Scottish Creations Film

Stories are such a key part of how we share ideas, history, personality and humanity with each other.

In the Year of Scotland’s Stories, we wanted to create a project celebrating storytelling from the places of the places we perform in, and making our audiences’ stories part of the project itself. So Scottish Creations explores a whole range of stories – musical, visual, literal and digital.

Filmed live at Mareel in Lerwick, Shetland at the midpoint of our tour in May 2022, you’ll be led through the concert film by Kate Suthers, a regular face in the Scottish Ensemble violins, directing with us for the first time. We hope you enjoy exploring works by Scottish composers, including a new work by award-winning composer and harpist Ailie Robertson, Archetypes, which we are honoured to premiere.

As well as enjoying musical storytelling, you can explore the collaborative exhibition we’ve put together with Creative Lives. It features curated works of art – from poetry to weaving, to printing – that were submitted by members of the local communities this project will be performed in; pieces which tell moving individual stories within which we hope you find resonance, fun, and solace. The exhibition accompanied us on the road and now features online in our new digital exhibition.

You can also find out more about the stories (and personalities!) behind the tour through our mini-documentary series – featuring composers, musicians and community artists. The six episodes are now all available here on our website recorded in Mull, Skye, Inverness, Shetland, Aberdeen, and Dundee.

As ever, we’d love to hear what you think about the project, and in particular this time, of any stories that captured your own imagination…

Please note, this digital performance recording is no longer available, as of 15/03/23.

Ailie Robertson
Archetypes
Sally Beamish
Partita for Strings
James MacMilan
Memento
Anna Meredith
Variation on Tullochgorum
John Blackwood McEwen
String Quartet No 15 in modo scotico

Composer's Note

By Ailie Robertson

Stories and myths are an intrinsic part of human communication. They are a teaching tool, a way to warn each other of dangers and the simplest method to better understand one another.

For thousands of years, narrative art forms have featured archetypes: characters built on a specific, identifiable set of traits that are recurrent across the human experience. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung suggested that these archetypes were archaic forms of innate human knowledge passed down from our ancestors. He believed that these recurring figures are part of the myth-making fabric that is common to all humans. This may explain how stories that originate from vastly different cultures across the globe can, at their core, so closely resemble one another.

The five movements of this suite are each inspired by a universal archetype that appears in numerous stories and myths across cultures: the sage, the shapeshifter, the caregiver, the villain and the everyman. Each musical portrait draws upon classical and folk idioms to cast a vivid impression of their respective theme and convey the traits underlying these ancient, eternal ideas.