Award-winning composer Linda Buckley’s ‘Thar Farraige (Over Sea)’ combined contemporary chamber music with Irish and Scottish folk traditions.

Composed for small pipes, string quartet and electronics, this captivating piece was performed with Maxwell Quartet and Brìghde Chaimbeul. It explored contemporary chamber music, embracing both Irish and Scottish traditional music and language, songs of love and loss, connections to place, migration and our idea of what ‘home’ means.

‘Thar Farraige (Over Sea)’ explored the potential meeting points and new pathways of contemporary classical and folk music. Says the composer of her work: ‘This project will weave together many strands of my musical self to create a cohesive whole, an immersive experience for the listener drawing upon themes of emigration/migration, and our sense of home and how that can be carried with us.’

Since its debut, ‘Thar Farraige (Over Sea)’ has resonated with audiences around the world, including Glasgow’s Celtic Connections, Northern Ireland’s Moving On Music, Norway’s Hemsing Festival, London’s Kings Place and September Me in the Netherlands.

This project was commissioned by Chamber Music Scotland and supported by PRS Foundation.

Genre: Scottish and Irish folk, chamber music

All events across New Music Biennial 2025 were free.

Events included two performances of the same work and a short interview with the creative team in between the two. This enabled audiences to experience the second performance with greater insight into the creative process.

New Music Biennial is a three-day festival celebrating the best new music across all genres from the country’s most exciting composers – and in 2025, for the first time, it came to venues around Bradford.