Music

Here’s music from Ireland in a story from Norse times with the timing of the tide. Here’s music from Orkney with Kirkwall City Pipe Band, joined on Broad Street by the Willowburn Valley Stompers and the visiting group Kakatsitsi. And here too from Orkney are Three in a Bar.

We go into St Magnus Cathedral to hear the organ. And we go to rackwick in Hoy to hear the voices of George Mackay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies in the 1982 BBC Radio Scotland programme The Valley by the Sea.

We go to the house in Galloway of the physicist James Clark Maxwell to walk on his favourite paths and hear music specially composed for him, and to hear about the dance Maxwell’s Waves.

We have songs from Slovenia and songs from Scotland.

Like the Corn Cut Down by the River

A 19th-century calculation of the tides in the area confirmed the chroniclers’ details. The story of the battle and the tide was depicted on 9 September 2018 in the 28th Orkney International Science Festival in Like the Corn Cut Down by the River, with Orkney Children’s Theatre Club, readers Dave Grieve and Ragnhild Ljosland, and singer Lorcán Mac Mathúna accompanied by Daire Bracken (fiddle) and Eamonn Galldubh (pipes and flute).

The Valley by the Sea

How the sounds and the light and the flow of time in the Orkney valley of Rackwick influenced the music of Peter Maxwell Davies. A BBC Scotland radio programme from 1982 with the poet George Mackay Brown tells the story of the composer and the valley in the island of Hoy with its breaking seas and scattered croft houses, with a visual sequence of images added today.

A9 to Wick

“Golspie, Brora, the northern aurora, Helmsdale, Berriedale, Dunbeath and Lybster…” Andy Munro (aka Mr Boom, the one-man band from the Moon) points his spaceship northwards in the direction of Wick, on a mission to Orkney – his annual visit to the Orkney International Science Festival.

Broad Street Saturday

Broad Street in Kirkwall is the setting for some of the Saturday afternoon events in the annual Orkney International Science Festival. There is the Vintage Rally organised by Orkney Vintage Club, with music by the local jazz band, the Willowburn Valley Stompers, and visiting groups like Kakatsitsi, the drummers from Jamestown in Ghana. In the early evening, Kirkwall City Pipe Band hold their final parade of the summer season.

New dance honours great Scot

Dancers in Dufftown in Moray trying out for the first time a new dance commemorating the life and works of the great Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's Waves was commissioned by Orkney International Orkney Science Festival, and danced in the Island Ceilidh in the September 2012 Festival. It was then more widely launched at a ceilidh in Maxwell's home territory of Dumfries and Galloway in April 2013.

Maxwell’s Waves and Freeland’s tunes

The music for the new dance Maxwell’s Waves was composed by one of the great figures in Scottish traditional music, Freeland Barbour. The dance made its first public appearance at the Island Ceilidh in the 2012 Festival, with guidance from Jessie Stuart who created it, and then had its Scottish launch in Maxwell’s home territory at a ceilidh in the Dumfries and Galloway Science Festival in April 2013.

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