“I quite often use elements of traditional Gaelic culture as a narrative tool for exploring a changed relationship with the environment. I think it represents a reciprocal relationship with nature which in many ways has been lost.”
Lisa Robertson
Lisa Robertson is a composer and violinist based in the West Highlands of Scotland. Her work explores the changing environmental landscape, the connection between people and the land, the imitation of bird sounds, and Gaelic language and culture. Lisa’s music has been performed at hcmf// (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival), Nordic Music Days, Cheltenham Music Festival, Musica Nova Helsinki, West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Sound Festival, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, BBC World Service, and BBC Radio Scotland. Lisa has been involved in schemes such as National Youth Choir Young Composers Scheme 2019/2020, RSNO Composers’ Hub 2021/2022 and the Royal Philharmonic Society Composers programme 2024/2025; she is also currently a composer with Music Patron. Lisa studied a Masters in Violin at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland under Maya Iwabuchi, Andrea Gajic, and William Chandler, before completing her PhD at the same institute with Emily Doolittle and William Sweeney.
On 5th September, the second instalment of concerts curated by Lisa as part of the London Symphony Orchestra Jerwood+ Composers Scheme 2025/26 will be held at LSO St Luke’s, featuring the world premiere of her new work fèath nan eun. Ahead of the concert, Georgie West sat down with Lisa to discuss imitating bird calls, working with archival recordings and folk songs, and her connection with Gaelic language, culture and community.
Header photo by Julian Maunder
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Georgie/PRXLUDES: You talk about trying to capture a sense of place from your home (West Highlands of Scotland) and reclaiming traditional Gaelic culture’s eco-conscious values. Looking at the titles of your pieces, it seems your Gaelic background is very prominent in your work. Can you tell me more about this?
Lisa Robertson: Portraying a sense of place has always been very important to me in composing. I grew up with the wild natural sounds of my surroundings in the West Highlands, and am continually inspired by them as well as the visual inspiration of the landscape. However, the history and culture as well as community are also vital to the place and greatly inspire me too.
As a Gaelic speaker, I look at the cultural worldview of Gaelic, which I think is really special, unique, and worth remembering in these times as it represents a reciprocal relationship with nature. Nature is really central to the culture and language with there being, for example, so many different words for specific types of rivers, weather and mountain features etc. Then on a more practical level, the traditional lifestyle was intrinsically intertwined with nature.
Thematically, I quite often use elements of traditional Gaelic culture as a narrative tool for exploring a changed relationship with the environment. I think it represents a reciprocal relationship with nature which in many ways has been lost. So my musical language is all very embedded in the language, culture, songs, and tradition.
I actively take inspiration from traditional Gaelic songs. I listen to archive and field recordings and transcribe them in detail. I really try to capture some of the more precise nuances of how the words are sung and pulled around and the kind of emotions within them. These then quite often form the starting material for my pieces, alongside transcriptions of natural sounds and then I begin to fragment and play around with them, with emphasis on keeping the authentic emotional nuances. Other specific things that manifest in my work are the actual sounds of the Gaelic language itself, as they are so different from English, as well as the intonation and rhythms of Gaelic speech.
You also aim to address globally significant environmental themes on a broader scale too. Can you expand on what that looks like sonically to you, would you say it serves a particular political message or is it more of a contextual backdrop to the music?
It is a political message, but it’s not trying to be pushy or change people’s minds necessarily. It’s informed by an understanding that people know this information already, but I think that art in general, and also music specifically, is a useful way of allowing people to feel emotions around the facts that they already know, collectively.
It provides an experience where you can connect with such difficult issues in an emotional way. From a sonic perspective, I often introduce some kind of threat or a sound that challenges the rest of my work that is based within place and environmental sounds. This creates a narrative pathway and some contrast to demonstrate being pulled between the natural world and influences which are more threatening.
In terms of how this manifests physically in the ensemble, as a violinist I do have a bit of a string bias! But string instruments can just achieve a lot of what I want to do very precisely. Their ability to execute subtle nuances and imitate natural sounds is often exactly what I am looking for sonically. I have also had a few opportunities to write for orchestra, where the breadth of possibility for colour is vast and that is very exciting and inspiring. I like working with all variants of ensembles and there is an occasion for all types of instrumentation.
How do you approach notation in regard to the specific sounds you are trying to achieve?
Writing for new instruments is always fun and with notation, I really like to explore. The best thing is to work with a player and find something that fits naturally. My comfort zone would be writing for contemporary players, and then writing really quite complex and precise things. I never want players to feel constrained by notation in any way. So if they’re excited by things that are quite detailed and quite precisely notated, that’s great; but if not, then I might prefer to give them a bit more freedom.
