Festival Artists
Maxwell Quartet
The Maxwell Quartet consists of four close friends (Colin Scobie, George Smith, Elliott Perks and Duncan Strachan) who grew up playing classical and folk music together in youth orchestras and music schools across Scotland. The group officially began in 2010 at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where its founding members met as postgraduate students. The very next year, the Quartet was appointed as the Conservatoire’s Young Artists in Residence and selected for Enterprise Music Scotland’s Residency Programme.
In 2014, the line-up changed to include Colin Scobie and Elliott Perks on violin and viola respectively. Since then, the Quartet has developed a unique, fresh and genuine voice of its own in the world of chamber music. In 2017, the Quartet received the First Prize and Audience Prize at the Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition, and their performances were hailed as ‘superb storytelling by four great communicators’ by The Strad and as ‘brilliantly fresh, unexpected and exhilarating’ by The Herald.
Now based across the UK and touring regularly in Europe and the United States, the Quartet’s performances are set apart by the tribute they pay to their Scottish folk music heritage. From 2019 to 2021, the Quartet is Associate Artist at both the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Music at Paxton festival.
Always keen to take the possibilities of the string quartet in new directions, the Quartet has worked with musicians including Kari Kriikku, Jonathan Kelly, Benjamin Grosvenor, David Watkin, Anna Meredith, Herman Kolgen, Lunir and the Danish String Quartet. The Quartet has studied with Hatto Beyerle of the Alban Berg Quartett and members of the Endellion String Quartet.
Kirsty Gunn
Kirsty Gunn is a New Zealand born fiction writer living in London and Scotland whose work has won numerous awards and been made into films, broadcast, theatre, dance and widely broadcast. Published in multiple countries internationally, her novels and short stories focus on ordinary lives and relationships and seek to show within the day-to-day those shocking moments of intimacy and tiny drama that make up human experience. ‘I am fully in love with Kirsty Gunn’s stories,’ Jane Campion writes. ‘They hit the heart of life so truly it makes me quiver.’
Kirsty is the author of six novels – Rain, The Keepsake, Featherstone, The Boy and the Sea, The Big Music and Caroline’s Bikini – extended essays and short stories about identity and Katherine Mansfield – Thorndon, My Katherine Mansfield Project and Going Bush – as well as three collections of short stories – Pretty Ugly, This Place you Return to is Home and Infidelities – and 44 Things, a collection of essays, fragments and stories. Her short stories have been included in many anthologies including The Junky’s Christmas and Other Yuletide Stories (1994) and The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood (1997).
Kirsty’s work has been shortlisted for and won many prizes. Her acclaimed story Rain (1994), about an adolescent girl and the break-up of her family, won a London Arts Board Literature Award, and also led to the 2001 film of the same name, directed by Christine Jeffs and the 2001 ballet by the Rosas Company, set to “Music for Eighteen Musicians”, a 1976 score by Steve Reich. Her collection of short stories, This Place You Return To Is Home (1999), won a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary (2001). The boy and the sea was the 2007 Sundial Scottish Book of the Year and her previous work Featherstone was listed as a New York Times Notable Book and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature. Her book, The Big Music, which comprises artwork, music and a film featuring the well-known Scottish actor Brian Cox, was listed for the James Tait Black and IMPAC awards and won The New Zealand Post Book of the Year (2013). Her collection of short stories, Infidelities (2014), was awarded the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story Prize and was also shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
In her most recent work Pretty Ugly (Otago University Press, 2024) Kirsty Gunn reminds us that ambiguity and complication are elemental forces in a human life, and grist to the storyteller’s mill. These 13 darkly compelling stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are testament to her unrivalled ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. The ‘ugly’ of these stories, she writes, is to do with ‘considering how much a person’s life can bear’. Pretty Ugly is currently shortlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Frances Wilkins
Frances Wilkins is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Elphinstone Institute. She is also a professional musician, performing Scottish traditional music on English concertina. As a researcher, she specialises in Scottish and Northern Canadian singing and instrumental traditions and has worked on research projects in Scotland, Canada and Germany. She teaches on the MLitt in Ethnology and Folklore and supervises PhD students in Ethnomusicology and Folklore. She has presented papers at numerous academic conferences, including of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, and the International Council for Traditional Music. She has written articles for journals including Musiké, MUSICultures, Folk Music Journal, and Northern Scotland and her first monograph, Singing the Gospel along Scotland's North-East Coast, 1859-2009 was published by Routledge as part of the SOAS musicology series. She has been invited to give lectures on her research in Scotland and internationally for the St Andrews Society of Toronto, Waskaganish 350 Year Anniversary Festival (Quebec), Banff Preservation and Heritage Society Annual Founders Lecture, Mayfest, The Universities of Durham, Sheffield and Newcastle, Orkney Folk Festival, North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, Scottish Fisheries Museum and at Aberdeen Saltire Society.
Wilkins has worked as a guest editor for Musiké and MUSICultures academic journals and website reviews editor for The World of Music (new series). She is on the editorial board for Folk Music Journal and convened the British Forum for Ethnomusicology annual conference in Aberdeen in 2019. She has convened conferences for the BFE (2009 and 2019) and the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (2018). She organised Button Boxes & Moothies: A Free Reed Convention in 2015. In 2018 she was on the judging panel for the BFE Book Prize.
