I first heard the air, Iain Sinclair of Skaldister at a house concert on Cape Breton Island during the annual Celtic Colours Music Festival. I found it quite a haunting melody and decided it would be a great tune to use in a woodwind quintet I was working on at the time. My first thought was that this was a traditional tune, but further research showed it to be in fact a melody composed by the Scottish composer, Louise MacKenzie. It was part of a collection of contemporary, but traditional in style, music written by composers in the Aberdeen area of Scotland and published under the title The Aberdeen Collection. She had written it for the celebration of Iain Sinclair’s 60th birthday, he a well known Aberdeen area fiddle teacher. The collection itself is organised under headings such as strathspeys, marches, hornpipes, waltzes, airs, jigs and reels (ideal for use in teaching Scottish music genres), and notated for instruments from clarsachs to concertinas, fiddles to flutes and pipes to pianos. It is intended as a source of music to be used for dance sets and performance material and is presented here in that sense with permission from the composer. Duration 2:51” Instrumentation Flute Oboe Bb Clarinet French Horn in F Bassoon
