Fergus Hall

“I’m a big believer in letting things slow cook. It’s why I love having a project in advance, even when I’m working on something else. I slow cook ideas in the back of my head, in my subconscious, and let them filter away. Then suddenly I have all these ideas when it comes to actually working on it.”

Fergus Hall

Fergus Hall is a Glasgow-based composer, musician and multidisciplinary artist. Driven by a deep connection to Scotland’s coastlines and marine environments, his projects often draw on themes of ecology, conservation and folklore. His work has been commissioned by organisations including Glasgow New Music Expedition, Nevis Ensemble, Sound and Music, Making Music UK, An Tobar, Sound Festival, and CoMA, and performed by musicians and ensembles across the UK. Fergus was a Royal Philharmonic Society Composer of 2024, and Young Classical Artist Trust Composer Fellow for 2025–26, and has released three albums: Shores (2021), for folk singer, jazz quartet and string orchestra; On Sonorous Seas (2022), using hydrophone recordings from Scotland’s west coast; and Isola (2022) with the Sequoia Duo. Beyond composing, he is one half of interdisciplinary duo Long Green Jaws with Sarah McWhinney, creating immersive performances inspired by ocean ecologies and folklore, and works as a music educator, conductor and community musician in Glasgow and Inverclyde.

Fergus Hall’s large-scale project and when the light returned I, transfigured, awoke, with Lea Shaw, Rylan Gleave, and Sonia Killmann, premiered in January 2026, with an accompanying podcast recently being released. Following the release of the podcast, Jess Naomi spoke with Fergus about the spectrum of improvisation, archival recordings, big bold feelings, and observing change…

Jess/PRXLUDES: Thank you so much for joining me today! You’ve described your musical background as fairly eclectic — can you tell me a little bit more about this?

Fergus Hall: I guess increasingly composers within the classical sphere are all coming from quite a mix of things. Growing up, I played a lot of jazz and played in bands. Definitely gigged a bit around the jazz scene in Glasgow! I got very interested in folk music through my degree; I did quite an academic degree and looked at a lot of Scottish folk music from that point of view. I played a bit of it for fun — I love that music.

I think it’s also partly the product of living somewhere like Glasgow, with such a brilliant music scene. It’s quite a small city but a lot happens in it. A lot of the music is piled on top of each other in quite a cool way. You get a really interesting cross-fertilisation of different musical practices as different musical scenes interact with one another.

A lot of the composers who really fired me up during my undergrad were composers who played around with jazz and traditional music within this very beautiful contemporary classical language. Bill [William] Sweeney is a big influence on my early work and still is; he’s such a great artist and composer — very much was deep into classical bagpipe music, like Piobaireachd. As well as Gil Evans with jazz, or Eddie McGuire and that similar generation of Scottish composers. I guess I’m working within that vein as well.

So, it’s an eclectic background in the way that I think many composers are eclectic. I personally don’t get a lot from being in a room, by myself, writing my classical music. I need to go out and about: play piano at a wedding, or go to a jazz gig, or play a jazz gig. That feeds a lot of different parts of my brain.


It’s almost like a tactile practice that you’re absorbing things as you go.

Yeah, I think it’s really important that when they manifest in the music for it to come out as part of your language. When you do it enough, you start just to blend these things because it’s just naturally what your voice sounds like.

I’ve always been really interested in the idea of musical practice rather than musical sounds. A big part of my work thinks about how different types of musicians approach music. Part of my work at university was about the musical practice of all of those different styles. I’m interested in how, as a composer, you can bridge those gaps or accommodate different musicians. Shores is a piece with folk musicians, jazz musicians, and classical musicians. The unifying thing was me in the middle trying to make it all work. -laughs-

I feel like you can just hear Scotland in your music. There’s this space — you can hear the mist and the mountains coming up, and the sea and all the folk tunes threading through. It’s very textural, it feels like you’re in a place. I was wondering in what way does your own sense of place and your sense of “Scottishness” influence your music?

