Fiddler Gavin Marwick on his Quarterdays project: ‘a metaphor for life itself’

The old Scottish quarter days – Candlemas (2 February), Whitsun (15 May), Lammas (1 August) and Martinmas – were significant markers through the seasonal cycle and the agricultural year, as well as on Christian and pre-Christian calendars. They had legal significance as well, traditionally used for rent payment.

Having released an EP on each quarter day, Marwick’s project is now looking to a significant date of another kind – the Scots Trad Awards in Dundee on 2 December, the annual “folk Oscars”, having been nominated for the Original Work of the Year award.

Each EP has been a duo collaboration, with Martinmas seeing the Kirkcudbrightshire-based fiddler join with pianist and accordionist Phil Alexander, his colleague in the Firelight Trio. The other three EPs saw Marwick duet with Aaron Jones on cittern for Candlemas, harpist Wendy Stewart for Whitsun, and his wife (and third Firelight Trio member), Ruth Morris, on nyckelharpa for Lammas.

All these musicians, plus further associates piper-saxophonist Fraser Fifield and double-bassist Stuart MacPherson, will assemble in Glasgow for a Quarterdays Finale at Celtic Connections on 2 February – Candlemas, exactly a year on from the project’s launch. A boxed set, including a 30-page booklet, is in preparation, as well as an associated tunebook.

As Marwick puts it: “The old quarter days offer a wonderful richness for investigation and musical representation.” It’s fair to suggest the concept also chimed with a certain heightened sense of mortality, as recent years saw him undergo chemotherapy, having been diagnosed with lymphoma in 2019. He received the all-clear in January of this year, he tells me, and agrees the brush with cancer may have informed the project: “The quarter days mark the cycle of the seasons, but of course that is also one of the great metaphors for life itself, the way they start with Candlemas, and a candle lighting.”

Martinmas, on the other hand, named after St Martin of Tours, overlaps with echoes of Samhain, he explains: traditionally a time for slaughtering livestock and preserving foodstuffs to support life through the winter. “It is a liminal time, when the veil between this life and the next is very thin.

“So there’s a lot of death in Martinmas. The Wife of Usher’s Well is just the start of it.”

The latest EP opens with the exuberant Lantern Hora, but there’s a lingering melancholy to the following air, When Nights Are Lang and Mirk. There’s a distinct pan-European flavour to some of the tunes, reflecting, perhaps, the widespread influence of St Martin of Tours.

Marwick, 54, also plays in the aforementioned Firelight Trio with Alexander and Morris, with the Galloway Agreement and with his ongoing Journeyman Band. An imaginative and prolific composer, he has worked extensively in theatre, including the Traverse, Dogstar and, most recently, in the Galloway Agreement’s widely lauded collaboration with poet Tom Pow, The Village and the Road, which took them to Japan in September.

In the meantime, he’s hoping for success in next Saturday’s 21st MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards, which should banish any gathering winter gloom as the Scottish folk community goes glitzy at Dundee’s Caird Hall. Among those performing at the event are the Peatbog Faeries, Gaelic singer Joy Dunlop, Mànran, fiddler Duncan Chisholm and Young Traditional Musician of the Year Amy Laurenson.

And among the numerous award categories, a notable new addition, the Sue Wilson New Writer Award, commemorates the respected music writer who passed away in September, and whose articles and reviews on traditional music appeared in The Scotsman and numerous other publications for many years.

For further information, see www.gavinmarwick.co.uk and https://projects.handsupfortrad.scot/scotstradmusicawards/