1 Who I happened to get as a first fiddle teacher
IT’S luck of the draw who you get as your first teacher, and I was certainly one of the lucky ones.
A fresh-faced 22-year-old newly returned home from college, Douglas Montgomery happened to be the fiddle teacher in my local primary school in Orkney. Our lessons were outside of genre from the get go. One minute we’d be preparing scales for my next grade exam, the next we’d be rocking out on Mairi’s Wedding, him accompanying me on the school drum kit.
It’s thanks to these early lessons that I ended up training in both folk and classical music, which now enables me to work across a variety of musical worlds. Douglas taught me from an early age that there are two types of music – good music and bad music.
He instilled in me a strong work ethic, put focus on the relationship between music and the mind right from the start, while always prioritising that, first and foremost, music should be fun.
2 Horses
ANIMALS were a big part of life growing up in Orkney, and I was always especially drawn to horses.
When I got my own, my parents stuck to their word of “we’re not helping”, and although the dark early morning mucking out shifts could be grim, I’m grateful to them for this.
Heading out twice a day in all weathers (okay, my dad relented once or twice when a “force nine-er” came through the islands …) definitely toughened me up, teaching me about responsibility at a young age.
Horses are such wise animals. Spending quiet moments with them really helped this dreamer to process adolescent life. I love the feeling of having a silent conversation with a horse, building trust through wordless communication.
3 A poster for St Mary’s
ONE day at school I saw a poster on the music notice board for a specialist music school in Edinburgh. Having, at twelve years old, already announced to my family that I was going to be a professional musician, the poster lit up my one-track mind. After S5, I moved down to Edinburgh to begin my full-time music education.
Being with other like-minded young people was just what I needed. They pushed me to up my game and many of them are still close friends now. I’ll never forget playing in a string quartet for the first time – it was week one at St Mary’s and I had no idea what was coming. We were to sight-read a Haydn string quartet in front of the teacher, and I was put on first violin (Haydn has notoriously gnarly first violin parts!).
This was the ultimate baptism of fire, and I dread to think what it must have sounded like, but boy, did it make me go and practice! My time at St Mary’s was the perfect stop-gap between home and starting college in Manchester.
4 Meeting Esther
WHILE at St Mary’s, I met my Twelfth Day duo partner Esther Swift. We both headed down to the RNCM in Manchester for college afterwards, where we shared a flat.
We soon discovered we shared a passion for creating new music, and our duo was born. This became – and still is – my deepest and most important musical partnership, and one of my most cherished friendships.
Esther and I challenge each other to push boundaries musically and over the years developed a style of music that sits between all the music we love. We are always continuing to develop what we do, and are sounding boards for each other in our individual projects.
Working with Esther taught me about the power of making creative projects happen with friends – the deep communication and the growth that that can bring.
5 Manchester
MANCHESTER – the city where I had my first home. I look back on my time as an undergraduate at the Royal Northern College of Music with so much gratitude for the musical opportunities, the friendships and life experience gained.
Manchester has such a special atmosphere, and whenever I go back, I feel lucky to know it well. Our college did a good job of their random assigning of who should be in which first-year string quartet – still some of my closest friends today – and the fact that the RNCM was also a busy music venue meant that we were exposed to many different styles of music and incredible artists on a nightly basis. It was the perfect place to get inspired.
6 Routes To Roots
After we finished our undergraduate degrees in Manchester, Esther and I sat down over a bottle of wine and said “what next?”.
What followed was the brainstorming session that led to the cornels of the idea for Routes To Roots, which is now an organisation creating intercultural collaborations to connect communities. We got funding from Deutsche Bank through an award at my postgraduate college the Royal Academy of Music, to undertake four development trips – each a month long – to Malawi, Quebec, Brazil and Mongolia.
These trips completely transformed the way I saw the world. Suddenly my mind was blown wide open to the power that music and culture sharing can have to connect communities in a really profound way. However, I wasn’t sure how to make this happen yet, so put the idea on the back burner for a decade and went away to get some life experience and establish my career. See below for what happened next!
7 Yoga
DURING a Routes To Roots trip in 2015, we found ourselves in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It’s the most sparsely populated country in the world, almost half of its population live in the capital. The city was so polluted that it was not advised to go running outside. So I downloaded a yoga app. Since then I have been hooked.
Yoga has helped me to maintain healthy headspace whilst on the road and kept the aches and pains of constant travel and sleeping in different beds at bay. It’s made me physically strong – which has given me a new appreciation for my body – and helped me feel mentally strong too.
8 Oma
WHEN I was still a student, I started travelling to Germany for regular gigs with an Irish band over there.
My mum is German and I grew up bilingual, regularly spending whole summer holidays in Germany. I was already very close to my Oma, but being able to stop by regularly between tours gave me the chance to get to know her through adult eyes.
I am so grateful to have had this time with her, to hear her stories over a glass of wine about being a young girl in the war (“mit dir trinkt man am besten” – you’re the best person to share a drink with, which she apparently said to everyone!). She was a warm, funny, intelligent woman who I took so many life lessons from.
9 Starting Fara
AFTER I finished my postgraduate studies in London, I decided to move back to Scotland. I always knew I wanted to base myself in the music scene where my playing style came from, and with the musician travelling lifestyle already under way,
I knew that I would still get more than my fix of adventures to other places and cultures.
During this time, I started reconnecting with some childhood friends from Orkney who had also gone away to do music. We had grown up together, but had taken our musical studies to different places and styles.
We decided it would be fun to put all of the different things we had learned into a melting pot alongside our shared musical upbringing, and Fara was born. The band is now 10 years old and we’ve made three albums and toured the world with our contemporary Orkney fiddle music.
10 Latin America
AFTER the pandemic I felt like I needed a shake up. In March 2023, though participation in the Global Leaders Institute for Arts Innovation, I had the chance to travel to Chile.
I met the most inspiring group of peers, some of whom are now colleagues and close friends. Among them was Christine Lauck who is now the executive director of Routes To Roots.
Together, we developed the idea that I’d had on the hob for the past decade and undertook a development period in Mexico and Chile between November 2023 and January 2024 where I collaborated with five artists to create new intercultural music (look out for the release of these coming soon).
My time in Latin America was transformative, both for Routes To Roots, and for me personally. I love the vibrancy, diversity, warmth – people and weather! – and musical variety of Latin American cultures. After 10 weeks I’d only just scratched the surface and couldn’t wait to go back. Since then I’ve had my first visit to Argentina and have projects in the pipeline in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina for 2025. I’m yet to master Spanish, but am working on it!
Catriona Price returns to the Fringe this year in a limited run, following a sold out show at Edinburgh International Festival last year. She will be at La Belle Angele, Monday, August 12 at 8pm, Queen’s Hall, Wednesday 14th at 8.30pm and Edinburgh New Town Church, Friday, August 16 at 2.30pm