Frances Wilkins took up the position of Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Elphinstone Institute in 2013.
Peaks
Peaks is the musical partnership between violinist George Smith and cellist Duncan Strachan, founder members and one half of the internationally-renowned Scottish chamber ensemble the Maxwell Quartet.
Incorporating both electronic and acoustic mediums, Peaks weaves together an eclectic range of musical strands, with much of the duo’s work focusing on aspects of Scottish traditional culture, recontextualised in a post-minimalist and post-modernist aesthetic. Smith and Strachan have collaborated with cinematographer Herman Kolgen, theatre company Cryptic, London Studio Centre Dance, composer Anna Meredith, piper Brighde Chaimbeul, and many more, with performances of their own music across the UK at major venues and festivals, and further afield in Denmark, Norway, and France.
Their 2017 project, A Concert in A Coire, saw the duo collaborating with Scottish electronica artist Architeq, for a site-specific performance composed on location at Coire Lagan on Skye, one of the UK’s most dramatic scenic locations. They composed a new work based on Skye’s landscape called Cladach/Mullach for the Magic Mountain festival in Portree in 2024.
Brighde Chaimbeul
Brìghde Chaimbeul (Breech-huh Campbell) is a leading purveyor of celtic experimentalism and a master of the Scottish smallpipes; a bellows-blown, mellower cousin to the famous Highland bagpipes. A native Gaelic speaker, Brìghde roots her music in her language and culture. She rose to prominence as a prodigy of traditional music, but has since begun a journey to take the smallpipes into unchartered territory. She has devised a unique way or arranging for pipe music that emphasises the rich textural drones of the instrument; the constancy of sound that creates a trance-like atmosphere, played with enticing virtuosic liquidity. She draws inspiration from the world of interconnected piping traditions, but her most recent album brings in influence from ambient, avant garde and electronic music.
Her mesmerising musicianship has won her many awards and media recognition, including BBC Young Folk Award, BBC Horizon Award, SAY Award nomination and a wide array of collaborators include Caroline Polachek, Colin Stetson, Gruff Rhys, Radie Peat.
Lochaber Schools’ Pipe Band
Lochaber Schools Pipe Band is a group of young pipers and drummers from the Lochaber area who get together for their love of the Scottish bagpipe and marching bands. Led by Mags MacMaster they are a truly awesome sounding band and during the summer, play at Highland Games and in Fort William's town centre most Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
Roo Geddes & Neil Sutcliffe
Roo Geddes and Neil Sutcliffe are a fiddle and accordion duo based in Glasgow, Scotland. Growing up surrounded by traditional music, they enjoy sharing their love of folk tunes and the stories attached to them with local and international audiences. They combine their shared experience across Classical, Folk and Jazz to create their own distinctive sound. They have toured widely across Scotland and abroad, at folk clubs, rural venues, and festivals like Celtic Connections, Edinburgh Tradfest and St Magnus Festival.
Roo and Neil first met aged 13, as students of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Juniors’ School. They quickly formed a close friendship and began collaborating musically throughout their studies until graduating in 2021 with Honours of the First Class.
In May 2022 they toured Scotland to release their debut album, HOMELANDS - a suite of pieces exploring their people and places which feel like 'home'. The works took five years to write and record and last just under an hour in length. During the first Covid-19 lockdown, one piece from this collection was selected a winner of Feis Rois’ “In Tune with Nature” competition. It was remotely composed, recorded and filmed to celebrate the wildlife and landscape of the magical Taynish National Nature Reserve. The duo are quickly gaining recognition and in 2021 were selected by Celtic Connection's prestigious ‘Danny Kyle Award’ and offered a performance at next year's festival.
In addition to their original music, they also frequently perform their arrangements of Scottish traditional music and song and function as a ceilidh band, performing at events across the UK. The duo work closely with Live Music Now, a charity which aims to connect musicians with people experiencing social exclusion or disadvantage. This incredibly rewarding experience has lead them to perform in care homes, ASN schools, nurseries and hospitals. Furthermore, Roo and Neil have eclectic experiences as jazz musicians which deeply influence their work.
Born into families of educators, both musicians are passionate teachers and their pedagogy significantly informs their identity as artists. They work with students from a diverse range of ages and abilities in both private and community-music settings.
Away from their instruments, they share a love of hillwalking, tree climbing, and all things outdoors. In September Roo begins study on a Master’s Degree in Jazz in while Neil is focussing on establishing himself in the Scottish music scene as a collaborative performer and teacher.
Kristine Kennedy
Kristine Kennedy was born and brought up in Orinsay, Lochs, on the Isle of Lewis. She was very familiar with working the croft and also immersed in a heritage of songs and music. After spending years in the Police service, she worked for a time as a director at Comunn na Gàidhlig creating and implementing projects, particularly youth work, both nationally and internationally. Her voice was heard for years presenting the Dùrachdan programme and contributing to others on Radio nan Gàidheal.
She has been involved with Mòds all her life in different capacities and has attended almost every national mòd since she was twelve years old and holds life membership of An Comunn Gàidhealach. She has spent many years teaching and preparing competitors for mòds and at fèisean (festivals).
She won the Traditional Gold medal in 1989 and won the top Celtavisión prize representing Scotland at the Pan Celtic Festival. She has made recordings and sung in many places all over the world.
Kristine very much enjoys drama and song and takes every opportunity to promote “our language and our music”.