Landmarks – Border Music

Overview

A musical concert performance of songs by the great Hawick composer Francis George Scott, this will also be a rare opportunity to hear performances of songs by another great – and greatly neglected – Hawick-born composer, John Blackwood McEwen.

Portraits of F.G. Scott by the artists William Johnstone, John Bellany and Alexander Moffat form part of the current Landmarks: Border Voices exhibition and the concert will take place in the presence of the paintings themselves, introduced by Professor Alan Riach of Glasgow University.

The exhibition brings together portraits by Alexander Moffat of the finest poets, singers and musicians of modern Scotland, with Ruth Nicol’s landscapes representing the hinterlands of the Borderers, writer Hugh MacDiarmid, composer F.G. Scott and artist William Johnstone, alongside poems by Alan Riach inspired by the paintings.

The songs in the concert will include settings of MacDiarmid and others, both distinctively modern and deeply traditional, by turns lively and gleeful or slow, melodic and thoughtful: always a pleasure to hear.

Performers:

Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow, where, from 2007 to 2022, she served as Co-Director of the award-winning Centre for Robert Burns Studies. She has edited the songs of Robert Burns and James Hogg and has published widely on song culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on British national songs and on music and Scottish literature. Most recently she has led a research project to relaunch the Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation and is acting as co-editor on a new Collected Works of the Scottish poet William Soutar.

David Hamilton teaches at both the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Music School of Douglas Academy. He is visiting Professor of Organ at the Conservatoire in Shanghai, is Strathclyde University Organist and Director of Music at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Hamilton. He has performed across the UK, Europe, and in Lithuania, Russia and China. He has recorded for the BBC and has two major recordings of the organ music of Buxtehude and J. S. Bach (both on the Divine Art label).