I think it’s because I would struggle to know what else to write about! For me, there’s definitely a lot of West-Coast-ness in it — so much of my work is quite coastal as well. I think it’s partly because of where I’m from, but also, when I was young, I was very lucky to holiday a lot in places like Oban and Skye — these beautiful parts of Scotland. I used to run around those places as a wee kid with a toy sword and pretend I was in the Lord of the Rings or something. Now, I still basically do that, but more from an artistic point of view.

It’s more that I’m writing about my own feelings around that landscape; particularly seascapes. So much of it is that I’m trying to tap into the sense of place that I feel. I don’t want to be trying to evoke a big “Scottish-y” sound. I’m just writing music that I like to write and I guess it comes out that way.

Pieces like Shores are so specific to the poetry. Sorley MacLean was such a beautiful Gaelic poet, and his text is so beautifully like a love letter to the landscape of Skye specifically. It’s so romantic, with feelings that are incredibly intimate communicated in language that’s massive and the size of a mountain. In my music, I try to do the same thing.

I describe my music as sometimes having a sense of joy. I talk about joy in my music because contemporary music (you know, we all like it!) can sometimes be a bit dour — whereas I think I’m a bit of a heart-on-my-sleeve person. I want to have these big feelings expressed in these big bold strokes, which then quite often have this landscape quality to it. In reverse, I often write about the feeling that I get from those landscapes. I’m not trying to write about the landscapes themselves; I think so much about the natural landscape reflects your own feelings back at you. Sometimes you can feel really small. Or sometimes you can feel really in it and part of it and joyous. Sometimes you’re very introspective. That’s what I love about natural spaces. I try to therefore communicate that feeling, rather than the landscape itself.


It’s the reflection of the landscape, but the landscape is part of your feelings, so then it becomes this whole intermeshed thing. I love how you were saying that it’s like something that’s really intimate that’s then pushed out into big, broad brushstrokes.

I love art that does that. I love bands and composers and poets who do that. The final movement of Shores takes its name from probably the most famous poem of his. He talks about a very intimate love — a very beautiful feeling of deep passion in a very evocative way — but it’s told through the imagery of these huge seascapes and the ends of the earth. It’s so romantic and passionate and beautiful.

When I went to do my masters, I wanted to write this piece that works with jazz musicians and has a folk singer but still feels very classical. Loads of that [in the central movement] is really influenced by Bill Sweeney’s saxophone concerto from the 1980s [ed. ‘An rathad ùr‘]. I blended these Scottish traditional textures like Piobaireachd (the bagpipe music) but then just gave it to a sax player and let him rip over it — it creates this lovely blend of all those things.


A lot of your work centers around themes of ecology, conservation, and folklore. What about these themes draws you to them?

I’ve always been an outdoors person. I was a bit of a David Attenborough kid, so that’s translated into me as an artist now. A lot of my work centers around the natural environment, and I’m very passionate about its protection and conservation. It’s hard in this day and age — it can feel a bit depressing, you can feel a wee bit helpless — but I think the one thing I can do is make art about it and communicate that passion, the urgency of it, through my work as best I can.

So much of folklore is about the land and natural environment and its protection. Stories that are a warning of “if you do that, then you’re going to mess this up — it’s really important that we keep this balance or don’t take too much — don’t overexploit the resource because it’ll bite you in the arse if you do”. Often in folklore, it’s about the reverence of outdoor spaces.

Scotland has a big mix of folklore that is Gaelic, Scots, and Doric. They all feed into each other. I find folktales through various sources and books. The School of Scottish Studies is an amazing archive that dates back to the 60s at Edinburgh University and they’ve recorded lots of people talking, singing, and playing. A lot of that’s been digitised, so it’s an awesome resource. You can just search for a keyword and it’ll come up in various languages — in Gaelic and English.

Ecology: just because animals are really cool! -laughs- But it’s all tied together. I think it again comes back to when I was young and just running around outside a lot, on beaches particularly. I’m quite a coastal person, and I don’t like to be too landlocked for too long. I think for a long time, I shied away from it because you don’t want to sound like that person just going on about the same stuff. But honestly, if it fires you up, and you’re interested in it, and it makes you want to write music, then why wouldn’t you?

