have a very exciting Sagas and Seascapes event coming up on 10th September in Orkney with our Faroese friends Aldubáran. More on that in a future post, but if you can’t wait that long and want to book your ferry tickets, then here’s a preview: https://oisf.org/fest-event/sagas-and-seascapes/
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What fabulous, fabulous concerts …. Really wonderful to have these events on our cultural calendar. xx
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Thank you, Lesley. I look forward to sharing On A Wing and A Prayer – Morvern with you online if you can’t cross the country in person!
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