Shona Mooney (born c. 1984) is a Scottish fiddle player and composer.

Career

Shona Mooney was the winner of the

BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician The BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician competition has run annually since 2001. It exists to encourage young musicians to keep their tradition alive and to provide performance opportunities, tools and advice to help contestants make ...

competition in 2006. She has appeared at international festivals such as the

Tønder Festival Tønder Festival is an annual folk music festival in Tønder, Denmark. It is held on the last weekend of August. It was founded in 1974. The first festival took place in 1975. The festival is one of the most prominent festivals for traditional and ...

(Denmark), and toured with the Scottish Folk orchestra The Unusual Suspects. To date, she has recorded two albums, ''Heartsease'' and ''Sensing the Park''. ''Heartsease (viola tricolour)'' was released on Footstompin' Records in 2006. It combines the traditional

Borders A border is a geographical boundary. Border, borders, The Border or The Borders may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Film and television * ''Border'' (1997 film), an Indian Hindi-language war film * ''Border'' (2018 Swedish film), ...

style with components of a contemporary style. It was chosen to be "Top of the World" (editor's choice) in

Songlines A songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land (or sometimes the sky) within the animist belief systems of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia which mark the route followed by localised "creator-beings" in the Dre ...

magazine and has received 5-star reviews in The Herald and multiple broadcasts on BBC's

Late Junction ''Late Junction'' is a music programme broadcast weekly on Friday nights by BBC Radio 3. Billed as "Experimental music for adventurous listeners.", the programme has a wide musical scope. It is not uncommon to hear medieval ballads juxtaposed wit ...

. Shona began playing in O'er the Border with her parents Barbara and Gordon Mooney, bowing a small fiddle bought for her in a junk shop in Peebles. During her childhood, moving between Newstead, Newtown, Westruther, Maxton, Eildon and Lauder in the Borders, she studied classical violin. She also studied traditional fiddle styles with violinist Lucy Cowan before joining the musical scene at Kelso High School. In 2001, aged 17, Shona started

Newcastle University Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public university, public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is ...

's newly founded degree course in Folk and Traditional Music where she continued researching music of the Scottish Borders, stemming from her father's contribution to the world of Borders piping. Along the way she had tuition from fiddlers –

Catriona MacDonald Catriona Macdonald is a musician and teacher from Shetland and is considered to be one of the world's leading traditional fiddle players. Background Macdonald started studying fiddle with Dr Tom Anderson MBE in 1981 at age 11 (she consider ...

, Chris Wood and Aidan O'Rourke – who supported her to blend the style of the Borders fiddle with more contemporary influences. She graduated with first-class honours and began recording albums with her friends, including Crosscurrent's ''Momentum'' and Border Young Fiddle's self-titled debut. She later continued to perform and teach at major events including

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, Warwick,

Dranouter Dranouter (Dutch, locally known as ''Nouter'') is a village and a '' deelgemeente'' in the municipality of Heuvelland in West Flanders, Belgium. Dranouter was an independent municipality before the 1977 local government reforms. Since then, it has ...

folk festivals and

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (also known by the acronym HCMF, stylised since 2006 as the lowercase hcmf//) is a new music festival held annually in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. Since its foundation in 1978, it has featured ...

. She also performed alongside

Capercaillie ''Tetrao'' is a genus of birds in the grouse subfamily known as capercaillies. They are some of the largest living grouse. Taxonomy The genus ''Tetrao'' was introduced in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his ...

's Donald Shaw and

Karen Matheson Karen Matheson OBE (born 11 February 1963) is a Scottish folk singer who frequently sings in Gaelic. She is the lead singer of the group Capercaillie and was a member of Dan Ar Braz's group L'Héritage des Celtes, with whom she often sang lea ...

at BBC Proms in the Park and appeared on

Howard Goodall Howard Lindsay Goodall (; born 26 May 1958) is an English composer of musicals, choral music and music for television. He also presents music-based programmes for television and radio, for which he has won many awards. In May 2008, he was na ...

's ''How Music Works'' for

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mooney, Shona Scottish folk musicians Scottish fiddlers Living people Year of birth missing (living people)