Full circle: Catriona Macdonald returns, with a new mission

However, thanks to a chance encounter a couple of years later with Eunice Henderson, who was heading to a lesson with Dr Tom Anderson MBE, she began attending his classes and made such rapid progress that, by the age of 13, she had been enlisted as one of Tom’s tutors. In 1983, she was named as Shetland’s Young Fiddler of the Year.

Many of Tom’s students became members of the fiddle group, Shetland’s Young Heritage, which was “phenomenal”. Still just 13, she and her group embarked on a three-week tour of Norway.

It felt like, that’s what we do! We had done it for so long, and it came from a really authentic place, practising every Monday night in Islesburgh Community Centre. There was a brilliant peer group of people – we just loved each other and we’re still close friends. It’s only now, I think, looking back, that we realise how special that period was.

Not content with nearby Norway, the group also travelled to America and Java. That a group of young Shetland musicians would set out for Indonesia might seem surprising to anyone unfamiliar with the islands’ strong tradition of globetrotting; and again, in hindsight, she recognises just how special that was. But at the time they thought, “does everyone not go to Java?”.

Shetland seafarers have often been as familiar with Shanghai or Montevideo as with Aberdeen or Leith, so that sort of adventure sits very easily in Shetland’s culture. Today’s Global Classroom, a Shetland initiative linking schools around the world, continues the tradition, as do generations of musicians.

As a child, Catriona was well aware of the long journeys that Shetland folk undertook, bringing back such things as American clocks or a box of porcupine quills. These were everyday things, recalling a grandad’s travels in the merchant service.

I was aware that people had been somewhere a long way away. it was never a ‘peerie isle’ mentality, that you just bide in your own place. That’s not what Shetland’s ever been about.

She pursued her further musical education in Edinburgh and then moved to London, studying at the Royal College of Music, where the course focused on classical voice; in other words, she was training to be an opera singer. Singing had always been part of her life, and she’d sung in choirs, including the Anderson High School one, “so I was always aware that I could sing.” With fiddle teaching, she often sang up in the fiddle range, and did really enjoy it. The Royal College, just across the road from the Royal Albert Hall, was an extraordinary experience:

....jaw-dropping, for somebody who comes from Lerwick, ending up in a place like that! I felt like an imposter for quite a long time in there and really had to navigate a way of accepting that it was OK: ‘you can be here’ – and that was a valuable life lesson.

Meanwhile, though, she continued to play fiddle, sometimes at folk festivals. She happened to meet Simon Thoumire, a concertina player who was to become very well known on the folk scene. In 1989, he had won what was then called the BBC Young Tradition award and he encouraged Catriona to enter the same competition, which she won in 1991.

It was really an amazing experience to have won it, because of course the doors started immediately opening. It’s amazing how the BBC calling card is quite something!

Catriona recalls that the previous year’s winner, Ingrid Henderson from Fort William, had been only 13 when she picked up her prize. Although she was and is a “fabulous musician”, it was helpful from the BBC’s point of view that Catriona was older and was ready to fulfil a year of engagements, so Catriona took a year out from her opera degree. It was a mutually beneficial outcome: “they had lots of opportunities, and I had the availability to do it”.

As the years passed, it was folk music that shaped Catriona’s career. She formed a duo with accordionist Ian Lowthian – a musical “magician” – which she says was a really valuable experience in learning her craft.

Much as she enjoyed London life and the opportunities it offered, she began to yearn for a change of scene. After fulfilling her commitments following the BBC Young Tradition award, she moved to the Scottish borders, where Ian was based, in 1993. Soon afterwards, she bought a house and lived there until her recent return to Shetland. She feels that the Borders has quite a lot in common with Shetland.

I loved that area. There are so many synergies. They have their own distinct dialect, they have their own crafts, they have a really rich musical and literary history. I felt more like I was living in an island in the Borders than I ever do here in Shetland!

Wildie and Lalla, a collaboration with the late Dr Shona Main during Covid, was about the death of Laura Saxby, daughter of Jessie. Her child’s passing was intimately described in her own words in her book, The One Wee Lassie, published in 1875. Saxby’s undeserved neglect in literature – she had written 47 books – paralleled the experience of many women in music and the arts in general.

