The Unfurrowed Field

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Fergus McCreadie Stony Gate
Donald Grant Thoir thusa nuas an rionnag sin (Bring you down that star) (world premiere)
Donald Grant Prelude Valse
Fergus McCreadie Nearness of You
György Kurtág selections from Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky
Christian Mason ‘Muttos’ from Sardinian Songbook
Donald Grant NZ 2004

Fergus McCreadie Piano
David Bowden Bass
Stephen Henderson Drums

Scottish pianist Fergus McCreadie approaches the sound of Scottish folk from the perspective of jazz, using shapes and lines from the classical tradition. His long-standing trio—featuring drummer Stephen Henderson and bassist David Bowden—formed when they were students at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and have found a permanence that’s less like jazz’s piano trio—a form in which personnel chops and changes rapidly—and maybe more like a chamber ensemble. But unlike classical group, all McCreadie’s music was originally taught by ear, giving a special lift to performances as deeply internalised music is realised with springy elasticity.

The Unfurrowed Field takes its name from a track on McCreadie’s Mercury Prize-nominated 2022 album Forest Floor. The record revolves around the natural Scotland McCreadie is fond of; in his spare time, McCreadie is a keen hiker, who enjoys the shift in perspective that the great outdoors brings: you realise just how small you are in the world.

Nature flows through the set, too. Among the tunes featured here is a changed up version of ‘The Unfurrowed Field’: it’s time-shifted, more spacious, and brings a string quartet into the mix. Complementing this are the shiny surfaces of ‘Snow Caps’, an ultra-bright tune from his forthcoming album Stream, that captures the feeling of being blinded twice—first by the sun, and then by the reflection of the snow—when you arrive at the top of a snowy peak. McCreadie says the first part of the programme is shaped like a circular walk. “It’s not super common musically, but it’s so often the case in other areas of life—especially if you’re going out on an adventure, realistically, you’ll probably end up back in the same place,” McCreadie says. But though the spot might be the same, the arrival comes with the weight of knowing what came before.

This idea feeds into the rest of Collective music director Rakhi Singh’s repertoire choices. Two thoughts shape what follows: “what can I do to hold the space for the folk-jazz element,” she says, while also realising that “what I choose makes us listen to everything in a different way.” The clearest way of holding the space comes by enlisting another Scottish musician improvising in the gaps between folk, classical and jazz: string player Donald Grant. ‘Thoir thusa nuas an rionnag sin’ (a line from a Gaelic proverb meaning Bring you down that star) is a dreamy slow jig inspired by an impeccably clear night sky on an early morning walk home after a recent Hogmanay; another, ‘NZ 2004’—in which Grant commemorates an extreme sports-heavy trip to New Zealand—is a rollicking trip through uneven time signatures, in a gnarly fusion of Scottish folk timbres and groove-heavy improvisation.

HUGH MORRIS

Featured works

Christian Mason ‘Eki Attar’ from Tuvan Songbook, ‘Muttos’ from Sardinian Songbook

(Singing) string quartet, 2016 and 2018

Singh imagines a big Venn diagram as a way of finding connections between seemingly disparate places. An interest in folk music in translation led her to Christian Mason’s Songbook projects for example, in which Mason translated different throat-singing traditions from around the world into music for string quartet, interrogating the sonic properties of the source material, while wondering how to make the distance between listener and source material constantly fluctuate. Two songs are heard here: ‘Eki Attar’, a Tuvan song about how horses are great—the title literally means “The Best Steeds”—which is a frenzy of frantically sawed rhythms and sung ensemble refrains, as well as ‘Muttos’, from Sardinia. Referencing the Tenores di Bitti, a traditional Sardinian choir who manipulate the vocal sounds from their throats to play with the resulting multi-tone ‘chords’, Mason employs a hocket technique to split a melody around the ensemble. What sounds at first like a surreal peal of bells passing through the ensemble is replaced by insistent, unanimous chugging.

HUGH MORRIS

String quartet, 1788

Joseph Haydn fits unexpectedly well into the magical folky Venn diagram. Heard among the rest of the programme, the Adagio from his quartet Op. 54 No. 2, sounds like a fusion of the florid, improvised language of McCreadie, and the earthy chorale sound of Sardinian song.

HUGH MORRIS

String quartet, 1988–1989

It’s the same for György Kurtág’s ‘Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky’. Taken from the more melodious, even folk-adjacent end of Kurtág’s music, these masterful musical aphorisms nevertheless maintain the classic Kurtág principle: a minimum of notes equalling the maximum, essential expression. Singh feels that these Kurtág pieces sit right at the centre of the programme’s Venn diagram.

HUGH MORRIS

II.
VIII.
IX.
XI.
XV. Arioso interroto (di Endre Szervánsky)

Arranged by Richard Jones
String quartet, 2016

If there’s a work that brings all the ideas together—a rustic folkiness, a work in translation, a feeling of wanting to burst out of instruments that can’t speak—it’s Anna Meredith’s ‘Honeyed Words’. It began life a moment of calm between two chattering tracks on her debut album Varmints; Richard Jones’s arrangement for the Ligeti Quartet translates the smooth synthesiser lines into string movements full of bulges. There’s an upright quality to this fluid work, like a very slow, languorous dance with lunges—a folk dance at night’s end, if you will.

HUGH MORRIS