The fiddle rocks low, and the mandolin laps like surf on the shore. In their music, they’re invoking the Watch Stone and the Ring of Brodgar, a neolithic site 3000 years old, or friends and family playing music in a pub after three years of pandemic — coming home.
On May 11, Louise Bichan, an internationally traveling fiddler from the Orkney islands off the northern tip of Scotland, will perform Out of My Own Light, live at the Foundry, with Conor Hearn playing guitar, Brendan Hearn on cello, and Ethan Setiawan on mandolins.
Louise Bichan an internationally traveling fiddler from the Orkney islands, plays live music outdoors. Press photo courtesy of the artist
Out of My Own Light
Orkney fiddler Louise Bichan live in concert
When: Saturday, May 11 at 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Foundry
Parking is limited — please use the three public parking lots in Town.
Her concert re-imagines a journey from Atlantic to Pacific, and through time. In 2013, she crossed Canada in the footsteps of her grandmother, Margaret Tait. Margaret had come from Scotland to Montreal in 1950, when she was 25, to see her family. And in 2013, when Bichan was 25, she recreated that voyage.
It was a turning point in her grandmother’s life, Bichan said. Two different men had asked her to marry, and she left home for perspective, trying to decide how to answer each of them.
It was a turning point in her grandmother’s life.
Neither answer would be easy. Margaret had lost her older sister, who died a few days after the birth of her son, Bichan’s uncle Sid. Margaret and her sisters were very much involved in raising Sid Bichan said. And some time down the road, Sid’s father, Margaret’s brother-in-law, turned to her.
The other young man was an engineer she had met on the mainland of Scotland, in Aberdeen. He had had job offers all over the world, and he told her he would choose Edinburgh if she would have him, but she would still have had to leave her family and home. She needed time to decide.
Generations later, she left her diaries from that year to her daughter, Bichan’s aunt. But they pause on the ferry, on her way over. She said she would continue in another journal, but if she has, Bichan has never yet found it.
And so Bichan set out with her fiddle to learn and imagine and recreate what her grandmother might have seen and heard and felt in those heady days.
She talked with her family — with her uncle and her grandmother’s younger sister, who never married and lived in a cottage in Kirkwall, the principal town on Orkney. Louise would visit her after school and listen to her childhood stories.
And in Canada she talked with her grandmother’s cousins. They were in their 90s then and shared what they could recall of the visit, and of their time serving in World War II, when they came to Orkney on leave and met her family there.
They gave her glimpses of Orkney during the war, she said. One of them remembered her great grandfather inviting him in to his study to talk over a glass of whiskey. Another remembered staying late at a party and almost missing a train home.
In Canada, her grandmother stayed for six months, Bichan said — she sailed into Montreal and traveled from Quebec to Winnipeg to Saskatchewan, and possibly all the way west to the Pacific.
And so Bichan plays music that follows her, favorite fiddle tunes re-imagined and original music. She has chosen a tune for the ship her grandmother sailed on and one for each suitor, music for the home where she grew up, and music for the places she came to
In the full live performance, she plays fiddle with a six-piece band, guitar, cello, mandolin. She shares photographs and memories from her grandmother’s diaries — and she can even share her grandmother’s voice.
‘She was a beautiful singer. Once, for a local production in Orkney, she performed on the radio, singing Scots songs, and we have a record on vinyl.’
“She was a beautiful singer,” Bichan said. “Once, for a local production in Orkney, she performed on the radio, singing Scots songs, and we have a record on vinyl.”
She played the music for the cousins, who had never heard the record before, and watched memories surface to the music. Talking with them and following these stories, she felt close to her grandmother in new ways, she said — going to the places she had gone, looking at the photographs she had taken there 60 years before.
“Growing up you have your grandparents and you know them in your lifetime,” she said. “Getting to know her as a young woman … her life doesn’t seem so far from mine. She talks about similar feelings.”
Louise Bichan and fellow musicians stand on the rocks by the shore. Press photo courtesy of the artist
She loved her home and her family and her music, Bichan said, and they have become familiar themes in Bichan’s own work. She began exploring Out of My Own Light as a project and a concert when she came to Berklee School of Music in Boston.
“I met people there and opened up my musical world considerably,” she said.
On Orkney, she grew up playing the fiddle in local music jams and gatherings, and later at sessions in Glasgow while she was studying at the city’s Art School — just as her mother played Spanish and folk guitar and sang (and would climb out the window at night and run off to sing at the local folk club).
She has music in her family on both sides, she said. On her father’s side, her grandfather played accordion, and at Christmas when the cousins got together, all the family would play music together.
‘It blew my mind, the vastness of this country and how much the landscape changed.’
That warmth pulses too in her new album, Lost Summer, just coming out in April — as she weaves together family and friends, the ties of home and the breadth of the U.S.
She first came to this country for what she thought would be a year-long scholarship, she said. But with the pandemic, for more than three years she could not get home. In the summer of 2020, she was missing her family, home in Orkney on the farm.
So she got into an old Volvo with her fiddle and a folding bed and camped her way across the country, cooking outside, walking the quietest trails in the parks.
“It blew my mind,” she said, “the vastness of this country and how much the landscape changed.”
Louise Bichan, a fiddler from the Orkney islands, stands by a window in sunlight. Press photo courtesy of the artist
On the album she has gathered tunes for friends and family. One sends a warm greeting to family who live near the Ness of Brodgar, a strongly significant archaeological site on Orkney, linked to a ring of standing stones older than Stonehenge.
Others recall for her people she knows and loves playing music with. Berklee became a safe space to take a tune and improvise, she said, and gave her a freedom that has expanded her playing. She recalled her first taste of the U.S., in 2013, playing at a music camp run by Alasdair Fraser, an internationally known Scottish fiddler who now lives in California.
“I met many people there,” she said, “and many had studied at Berklee. It was a Scottish fiddle camp, but people would play Scandinavian music, Irish, Strathspeys in another corner. It was a a welcoming and energizing place — I felt inspired.”
‘People would play Scandinavian music, Irish, Strathspeys in another corner. It was a a welcoming and energizing place — I felt inspired.’
On the album, she performs tunes named for friends, family and people they loved, one, a tune for Claire, a local girl in Orkney who died very young in an accident.
“I had played music with her brother,” Bichan said, “and her father was a musician too.”
Another, Pinnacle Ridge, the fiddler Roger Peppé named for the day he climbed Sgurr nan Gillean on the Isle of Sky with friends when he came home to celebrate his parents’ 40th wedding anniversary.
Thinking of the friends she gathers in her music, she remembers coming home to Orkney at Christmas after three years away and playing music together, 20 people in a local pub.
“That’s why I do what I do,” she said. “I love playing music and spreading the joy of it. I’m lucky to do what I do, to travel and play all over the world and connect in music, and I do it because I love playing with other people.”
This story first ran in the Berkshire Eagle weekender. My thanks to Features Editor Jennifer Huberdeau.