And then people seek you out for projects. On Sonorous Seas was an actual dream gig. I was invited by the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust to go on a whale research boat for a week and chase whales (not chase them, but observe them!) around the Hebrides. I was given access to raw hydrophone recordings so I could make music out of it to be part of this multimedia exhibition with poetry, film, calligraphy and sculpture. It was such a dream gig; I’m just obsessed with that stuff. I love it, it’s where I’m happiest.


Did you see many whales?


We actually went at a really funny time of year, so not really! But the fact we didn’t see any is still important research. The fact that, on that particular trip, we didn’t see a lot, is actually important data to gather.


You’ve mentioned using poetry and archival recordings. How do you approach writing with text? And why are you drawn to using it in your work?

I’m a bit of a poetry person. If I hadn’t studied music, I’d have really enjoyed studying English. I’ve always enjoyed reading and creative writing. I love writing for voice because it’s an opportunity to work with text.

I try to take rhythm from text as much as I can. I think it’s an interesting thing now that I’m writing my own text more, the music and text start to flow at the same time. When it’s a text somebody else has written, I try to move with the rhythm of the text first before I have any musical ideas. There are a few Sorley MacLean moments in Shores where the phrase lengths are really strange, and the structures are really unusually paced. If you were considering it as a jazz chart, they are really odd bar lengths because of the text. The jazz musicians loved it because it made for interesting solo structures. In the first movement, the whole thing is in five-bar phrases just because of what the text dictates. So I try to follow that and not be too stringent on clamping it into a certain shape.

With music, you’re not trying to evoke anything too literally — you’re trying to write a feeling. So much of music is an abstract thing — you’re not trying to musically mirror the text. You’re trying to think about what that text makes you feel, and then writing to that feeling.


I always find it amazing the layers of the subtext between the text and the music — you’ve got this depth of feeling within the space between them. Words are so concrete, they just say what they mean, whereas music is so abstract.

Isola is a really fun one, actually; because it was written as a back and forth between me and the writer. The words are [by] Alexander “Sandy” McCall Smith — he gave me a poem and I started to write music. Then we realised we wanted to make the piece nice and long, so we needed more text. I was writing music and sending it back to him and saying, “I’ve written this in response to this part of the poem, I think this bit is really great, it could be longer.” He would then write more.

There’s a bit in the piece all about St. Kilda and its big bird colonies which are absolutely wild and beautiful. His language took on this chaotic swoopiness because that’s what the music was doing. It felt like we were really onto something there — a really lovely collaborative moment.


I’m also really into speaking voices and using sonic material in that way. ‘Crossing the Simeto’ [from Isola] uses archival recordings of Hamish Henderson, who was a really big cultural figure in Scotland as a poet and folklorist. He was out recording lots of people in the 70s and 80s. He was a really interesting guy — he fought in the Second World War and has brilliant poetry from that time. I found these recordings of him reciting them when he was old: he wrote the poems when he was my age at the time I was writing the piece (I was maybe in my early 20s), and he was then reciting them back as an older man. It’s so evocative; and that’s actually what I’m responding to more than the poetry.

You can’t beat an archival recording. It was from a tape, so it just sounded awesome — you can almost imagine him behind the microphone getting all fired up! When I was writing it [‘Crossing the Simeto’], in the penultimate movement, the musicians are just attacking the instruments — it’s really rhythmic. And because it’s war poetry, it’s very intense. You can’t not get fired up with that and write music that matches. Then with ‘Isola’, we were going to get an actor to recite [the text], but Sandy’s got such a great speaking voice that eventually I convinced him to do it himself. If he gives me a piece of poetry, I hear it in his voice anyway, so then I’m writing it with his voice in mind.

Going more into your creative process, can you tell me how you start a piece? You’ve got so many influences, and so many things that you’re excited about. How do you start?

