Ullapool High School is delighted to announce that a new music composition project "A Sense of Place" will begin in August 2004, thanks to a grant of £7,300 from the Performing Rights Society Foundation.  The award, from their "Music Creators in Residence" scheme will enable musician Brian McAlpine to visit Ullapool High School regularly over the session.  Along with other colleagues he will help senior students create music for a documentary film focused on the Lochbroom/Coigach/Assynt area.  Senior students will choose a place with special significance to them for personal, cultural or historical reasons.  They will research its background, using current and archive material to look at its past and imagine its possible future.  They will then film their location, and compose music to express the emotions evoked by their sense of the place and its changes, past, present and future.

Brian McAlpine was closely involved in the development and rehearsal of students' compositions for the Suilven Spring project in 2003, and played keyboard in the performance and recording.  Suilven Spring, also funded by PRSF and supported very generously by community businesses and organisations, has generated intense creativity in Ullapool High School.  Brian is looking forward to leading this new project with great enthusiasm.  "I know the fantastic ability and creative power of these students' compositions and arrangements.  Now I want to introduce them to another creative journey, which should, in the end, leave them able to write and compose to an even higher level and with an understanding of collaboration previously not considered."

Brian's own musical background is richly diverse.  In his early career he was a member of bands Hearts and Minds and The Pearlfishers, and he has toured internationally with many bands, including Iron Horse and the Gordon Gunn Band.  He currently works frequently with popular fiddle-based band Session A9, led by Charlie McKerron, and has recorded with numerous artists including Savourna Stevenson, Rory Campbell, Bruce MacGregor, Jim Hunter and Jerry Lee Lewis.  Brian has worked extensively with record company Wild Biscuit run by John Saich, Musical Director of Suilven Spring, and John will be closely involved as a consultant with this new project.

A Sense of Place will culminate in a film première on June 22nd 2005 in the Macphail Theatre, Ullapool.  They also hope to release the finished documentary as a DVD/video tape for sale to the public, and to give it to local organisations such as the Ullapool Museum and the Isle Martin Trust.  Indeed some of the students who will compose music for A Sense of Place are among the student group who won The Highland Council and Careers Scotland's "Highland Youth Citizenship" Award in June for their work in the ongoing development of an interpretation centre on Isle Martin.

This project comes at a perfect time in the school's ongoing development, offering opportunities not only to music students, but to those involved in film-making.  This group recently attended Glasgow's Reel to Reel International short film festival, in which they were short-listed for a national award in the Community" category.  As Brian McAlpine says "Music is the art form which can bring together drama, Gaelic and English creative writing, film and television studies, environmental studies and more.  I am sure that A Sense of Place will offer the students and teachers of Ullapool High School the opportunity to create a work which will have a lasting, positive and tangible effect and become an invaluable archive for the Highlands".