Music

Compositions

I have composed a number of tunes mainly in the Scottish traditional idiom. I will keep on adding sheetmusic here as I get more things scanned — which is a bit of a challenge during the pandemic.

  • Heartbreak Waltz — my somewhat angry and simple first tune. Accordingly the sheetmusic is a bit unideal.
    sheetmusic [pdf]
  • Walking Back Home from Douglas and Jane-Anne’s — a scottishce I wrote while doing what the name says.
  • Drying Acorns — the first tune I ever started writing but one that took a while to finish. The idea for the name came from a conversation with Nigel Gatherer while he was giving me a lift to the Slow Session at Leslie’s bar.
    sheetmusic [pdf]
  • Walking on a Foggy Hill — a tune I wrote for Caitlin on her 30th birthday. Name comes from an evening walk we once did on Isle of Arran.
  • Up too Late / Finishing my PhD — a tune about frantic writing late at night. Several nights and weeks and months (maybe even years) in a row.
  • Sun Comes out at Crianlarich Station — a slow air that came to me while standing on the platform of Crianlarich Station.
  • Time & Tide, Space & Distance — a slightly weird feeling tune in that it is not very traditional in its structure. I wrote this one in the Unlocking our Sound Heritage Workshop 1 with a method that interprets alphabet into musical notes.
    sheetmusic [jpeg]
  • With more to come as time goes by.

Caol Cù — our band

I have a band called Caol Cù (Scottish Gaelic for ‘Dog Straits’ after the Finnish nature centre at Koirasalmi) with Samuli Karjalainen. In the band I play tin whistles and similar instruments and Samuli plays guitar and whistles. The band plays mainly Scottish folk music in a mainly Scottish style. Videos from the band can be found on the band’s youtube channel.

Writing

I am writing two books on walking. The first one describes the Journeyman’s Walks (Finnish Kisällinmatkat) that I am about to undertake, and the second one is my take on some philosophical matters relating to wandering and walking. I will translate both books to Finnish once they are completed.

  • A draft of the first two chapters of the Journeyman’s Walks [pdf]