I wrote a string quartet [Three Hours After High Water] last year and the players were amazing! They just played with so much energy; I wanted it to be so full of life and rhythmic. I knew how it was going to end — I wanted the players to be absolutely tearing into their instruments. So then, I’m chasing that the whole time, figuring out how I reach that end point. I can just feel the music before I hear it… [With the piece as a whole] I wanted to be unapologetically me and write about something big and joyous and energetic. For me, that’s got to be something to do with tidal flow and movement and the earth breathing. But I’m not thinking too much about the exact tidal map — I’m thinking about flow, I’m thinking about things crashing, I’m thinking about the transfer of energy in different directions.

I think I’m always trying to start with feeling. That might come with a concept. Then I see where it goes after that. With a piece where there’s text, you have to nail the concept down. Maybe you don’t have to write the whole text, but you’ve got to know where you’re going with it. For example, I knew Old Woman and the Blackbird was going to be a story, and be quite mysterious and misty and very visual. Whereas the string quartet could be so vague: it’s about tides — let it just flow from that. You can just follow the music and let it go where it’s going.

It’s why I like to give myself time. Occasionally I have to go “that project’s done, straight into the next” or sometimes something comes in last minute. I’m okay with doing that. You don’t overcook it and it’s just as good as the stuff that took ages. There’s a bit of a flow state going on. The music feels a bit more improvise-y in a way, the raw idea is not too refined.


How do you balance working with improvisation and more formally notated scores?

I got really into improvising, being an improvising musician and doing ambient music when I was studying. I’ve always been a good “just let it flow out” sort of musician — following my ear and being quite responsive. I think that’s my strength as a musician and it’s always fed into my writing.

As a contemporary classical composer, it’s been fun putting that into scores. I think my best one is a piece called To the Hands that Tend It. It was going to be as part of a tour where the group were going to play it multiple times so I wanted to write a piece that was going to be a real jam, something that could change who plays the solo parts.

I was thinking how with contemporary music, we can quite often have these scores that are so full of instructions; whereas I wanted something which invited somebody to play something a certain way. As in, “here’s a sketch — it’s based on melodies from archive recordings”. The project was about an island off the West Coast of Scotland called Eigg, working with the community there. I found archive recordings of three women who lived there in 1913 — so the recordings were made [using] these really old wax cylinders. The melodies are then based on the melodies of these women singing. Throughout the score, [there are] sketches of the transcription of them singing. At no point is it ever that accurately notated, because it’s impossible to. So you’re writing vaguely and then inviting musicians to play in a certain way.

There’s a really nice moment in the recording where the two other violinists and I all play together and just follow each other. Nobody leads. You get this lovely washiness. There’s another great moment where the cellist takes a solo and the viola player [Sagnick Mukherjee] improvises a counterpoint which is suggested in the score. He just nails it — it’s so beautiful! It’s such a nice coming together of this fluidness.

I’m interested in the spectrum of improvisation. Like straight-up-improvisation-jam to a score and then what’s in between: choosing notes and choosing where the music moves next and choosing how to embellish a melody. I’m also getting more and more into writing [text] — how you instruct, how you invite, how you talk to musicians via a score. As well as this, I like drawings within the notation. I’ve never really done a full-on graphic score, but I do love having drawings in my music that behave like instructions or which evoke a feeling.


It’s different ways of getting into a piece. When I was reading through the score for Old Woman and the Blackbird, the way that you write the expression markings is so interesting because it feels like you’re being led through as a character.

That was through working with the singer, Stephanie Lamprea. She’s an amazing virtuoso soprano and obviously a very good performer. I was thinking whether we wanted to utilise more extended techniques and we were trying to figure out how to notate them before realising that it’s just an instruction. It’s really just a character.

I’m thinking about the story I’m writing: what would an actor want? What would a director say to an actor? What would stage directions be? What is this sound? And then moving that thinking to the instruments too, because they’re likewise playing characters. The flute solo is being a blackbird, so I said shrill and annoying which is quite a funny thing to be as a musician.

