New for 2022: MacGillivray and Mary, Queen of Scots
February 2022 sees the release of the first of our ‘lost’ albums – In My End is My Beginning by MacGillivray. Manufactured prior to the pandemic, its release was postponed when antigen entered a period of enforced dormancy over the last 21 months.
MacGillivray’s eighth solo album is inspired by the words of Mary Queen of Scots and draws influences from French chanson, the troubadour tradition and contemporaneous composition by William Byrd. The album opens with the sound of the creaking stairs Mary is said to have descended on her way to execution from Fotheringhay Castle. This sets the scene for an album which is at once cinematic and deathly intimate, drawing together the creaking wood and dust of the spaces it was recorded in, while ventriloquising the sensitivity and intelligence of its subject to haunting, bone-rattling effect.
MacGillivray transposes sonnets and letters written by Mary and performs the songs with air encapsulated at sites and on dates specific to each piece – Linlithgow Palace on the anniversary of her birth, Loch Leven where she was imprisoned, and at Fotheringhay on the anniversary of her death.
MacGillivray accompanies herself on dulcitone, dulcimer, Indian harmonium, peddle harmonium, electric autoharp, melodica and prepared piano. The dulcitone was chosen for two reasons; as a Scottish instrument (made in Glasgow in the 1800s) and for its diamantine, crystal sound in reference to Mary’s frequent use of diamond imagery in her work – particularly The Diamond Speaks.
In My End is My Beginning will be released on 8 February 2022 – the 435th anniversary of Mary’s death.