Sarah-Jane Summers

Nine solos for Hardanger fiddle that trace a fascinating journey between tradition and experimentation, composed and performed by Sarah-Jane Summers, a virtuosic Scottish musician based in Norway. With Echo Stane, Summers employs the Hardanger fiddle – the national instrument of her adopted country – as a bridge across the North Sea, connecting the musical heritage of the Scottish Highlands with Norwegian folk traditions while pushing both toward the avant-garde.

Summers grew up in rural Inverness, on the same farm her family had inhabited for generations, and developed her relationship with the fiddle as a way to reconnect with her Celtic heritage. A member of the Highland Strathspey and Reel Society from her youth, she has evolved into a composer capable of modernizing these traditions, driving them toward contemporary minimalist territories. The Hardanger fiddle itself – an eight or nine string violin-like instrument with distinctive sympathetic resonances – becomes under her hands an instrument of subtle timbral exploration.

The album's titles draw from Scots terms for nature phenomena, found in Amanda Thomson's A Scots Dictionary of Nature: Echo Stane (a black, hard stone full of holes that returns sound), Shadow Half (the northern exposure of land), Airtan (direction toward a certain quarter of the heavens). In pieces like the opening Airtan, Summers plays melancholy odes with the sharp flourishes characteristic of Celtic music, but employs a markedly minimal approach. The sympathetic strings create haunting overtones that blur the boundaries between folk melody and drone-based sound art.

The Free Jazz Collective praised the album's sonic depth: "She fully explored the resonating timbres of the Hardanger fiddle and suggests distinct and highly expressive, sound-oriented and untimely textures," noting that the more adventurous pieces are "introspective sonic meditations that employ a specific pitch-based approach and are free-associative and often offer intriguing cinematic visions or bring to mind the syntax of electronic music."

A unique voice in contemporary folk-experimental music, where virtuosity and restraint, tradition and innovation exist in productive tension.