You’re thinking about the dramaturgy of the piece.

I used to be one of those “the notation and the music will speak for itself” composers, but actually now I think if you’re good at writing, then use the words. I will say with my writing as well, I’ve really gotten into my programme notes recently. Again, I used to hate a programme note; I used to hate explaining the piece. Whereas I’ve got really into doing a piece of writing to accompany [the music]… Maybe they have nothing to do with the piece. My favorite one is one called Look What I Found. It was such a personal piece — it was a wee bit to do with a bereavement — and I didn’t want to write “the soprano does X”, but I also didn’t want to be too explicit because it felt so exposing. So I sat down and basically wrote a short piece of reflective writing that doesn’t mention the music or the piece.

I love artists and writers that are like that; everything is just connected – their writing to their music to whatever. For Old Woman and the Blackbird, the programme note is another poem. There was confusion at one point when I sent the programme note, they thought it was the text!


As a listener, when you’re listening to a piece you don’t want someone to overexplain something to you with a programme note. But sometimes you do want another way into the piece.

It’s about feeling, isn’t it? I don’t want to explain the feeling, but I could express the feeling more. I don’t want anyone to feel they need to feel a certain way; I don’t want to overexplain the piece or what it means. I really enjoy it as a creative output. I like it as a wee side-quest to my creative practice.

You can have such a clear feeling of what you want the themes and ideas and feelings to be, and you can just spend ages trying to find the right text. Sometimes it’s actually more straightforward to write [your own]. For Old Woman and the Blackbird, I didn’t want to write the text because I didn’t have enough time. However, I just couldn’t find the right text and had all these notes about what I wanted the piece to be, the feeling of it, I knew the imagery I wanted to use. Eventually I was like “I’m going to write this, I need to write this myself.” I cannot believe how happy I am with what it is. I want to go back to my past self and say, “the text’s going to be great, just go for it — you’re going to be so chuffed with it!”


It’s a really great piece of text! When you were writing it, compared to when you write with text someone else’s written, how was that process?

I guess it’s nice because, if somebody else had written it, that is what I’ve got. Sure, if I really wanted to, I could take out a bit, or I could maybe change a little bit of the stanza order… But, it’s great with yourself because you know you want (say) the opening to sound and feel a certain way, so your text is going to do the same. Or maybe I want it to be a bit nuts by the end, or I want the middle bit to go a bit crazy, and you can write the text to facilitate that. It’s so flexible. I change metre all over the place — but then it means that I’m writing to the music that I want to write. A piece I wrote, Ballad, intentionally mixes up styles of storytelling “balladry”. At one point, it starts to rhyme, and then suddenly it doesn’t rhyme anymore because the perspective changes. I like those text devices, and you can just put them in everywhere!

I sit and try to write a chunk of the text; I then might write music to that chunk of text and then go back and write more text again. And then write more music. And then more text. I think different parts of my brain need a little back-and-forth. I give my brain a break by writing some music and then, when I get tired of writing music, I can go back and write more text. Normally that looks like sitting on a bench with a notebook and just staring… People think I’m probably crazy — I’m just scrawling and listening. Lots of scratchings out and stuff. Quite often I write text with two versions of a line and I’ll decide when I’m setting it to music.

They inform each other in a different way.

Yeah. Working with an actual writer is really fun because that’s collaboration. Working with beautiful old texts that you love, like Sorley MacLean, is great because you feel like you’re collaborating with Sorley MacLean. [But] there’s something incredibly satisfying about conjuring the entire thing out of your brain — sitting down and dreaming up the whole story, the whole scenario. It is very satisfying, even though it’s a pain in the arse!

The friction of that must make it more satisfying.

Such a challenge!