When I’m dealing with transcribing archive recordings or natural sounds, these can often come out looking pretty complicated, so it’s good to question how precise to be while also finding ways of allowing the musicians to be free to play expressively.
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I’d like to touch on how the rurality of where you are from has informed your practice. You are also a trained violinist, and then also as a composer of contemporary music — has the distance from city-based musical experiences made composing more isolating, or is it anything but?
I was very fortunate that there was a violin teacher in my area when I was a child. I trained all the way through to I was very fortunate that there was a violin teacher in my area when I was a child. I then studied in cities, training all the way through to do a masters in violin, and it was only actually when I got to university that I composed anything at all. I then pursued both things, and went onto do a PhD in composition after finishing my violin studies. When I compose, I try to hear things without being too influenced by what feels good underneath my own fingers at the violin — but it is useful to be able to try out sounds.
I am so used to rural living, having grown up here and mostly been based here that I don’t feel a sense of isolation. That also comes from the strong sense of community here; it’s never quiet, as there are always things happening! So it’s never isolating, it’s actually all very connected. The music community in Scotland more widely is also very strong and I feel very connected to that through attending events and when travelling to other parts of the country for musical work. I enjoy being deeply rooted here while having an outward looking perspective, working in projects further afield too, for example, in London and internationally. Actually I recently had a commission from the Silence Festival in Arctic Finland and travelled over there from the Highlands by train and ferry!
Having space to feel connected with the environment by spending a lot of time in it, hearing different birds, and tangibly connecting to those sounds is afforded by the experience of living here. I notice when I spend time in cities, everything feels different — including the sounds. And then there’s definitely something about place and landscape that is important too and I think that the expansiveness but also starkness of my home landscape is reflected in my music and I like to embrace that.
With your background in classical and Scottish traditional music, how do you find being a composer of new music where spaces and opportunities must be slightly fewer and far between in the Highlands?
I have been very fortunate to find spaces to explore contemporary writing during the pathway through my education and then through composition schemes and professional work. These schemes are so important, because if it wasn’t for them it would be quite difficult to get into these kinds of contemporary music spaces, and meet performers as well as composers. It would be difficult to develop your musical language if you didn’t get a chance to workshop and be in front of players.
Where I am living, though there might not be so much new music around, I think it’s important not to think too much about genre and to think more about making projects interesting to lots of different people. In rural places I have found that audiences can be really curious and engaged in all kinds of music and I have enjoyed working with all kinds of local musicians too. I have found lots of likeminded people, artists and audiences, in rural areas and had some really lovely meaningful projects in these places.
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You are also the co-artistic director of Loch Shiel Festival, which serves as a place to bring together the communities around the loch. Can you expand a bit more on how community music making has become a part of your practice?
Loch Shiel is a really nice festival which has quite a wide geographic spread. We’ve got venues dotted all over the place, accessing slightly different communities in each place, which is nice.. This was my first year as the co-artistic director, so I’m still learning the ropes!
It’s got a very West Highland ethos. Everything is very friendly, quite laid back and generally has a lovely community feeling. There isn’t really a barrier between the performers and the audience, so we will all be socialising before and after concerts— and that’s so important. We found that the whole festival is very intertwined with environmental themes inherently because of where it is and the local peoples’ interests.
We invite a few different ensembles, and we try to create some programmes where groups can join forces which makes everything even more interconnected. There’s a bit of crossover between genres as well with Scottish traditional and jazz as well as classical and new music. There is quite a wide demographic attending and mostly local people which makes it very special.
Community in general is very important to me, perhaps because of coming from such a strong rural community background. Making music where a community of people are invested in the process and have a sense of ownership over the finished work is so satisfying for me as a composer. This could be a case of co-writing, of gathering conceptual or musical ideas from a group, or even just working closely with the performers so that they have some feeling of ownership of it. It can make the process and final product so meaningful.
You were one of the composers on the RPS Composers Programme in 2025 and from that, wrote your piece an sgaireag: she screams for The Hermes Experiment. You explained that as well as touching on environmental themes and anti-migrant rhetoric it also refers to female suppression — how did you balance and approach these weighty themes in the writing process?
Recently, quite a few pieces have looked more specifically at female oppression, while viewing it as being very intertwined with the oppression of the environment and of Gaelic language and culture. I think they go hand in hand in many ways. It’s the same kind of forces, oppressive forces of dominance in a patriarchal society, that have caused this.
