The way she sailed into St Andrews’ historic harbour waving and singing, with her eyes peeled for seals, you’d never know trad musician Mary Ann Kennedy was completing a gruelling three-month pilgrimage that took her from Iona all the way to the Fife coast.
With the sun shining and the iconic cathedral at her back, the burgh seemed to be welcoming Mary Ann – and not a moment too soon.
Breezing in on a little boat (the Terra Nova) from Newport yesterday, she was just in time for the beginning of St Andrews Voices – Scotland’s singing festival, which launched in 2012 and is now back in action after lockdown.
“The Voices festival is probably my ideal gig!” says Mary Ann, as we get on to terra firma and watch the Terra Nova puttering back out to sea. “As the name suggests, it’s all about vocal music, with its heart in the classical world but very open-minded.
“This year it’s giving traditional music a real spotlight and bringing the Gaelic language into Cill Rimhinn, which is the Gaelic for St Andrews.
“So it’s a very happy place to be.”
The festival, which is open-door and welcomes audiences of all ages and stages, is based in the new, purpose-built Laidlaw Music Centre at St Andrews University, but makes use of several local church buildings for performances.
And festival director Amanda MacLeod, who sailed in with Mary Ann, assures audiences that though the festival has its heart in the classical, it is a celebration of all kinds of singing.
“It’s the singing voice in all its guises,” she says. “There’s all different genres – traditional song, which you’ll hear from Mary Ann, to classical music, to choral singing in all the different genres you can imagine – rock, pop, jazz, opera”
Epic journey – by boat, bus, bike or boots!
The theme of this year’s festival is “journeys”, and when Mary Ann was asked to perform, she took that theme very much to heart – embarking on an epic 200-mile pilgrimage from Iona to St Andrews – roughly tracing the route dubbed St Columba’s Way.
“When Amanda explained that journeying was the theme of this year’s festival, I said, pretty flippantly: ‘Oh, I could travel from our saint (Columba) to your saint (Andrew)’,” laughs Mary Ann, who hails from west-coast village Ardgour.
“And Amanda said, ‘Yeah, why not?'”
Deciding to make the journey into a challenge, Mary Ann embarked on a no-diesel, no-petrol pilgrimage.
“We could use boots, bikes, boats, buses – but no cars!” she says.
Thanks to some hiking, cycling, train journeys and even a “pretty damp” canoe up the Tay from Perth, Mary Ann completed the saint-to-saint journey – with two hours to spare before the start of the festival.
And on her travels, Mary Ann rediscovered her deep love and connection for the land she sings about.
“It was a really cool thing to be able to be in Iona and sing a song I’d written about the island,” she says. “Or to stand at the foot of Beinn Dorain and sing Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s great epic poem in praise of the mountain.
“To be able to be the songs connect to the place, and to people, was a really powerful thing.”
‘We were riding an emotional rollercoaster’
Indeed, although artistic collaboration was merely a notion when she set out, connecting with other musicians became a significant part of Mary Ann’s mission as her journey went on.
“It was sort of a notion right back at the beginning of this that it might be nice to hook up with other singers as we went along,” she explains.
“But it’s become a more and more important part of the journey, because we’ve been able to document musicians’ and singers’ experiences of lockdown as they’re emerging.
“And depending on what awfulness or stupidity is happening at the time, how people are talking and feeling changed with that.”
By making this trek across the nation, Mary Ann has collected a collage of stories which show the push-and-pull of fear and excitement that characterises moving out of lockdown.
“When we were in Mull, for instance, it was the first time the Gaelic choir there had got together to rehearse indoors. So it was this big, emotional thing,” she explains.
“But it was also full of unease, because there’d just been another spike in Covid cases, which is a big deal for a small population.
“We were riding this emotional rollercoaster with the folks we met. And we realised we were actually collecting something that was going to be a valuable document, when people come to look back.
“So it’s been quite the journey – and we haven’t even done the gig yet!”
Mary Ann Kennedy will be playing with her bandmates from Aon Teanga on Saturday October 16 at the Laidlaw Music Centre.