Going on to talk about the project and when the light returned I, transfigured, awoke — can you tell me a bit about how that came to be? You’re working in partnership with Lea Shaw, and you’ve also commissioned Rylan Gleave and Sonia Killmann…

Lea and I have known each other for a long time — I will say, Lea and I are getting married later this year! She’s a very talented performer and mezzo soprano. She’s a big contemporary music person. We’d only ever worked together very tangentially — all the vocals on On Sonorous Seas are all her. But that was so brief; I just recorded her for an afternoon and then messed around with it, so we’ve never really worked together collaboratively.

We were trying to get funding so I could write her a piece of music and, when we were going for a certain funding pot, there was scope to get a little bit more money. So we thought, “what if we just spread the love a little bit, what if we actually make this more of a thing?”. It’s a dream of Lea’s to be somebody who people write music for and to be somebody that expands the repertoire, particularly song repertoire. I think she feels — particularly as a woman, as a performer — that, in the classical repertoire, songs are often “my love has gone away and I’m going to die because I’m sad”. We wanted to explore where she felt there were gaps within the repertoire.

She’s very into folklore and the connection to the natural world, and natural cycles and identity. We decided to explore those as themes and then commission two composers who we really love and admire. We commissioned three composers [ed. Fergus Hall, Ryan Gleave, and Sonia Killmann], but we actually ended up with four pieces. Lea had written a poem (she’s also a very good writer) — she’s such a great improviser and performer, I’m surprised it took her this long to write in that way! It’s this beautiful poem. The rest of us wrote heavy, intense pieces so it’s a nice counter to that.

I wrote this big piece about a witch. In Scotland there are witch stories about folklore witches; and then there are witch trial witches which are heavy, very historic and are about real people. I wanted to write about witches from a folklore sense. I wanted somebody who actually transforms into an animal. So I magpie’d together lots of folk ideas, referencing a lot of different sources in one text. My piece for her is a ghost story and a witch story — she turns into a sea bird and follows somebody and there’s a shipwreck. It’s a bit of an odyssey! Everyone else’s pieces are amazing and very different. We premiered all the pieces in a concert in January.

Each piece has a podcast episode attached to it. Tell me a bit about these podcasts — what’s that all about?

I guess when you’re trying to apply for funding, you’re thinking about how you can share the work more widely (which is partly a condition for getting funding as they want to know how you’re going to connect with people). One of my side hustles — mainly in lockdown years and a wee bit after — was doing a lot of podcast production and editing… So we just thought, “what if you have these creative discussions? What if we have Lea as the artist commissioning these composers in conversation with them?”

As part of the commission, we wanted to ensure the scores would be made available online. We’re quite keen for maybe young performers to [have access to them], or people who just want to explore the work. It’s written for a mezzo-soprano but anyone can have a go, and we’ve said that if someone wanted a key moved to just get in touch with us. We wanted to open the project up, and a podcast was a fun way to do it!

You work a lot across different disciplines — you’re interested in lots of different art forms, different types of music. I also want to ask about Long Green Jaws, with Sarah McWhinney — can you tell me first a little bit about that collaborative process?

I’ve described that project as what happens when you have no creative brief — the two of you can make anything you dream up, there’s no commission, there’s nobody asking you to do a certain thing for a certain thing. It’s what you want to make. We made this piece about ocean folklore, story, sound, outside and beaches — we wear costumes and make puppets.

I’ve always wanted that show to feel like a dream. One time, during R&D, we were in the Outer Hebrides in the middle of summer, and we camped on the beach under the craziest sky you’ve ever seen. I want this piece to feel like you fell asleep in that moment and experienced our show but then woke up and didn’t know if it actually happened or not. It’s so dreamy. We don’t talk in it. Sarah sings, but there are no words — it’s very ethereal.

Sarah is my creative soulmate. We both really complement each other. I think I’m quite bold strokes; I love building things and making the set and I love the big things. She makes the most beautiful, detailed, gorgeous [things] — she can spend hours making a tiny little thing. I guess that is actually what the show is about: this push and pull between microcosmic, bubbly, bacterial little beings, and a shipwreck.

She slows me down. In the midst of the creative process within that theatre-y, “everything’s everywhere” studio space, I can go 1000 miles an hour and want to try everything. She brings me down into the detailed space, the slow space. But then she has said to me that I bring the energy in the way that’s needed as well, so I feel like we have a nice push and pull. We balance each other well.


