Mary Macmaster

One thing I learnt at the Jakez François International Lever Harp Competition was how massive the Scottish lever harp scene is.  I should have known this already, because I lived on the Scottish border in Northumberland for five years - although equally, I also once nearly didn't make it to St Petersburg because I thought Russia "was in Europe", so I hadn't ordered a visa.  But I digress:  Scotland is absolutely buzzing with contemporary takes on traditional music, with the harp  often right at the centre.  Catriona McKay, for example, won the Jakez François competition in 2004, and in 2009 Ailie Robertson was a finalist.  This year, Mary Macmaster was on the competition jury. 


(photos:  Louis de Carlo)


Mary is half of the Scottish harp duo Sileas, along with Patsy Seddon and this duo is  also part of the five-piece band, The Poozies.  As well as these groups, Mary is also a member of the alternative-Celtic Macmaster-Hay duo, with Donald Hay.

The Poozies formed in 1990 after Mary, Patsy and singer Sally Barker spotted a gap in the market for an all-women folk group.  Since then, they have enjoyed continued success with their blend of folk, rock and close vocal harmony, and where traditional instruments like accordian, fiddle and gut and metal-strung harp come together with the electroharp underpinning it all at the bass.

"At the beginning of the eighties the Feis movement took hold in Scotland.  Feis is Gaelic for "festival" or "holiday", and it started with traditional musicians getting together and running week-long summer schools for children - fiddle, pipes, guitar, harp, keyboard, whistle, ...so all these traditional instruments began to be widely taught again in Scotland, and the crucial thing was, they became cool."

The Poozies

"In fact it was around this time that people started playing more Scottish music in sessions as well as the Irish music we'd all been doing before.  The band Jock Tamson’s Bairns was a massive influence in Scotland. They took their name from a lovely old Scottish saying -  "we're a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns" – meaning we’re all equal.

In 1982 Patsy Seddon and I were asked to join an all-women ceilidh band for Women's Day - that's March the eighth.  Thus Sprangeen was formed: a ceilidh band featuring two harps!  Now I come to think of it, an all-women band was very unusual at the time. Mostly women in bands were singers – like Sandy Denny in Fairport Convention, or Maddy Prior in Steeleye Span. Nowadays it’s quite normal for women to be instrumentalists in a band and women’s bands are no longer unusual.

Not only did Sprangeen have two harps, one of them was a metal strung clarsach! When I bought my first harp, I found the cheapest one in the “Exchange and Mart” magazine and it happened to have metal strings, which were extremely rare in those days. I was disappointed at first but came to love the bell-like sound of the metal strings and when I got together with Patsy, the combination of the gut and metal strings made a really special sound, which people seemed to love.

After playing gigs together around Scotland for a while, the rest of Sprangeen didn't want to go professional, but Patsy and I had only just finished university and we wanted to continue, so we carried on as a duo on our own.   Now there are so many harpists in Scotland, but in those days we were unique as a lever harp duo.  I myself only started playing the harp at the age of twenty-one, and as nobody really knew how to play the wire strung harp, I made it up as I went along.

In 1984 we met Joël Garnier.  He came to the Edinburgh Festival with Kristen Noguès, and he brought a prototype electroharp.  I remember at Kristen's concert, the first artist up was the brilliant Irish harpist Maire Ni Chathasaigh and I remember feeling so scared for whoever was going to have to follow her.  And then Kristen came on and I was overwhelmed: I'd never heard anything so beautiful: such dark, dramatic, emotional music.  She’s been a huge influence on my music ever since.

Joël in his turn invited Patsy and I to do a concert in Lorient, after which we drove to Mouzeil to pick up our first electroharp.  I was really delighted with this harp because it sounded more like a harp than my wire-strung but I could still play it with my fingernails.  I've almost always played electroharp ever since.
 

When the Poozies were first formed, it was partly because of the electro harp.  Patsy and I were doing a gig in a club in Nottingham when Sally Barker came in to pick up something she'd left at the club. She saw us working with the electro harp and some effects pedals and asked us to come and work on a recording with her. 

As we were doing that, she said she had always wanted to form an all-women band, so we said great, let's do it.  My sister was going to play the bass, but then she got pregnant, and so we realised the electroharp's potential to be the bass instead.  The band originally consisted of Sally Barker, Patsy Seddon, all-Ireland accordian champion Karen Tweed, fiddler Jenny Gardiner,  and myself.  There have been a few changes in the line-up since then.  Jenny left in 2007, to be replaced by a fantastic fiddler from the West Coast of Scotland, Eilidh Shaw, and we now have a young accordionist from the north of Scotland called Mairearad Green.

Harp is a very important part of the Poozies' sound. We use three of them!  We did a lot of touring outside Scotland too, in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Britain, Hong Kong, Egypt and Turkey. So we really feel like harp ambassadors!Last year I was honoured to be sponsored by Camac to go to Australia with my new duo (called Macmaster/Hay) to play the electro harp at the Canberra Harp Festival.  This duo is with Donald Hay, a brilliant drummer and percussionist from Edinburgh.
 

We use a lot of samples of harp noises - like chords or the sound of the bow on the bass string of the electroharp – and Donald triggers them while we play. I love playing with a drummer and we find it easy to write together. We started by writing a commission for the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow in 2002. This was a piece for 5 electro harps and drums. It was called "Three Days "and it was to celebrate the life of Joel Garnier. If it wasn’t for Joel, I would not be where I am now, doing the things I’m doing. His invention (the electro-harp) changed my life and I will always remember that.  We played  Three Days with Kristen Nogues, Patsy Seddon, Corrina Hewat and Maeve Gilchrist.  Recently we revised the piece for the Edinburgh Harp Festival and it was very well received. Sadly Kristen is no longer with us but we played two of her compositions in the first half of the concert to honour her memory. 

I would love to have all Kristen's music written down. I think it’s really important that all the young harp players who never knew her should have the opportunity to learn her music. It’s such great modern repertoire for the harp."

 

The harps at the world premiere of "Three Days"