NEW ALBUM OUT NOW!

It is my great privelege to share with you my second solo album, “Lèirsinn - Perception”. Available now on CD, Limited-edition pearled Vinyl and to stream or download.

And what’s the album all about? Well…

The way in which humans relate and respond to the physical spaces and landscapes around us can have a profound effect on both the person and the place. Such interactions are frequently described in terms of feeling a “connection” or having a “sense of place” – emotional responses that can range anywhere from deeply positive to harshly negative. These feelings can influence decision-making from an individual right up to a large-scale organisational level and can have significant consequences for the places concerned in terms of how they are treated by humans. Similarly, how a person responds to their environment can have a considerable impact on their own wellbeing.

At their core, however, these interactions are heavily influenced by our own perceptions of the world and, with that, subject to all the external and internal influences that shape our outlook. In other words, part of a person’s response to a given environment is purely a product of their own mind and everything that has shaped their way of thinking, most significantly memory and imagination.

The music in Lèirsinn originated during the periods of restricted travel brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Torn from the life of a travelling musician and plunged into the confinement of “lockdown” living, I became increasingly interested in this idea of the way we relate and respond to the physical spaces around us being (at least in part) shaped by the imagination. I began taking imaginary journeys to places, both those I knew well and some I didn’t know at all. With the aid of maps, written and oral accounts of human and natural histories, folklore, art and music, I’d immerse myself as fully as possible in a place and mentally escape my Covid confinement for a few hours. These imaginary journeys were so comparatively invigorating (given the mundane reality of the average day in lockdown) that I was frequently inspired to compose pieces of music in response to them.

Further into the pandemic, I enrolled on the University of the Highlands and Islands’ “Music and the Environment” Masters degree course and, looking to explore this idea further, decided to turn the imaginary journeys into a musical experiment. Once restrictions had lifted sufficiently, I made real, physical trips to some of the places visited on my imagined journeys and wrote further pieces of music inspired by these "real" visits. I then compared the pairs of compositions for each location in a bid to understand the extent to which the imagination influences our perception of place.

Translated into English as “perception”, the project’s Gaelic title, Lèirsinn, has a broad definition covering vision, sight, seeing, intellect, understanding, insight and knowledge. Importantly, both words carry meaning extending beyond that which the eye may behold – sight is but one sense through which an emotional response to an environment can be influenced. Indeed, you could say that the experiment sought to understand what may be referred to as the “inner eye” and its response to our surroundings, as much as any of the common human sensory faculties.

On his famous journey to the Western Isles in 1773, Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that “the use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” Rather than pit imagination against reality, the conclusion I took from all this was that the two have an altogether more interdependent relationship. The imagination has no difficulty whatsoever in creating responses to places, real or fantastical, but that’s not to say that the environment itself has no influence on the matter. When encountering the places for real, I found that the imagination tended to interact with the landscape, colouring in the blanks and amplifying what perhaps lay in the landscape already. Though the imagination may be at times the dominant partner, both are the richer for each other’s contribution. 

Shinty Composition Competition

I was delighted to be notified that my composition, ‘Clos nan Caman’ (‘Silence of the Camans’) had been awarded first place in a recent competition run by the Camanachd Association, the Royal Celtic Society and the Glasgow Celtic Society. You can can listen to the tune here and read the full story below!

Lochaber’s Ewen Henderson, one of Scotland’s finest musicians and composers has emerged as the winner of a unique competition which has been held to mark the 200th anniversary of the Royal Celtic Society and the fact that shinty has not been played this season.

The results of the final of the musical shoot-out were revealed at 1415 on Saturday afternoon (September 19) at the precise moment that shinty’s Big Day out, the Tulloch Homes Camanachd Cup Final, would have been throwing up in Kingussie had it not been for the intervention of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Three of Scotland’s oldest and most significant sporting and cultural bodies – the Royal Celtic Society, Glasgow Celtic Society and Camanachd Association - came together to offer a major set of prizes for an original musical competition marking the absence of shinty from this summer’s sporting calendar and looking forward to the return of play.


Led by the Royal Celtic Society (RCS), which is this year celebrating its 200th anniversary, and in partnership with the Glasgow Celtic Society and shinty’s governing body the Camanachd Association, supported by Tulloch Homes, the competition offered three prizes totalling £1,500 for an individual to compose an original competition.
Three finalists were chosen by a panel of judges after considerable and challenging assessment from an original entry list of more than 20. After serious and prolonged discussion, Chairman of the judges Gary Innes revealed the result, with Ewen Henderson emerging in first place, Mary Ann Kennedy second and Chris Gray third.


Ewen Henderson described his entry as follows: “I’ve composed a pipe-style ¾ march in three parts. The first reflects shinty’s proud history; the darker and repetitive second part symbolises lockdown and shinty’s hiatus; the optimistic third part looks to the future and shinty’s revival. Unique to Scotland, ¾ marches are a much underrated and neglected part of our musical heritage in the same way that shinty is sometimes overlooked in the wider sphere of Scottish sport. Also, many of the best of these marches were composed by army pipers in the war years – an appropriate nod to the only other times that shinty seasons have been cancelled.”

The RCS had originally intended that the winner of the competition could have
performed at this year’s Camanachd Cup Final at the post-match Final Fling. That game has now been re-schedule for Kingussie in September 2021. Royal Celtic Society Chairman Alan Hay said: “We are grateful to the Princess Royal for introducing the final competition for us in our significant 200th year when she has agreed to become our Patron. I am grateful to the Glasgow Celtic Society and Camanachd Association with the support of Tulloch Homes This was a huge undertaking for us and a unique set of circumstances against the background of a global pandemic, at a significant moment in our own and shinty’s history. I am grateful to the judges, who were unanimous that they found the entries a highly demanding challenge in terms of the separation for final choices and I know from personal experience how difficult it was to select a winner from such an accomplished set of entries. We were particularly encouraged by the number of young people who took part and also the fact that the clàrsach appeared on at least two occasions.”

Fiddle Course in Skye

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll once again be teaching a five-day fiddle course at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig - Scotland’s Gaelic College - on the Isle of Skye. This has been a great week the last few years and this time it’ll be happening between the 17th & 21st of August.

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It has booked-up fairly quickly in previous years so, if you fancy it, you should head over to the Sabhal Mòr website just now. There’s more information on the course available there too.

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