Can I ask how you and Sarah started working together — and how that’s changed over time?

We started as an experimental music duo where we would jam and play ambient music. We had an overhead projector and something interesting happened: we’d play music gigs and everyone would lose their minds over the visuals because it was water and oil and ink projected onto the wall. Then we’d play gigs in theatre spaces with experimental theatre crowds and they’d lose their minds by the fact we’re playing live instruments.

Then we got an opportunity — a bigger theatre festival asked us what we would want to make, and we dreamt up this big show. Then we managed to get some funding to build it. We’ve toured it in Mull and the Highlands… We did it in a barn once. My dream would be to do it outside on the beach, but that’s really hard to do in Scotland. But my dream would be to do it in the Hebrides somewhere on Midsummer.

[Our collaboration has] changed over time in the way that we know each other better and we’re more confident artists. I think when we started in a theatre space, we felt like we didn’t know what we were doing because we’re two musicians. Then we realised no one actually knows what they’re doing, and we’re actually really well set to do this because we’re artists — and that means that we are good at figuring things out. I think that project gave me a lot of confidence — like, build a mechanical moving puppet? Sure, let’s watch some videos and figure out how to do that and trial and error until it works. Experimenting and playing! I guess we always want our work to have that sense of play.

Does Long Green Jaws follow a specific plot?

Yeah, it’s got a plot taken from bits of folktale. There are a couple of characters in it — there’s a little trow. Trow is taken from Orcadian folklore and it’s a little mischievous being. Our trow is made of a milk bottle top and some nets, so the puppet’s very simple. That’s our main guy! He gets up to things — he steals fish from nets and at one point he finds a big fishing net, and he starts to take too much fish. That starts to upset balances and things start to go wrong. There’s a large creature lurking in the depths that, when it can’t have enough fish, might start coming after the wrong thing. It’s quite abstract as well.

There are archival recordings in [the piece] of old fishermen taken from the School of Scottish Studies. We found this [archival] recording and we were both just like “the entire show is about this recording!”. It’s this man from Tiree, he goes “ohh you can hear it if you listen really careful, the sound of the sea” — and he starts to make the sound of the sea, going “shhhh” really quietly. And that was the show! It’s just so perfect; this real call to listen.

There’s another one where the recording’s from the 50’s. The man [Donald Sinclair] is in his 70s or 80s, and he’s talking about his uncle, so the story refers to someone from the early 1800s. His voice appears in our show talking about how they could tell by the moon and the stars what the weather was going to be — this beautiful awareness of the environment.

So much of that is in my work: trying to be connected in a way that I think modern society forcibly makes us not connected. Because if you don’t know something’s there, then you don’t know that it’s got value and that it needs protecting — it can get swept away and you never realised. Whereas when you’re connected to it, you then are aware of how precious it is.


We don’t live in a world now where that connectedness is prioritised at all. It’s just how much you can output and work. But that slowness is really important.

Old Woman and the Blackbird is just that — trying to feel more connected. Living in a city, I really felt the capitalist consumerism forces. Why can’t November just be a month that changes slowly into winter? Why does it have to be Christmas? I just want to enjoy November as a month. It’s a beautiful month! It’s change! Can we not just observe change? That’s what I was craving a lot. I made a real effort to walk through the same spaces continually and observe the changes that happen and try to feel really connected to it.

–

Learn more about Fergus Hall and his practice:

• https://www.fergushallmusic.com/
• https://fergushall.bandcamp.com/
• https://www.youtube.com/user/feh2041996
• https://www.instagram.com/ferghallmusic/

References/Links:

• ‘What Is Piobaireachd?’, The Piobaireachd Society
• Sorley MacLean, Shores (1943)
• William Sweeney – ‘An rathad úr’ (1989)
• Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches, official website
• ‘The Trows of Orkney and Shetland’ (2015), The Faery Folklorist