I think in that piece all of those influences led to the same feeling of intense frustration. I wrote a text which alluded to the topics and formed a narrative. An sgaireag is the name of a seabird, a young gull, but the word may derive from the word sgairt which means to shriek or scream. I’ve always felt that seabirds’ calls have this very visceral, pained human-like sound. Some specific bird calls can get to you in a very emotional and direct way. I like the idea of seeing those connections with different species — not necessarily in an anthropomorphic way, but in that if we see parallels with other species, we see that we are part of the community of nature.
The frustrated scream of a seabird is equal to that of a human. With gulls specifically, there is something in their wildness that draws me to them — it’s their freedom and the sound. But their numbers are also declining. And so you can feel in their calls the injustice of those topics of female oppression, anti-migrant rhetoric and environmental damage more generally.
In the piece, the feeling of frustration was emphasised by the use of visceral bird call imitation gestures in both the music and the text. In the text, I aimed to tie the themes together in a way that slightly blurred the line between different aspects of the topics. Working with the Hermes Experiment was amazing, because they were so capable of achieving all these sounds with complex techniques, and were fantastic collaborators who were so invested in achieving everything I’ve just mentioned.
We are all very much looking forward to the premiere of your piece fèath nan eun for the 2026 Jerwood Composer+ Showcase on the 5th September at LSO St Luke’s! Can you tell me about the process of writing this piece and how the scheme has been?
The scheme has been amazing! Having the opportunity to think more widely than about just the piece that you’re writing, and being able to curate a whole concert, is really interesting and exciting. Having the opportunity to have creative free rein of what you want to do, including deciding the instrumentation , programming, lighting, and all the other creative decisions, weren’t things I’d thought about to this extent before. The level of ambition you can have, if you choose, is amazing. And it makes such a difference to the overall creative experience.
My first concert in January, which was called Ceòl na Mara (which means music of the sea in Gaelic), was all sea themed. The process of programming feels quite connected to the composer mindset in the way that you’re thinking about flow, narrative, and the overall shape of the concert. We thought a lot about staging, even using immersive blue lighting and haze and you can really see the difference that features like that make to the overall experience. Going through the programming process at the same time as writing your own piece for the project is really interesting and I have felt inspired by themes that have come up along the way and by the different pieces.
This piece draws inspiration from birds again — can you tell me a bit more about how birds have inspired fèath nan eun?
The title of the whole concert, Cànan nan Eun means the language of the birds, and the concept was inspired particularly by archive recordings that exist of Gaelic songs which were imitating different bird species. They are amazing because they are so fun and playful and really quite accurate. I think it’s the style of singing that brings the intricacies out, and these songs are a real testament to that Gaelic connection with the environment with the imitation of the sounds of the landscape. There’s also folklore and tales that relate to different bird species, which tell beautiful stories, for example, of certain birds being the embodiment of the departed souls along with the evocative names of bird species, rich in storytelling, which beautifully illustrate that human connection with the environment.
I was very excited to programme some pieces from composers imitating bird sounds, and whom I am a big fan of. These include composers such as Carola Bauckholt, Arlene Sierra, and Emily Doolittle who are all really amazing at that. We’ve also got a visual artist called Sandy Leong joining for the concert and she’s going to be doing shadow puppetry and has created animations to be shown throughout the concert. It’s going to be really exciting!
There is a narrative throughout the concert looking at the decline of bird numbers, and there is a growing sense of darkness and melancholy. The title of my new piece, fèath nan eun, is a term meaning “the calm of the birds”, traditionally used to describe the time of year starting in November “when the birds are said to be unusually quiet”. I use the term here to allude to a quietening of the soundscape with the decline of bird numbers. For the piece I have invited acclaimed Gaelic singer, Mischa MacPherson, to join the string trio, and she will also sing a few traditional, bird-related Gaelic songs throughout the programme.
Fèath nan eun is inspired by some of these traditional Gaelic bird imitation songs, exploring the sounds of Gaelic language and traditional singing styles. I have also created my own imitations of bird calls played by the string trio, making use of complex technique and timbres and it’s been a great opportunity to work with fantastic contemporary players on this piece. It has been a really interesting and exciting challenge to bring all these different influences and styles together and I’m looking forward to hearing it all coming together for the premiere!
–Lisa’s Jerwood Composer+ showcase, Cànan nan Eun, takes place on 5th September at LSO St. Luke’s, London – learn more and buy tickets at:
Learn more about Lisa and her practice:
