At the year's turning: 5 songs for new year's reflection

At the turning of the year, it is a time of looking forward and looking back. As ever here at Music Road, the stories found in music are company along the way, and guides to help think about the challenges, acceprt the sorrows, and share the celebrations of the turn of seasons.

Carrie Newcomer’s song Singing in the Dark works for this point in the seasons and beyond.

The idea for the song sparked for Newcomer when she spent a bit of time at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. A respected writer, artist, and thinker on matters of the spirit, she’d been invited to experience the place where spiritual teacher and writer Thomas Merton had lived.

While there, she attended several of the services through which the monks keep hours of the day -- matins, lauds, vespers, compline, for example -- some of which occur in the dark of night and the dark of very early hours of the morning.

On new year’s eve and other times, someone is always singing in the dark...

You will find Singing in the Dark on Carrie Newcomer’s album A Great Wild Mercy.

Waitin’ on Mary is a Christmas song, yes. It also works really well with the atmosphere and events going in in the world just now: finding reasons to hope amidst despair, for one thing. Gretchen Peters wrote it. You will find it on her album Northern Lights.

Rani Arbo has set words of Alfred Lord Tennyson to music in Ring Out Wild Bells. Each of the verses she’s chosen speaks to today as much as they did to Tennyson’s time.

You will find it recorded on the Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem album Wintersong.

In Scotland, the celebration of midnight as one year turns to another is marked by and is called the bells. Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem’s song is a nod to that, and so is this...

Auld Lang Syne, as well known as it is, really does belong as a part on one year turning into another. Here’s a fine version of it by Hannah Rarity and Blazin’ Fiddles. You will want to listen, yes, but then perhaps second time round go ahead and sing along.

Bittersweet as the turning of a year may seem at times, it is also a time which invites celebration, connection and hope. Cajun musicians Canray Fontenot and Michael Doucet caught that ideas well in their song Bonne Annee. So did Rani Arbo and daisy mayhem in their performance of it, on their album Wintersong.

Wishing you all the best at the turning of this year, and as the new year unfolds.

You may also wish to see
Three more songs for the new year, from Kris Drever, Fara, and Olivia Newton-John
Ireland, Scotland, and story
December: music for a time of hope and reflection at Wandering Educators
Music for peace, understanding, and connection at Wandering Educators

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Scotland's Music: Doddie's Dream

Music is about celebration, community, dreams, hope -- and fun. All those things have come into play in the creation of the tune Doddie’s Dream.

Who is Doddie, what’s his dream, and why will you enjoy this music?

Doddie is Doddie Weir. He is a rugby legend in Scotland and points beyond.

Several years back he started a charity called My Name’5 Doddie Foundation. The foundation’s purpose is to help people who, like Doddie, have Motor Neurone Disease, and to fund research toward a cure for this as yet incurable illness. This past January the foundation had a challenge called Doddie Aid, which encouraged people to run, walk, or cycle to rack up miles for their chosen geographic district to raise money.

When he’s not playing music or presenting on the radio, Bruce MacGregor of the band Blazin’ Fiddles loves to cycle.

“Whilst cycling out by Loch Ness as part of Doddie Aid,” MacGregor recalls, “I had this idea of doing a charity single with a whole host of fellow musicians playing along with me and the Blazers.”

He wrote a tune which has “a real positive lift to it and hopefully it fits in with that amazing collective spirit that was on display during Doddie Aid,” he says.

His bandmates in Blazin’ Fiddles Angus Lyon, Anna Massie, Rua Macmillan, Jenna Reid, and Kristan Harvey quickly signed on to join in and before long they’d recruited what amounts to an orchestra of Scottish folk top liners, and a few surprise outliers too.

Each of the artists and all involved in tech and promotion of the music gave of their talent and time pro bono, too, and artists recorded from their own locations as under current conditions they could not safely gather together.

Participants include fiddle and accordion duo Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham, top Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, acclaimed composer and fiddle player  Duncan Chisholm, musician and composer Donald Shaw, BBC Take the Floor Presenter and member of Mànran Gary Innes, Megan Henderson, Ewan Robertson and James Lindsay of  Breabach,  Skerryvore’s Martin Gillespie and Scott Wood, BBC Radio Scotland Young Trad winner Ali Levack, piper and whistle player Ross Ainslie, fiddle and cello duo  Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas,  Iain Sandilands on percussion, harp and fiddle duo Iain MacFarlane and Ingrid Henderson, Douglas Montgomery and Brian Cromarty on fiddle and cittern, multi-award winning concertina player Mohsen Amini, member of Treacherous Orchestra and Session A9 Adam Sutherland and Scots fiddle maestro Paul Anderson. 

Acclaimed accordion player Sharon Shannon of Ireland joined in too, as did top dobro player and long time Transatlantic Sessions co-director Jerry Douglas from the US. So did native Scot and well known classical violinist Nicola Benedetti.

It’s not the first time Benedetti has joined up with fellow Scots for a musical project; her album Homecoming, in which Bain, Cunningham, Chisholm, and Fowlis took part is one example of that.

“It is a total honour to perform with such an incredible line up of folk musicians and for such an important cause, “ Benedetti says. “All the proceeds will go to Doddie’s Charity which helps fellow sufferers of Motor Neurone Disease and funds much needed research into this cruel illness. I hope everyone enjoys our wee tune and helps us to raise awareness of MND.”

Doddie himself is thrilled. “What a beautiful piece of music – it really is special, and I am so humbled to think these world class and brilliantly talented musicians have all been part of this.,” he says. “If ever we needed some uplifting music, it is now, and my old teammate Stewart Campbell has produced a fantastic film to accompany the music. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.”

Here’s the trailer for the project, produced by Campbell's firm Tigershark.TV

The track will be available to buy & download on Friday 12 March 2021 with all proceeds going to the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation.

 

The single is available to pre-order on iTunes and pre-save on Spotify, buyers can go to www.facebook.com/blazinfiddles. for more information.

Here’s where to contribute directly to the foundation contribute directly to the foundation

Photo of Blazin Fiddles by Sean Purser; photo of Nicola Benedetti by Andy Gotts; photo of Bruce MacGregor courtesy of Innes Campbell Communications

You may also wish to see
7 Ways to explore Scotland through music, at Perceptive Travel
Music & horizons: stories of hope at Wandering Educaotrs which includes one of my favourite tracks from Breabach
Scotland’s music:Still Time from Karen Matheson

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