Another film, Wave Waulking, explores Catriona’s bi-islands’ identity, bringing together a collage of cultural strands from her mother’s Shetland and her father’s birthplace, the Isle of Lewis.

Composing also formed part of her PhD studies; she also wrote 70 minutes of new, creative work, which responds to the academic and archive material that she has brought together.

There were other collaborations, too; she worked with the Northern Irish poet, and winner of the 2013 T. S. Eliot prize for poetry, Sinéad Morrissey, who is currently professor of creative writing at Newcastle.

It’s a truly impressive body of work, built on an exceptional career. Catriona has not only written about the barriers that women have faced but has also played her part in breaking them down. Her thesis will become part of the doctoral collection at the Shetland Archives, and she has already been asked to give talks about her findings.

As for new role models, she’s confident that they’ll continue to emerge:

I’ve been really lucky that I’ve been working for the last 25 years with young musicians, at the start of their careers. I know so many that I’ve come across doing my job in Newcastle. I’ve taught people like Eryn Rae; she’s been up here recently at the Folk Festival with her band, Astro Bloc. She was my pupil from age 7. Again – like me - I put the fiddle in her hands at 7 and she breathed through the instrument. It was like, ‘this is my other voice’. To have the privilege of seeing young women like that come up – and she’s everywhere at the moment – and I think ‘wow’, she’s probably sitting there playing and there’ll be some other little girl who was like her, in the audience, going ‘I want to do that!’ It’s fantastic.

Catriona loved her time at Newcastle University; the teaching, the opportunity to think strategically about musical education and the freedom to combine those with performing. But after 25 years, she began to contemplate a change.

I came up here in 2017, when I started my PhD, and I spent a brilliant six months in the Archives, a wonderful warm bath of so many lovely things happening. I’ve always known that I was going to end up in Shetland, but I wasn’t sure if I could drag my Canadian husband and my bairn back up here! But my husband Gordie was, like, ‘we could live here, we could have a brilliant life here’.

On the other hand, she wasn’t looking to leave Newcastle at that point, when she’d just been appointed to a professorship and was embarking on the PhD. However, when the Shetland Arts job came up, she felt she had to put her hat in the ring “because this kind of cultural job will never come up again in my working lifetime”.

More than that, she had never felt disconnected from Shetland and had done everything in her power to highlight its cultural strengths.

I’m coming back when I’ve got my feet on the ground and can hopefully be really helpful and useful. It’s not that I’m never going to go away and play, because I have to, it’s part of my being, but I think I have some experience to bring to the arts in Shetland.

This is a new job, with broad scope, and Catriona is clear that it can be shaped to meet Shetland’s needs:

I’m really looking forward to – and I am – going out into all the art-form communities. I’m really interested in collaborations and in inter-disciplinary work, but I need to get to know everybody. I’m also working on the educational programmes that are delivered by Shetland Arts and I’m very happy to be doing that. The people that I’m working with have been doing a fantastic job.

Recovering from Covid, which had a huge impact on the arts as well as everything else, was a challenge, but Catriona feels that we’re now in a much better place from the viewpoints of both artists and audiences, with scope to shape programming based on an understanding of what people would like. But talking to people, she is clear that they recognise how exceptional Mareel, the building, is, and how lucky we are to have it. Above all, she welcomes the fact that people have, and express, opinions.

Those conversations have also confirmed that the arts in general are in good health in Shetland:

I always knew it was excellent, but we punch way beyond what folk could ever have imagined. I’ve always known that, across the arts here, there is a really high standard, but actually, just getting into the granular detail of it, it is extraordinary. Across the art forms here, the industry, the people, the amount of interest around all the art forms – I think that’s amazing for a place this size. Long may that continue!

Catriona adds that although the facilities and funding are in place, it’s really important that we all make use of what we have. “You’re so welcome! If you thought before that the arts are not for you, come, go to something!

Catriona’s return – maybe that should be a new fiddle tune – is an important moment for Shetland, and especially for its thriving creative communities. After years of promoting Shetland’s music around the world, we are fortunate to have her home, bringing with her not only a wealth of performing experience but also her outstanding academic and strategic insights. She has come full circle, but a circle greatly enriched by all that she has accomplished.

We congratulate her and wish her well.