Obituary - Maggie Macdonald
TRIBUTES have been paid to a woman widely regarded as one of Scotland’s top Gaelic singers, who has died.
Maggie Macdonald, 63, although born in Glasgow, belonged to the Campbells of Greepe in Skye - one of the best-known and accomplished families of traditional Gaelic singers in Scotland.
Mrs Macdonald, who worked as a primary teacher and taught throughout Scotland, including in Skye, Inverness and Fort Augustus, won the prestigious National Mod Gold Medal in 1994.
The daughter of Ann and Alasdair Michie, a Glasgow police officer, she sang regularly as a youngster and joined Glasgow Islay Gaelic Choir at 17.
She helped re-form the award-winning Inverness Gaelic Choir and in 1991 travelled to Vancouver in Canada for a Gaelic festival there where she also won a solo competition.
Mrs Macdonald was a founding member of the Gaelic band Cliar, along with cousin Mary Ann Kennedy, Arthur Cormack, Chaz Stewart, Blair Douglas and Bruce MacGregor. Many of the songs the band performed were sourced from the lengthy historical catalogue of Maggie and Mary Ann’s musical background.
She recorded four albums with Cliar on the Macmeanmna label and made numerous broadcasts and appearances on radio and TV at home and abroad.
Mrs Macdonald also performed with the family project, The Campbells of Greepe, recording two albums and contributing to the nationally award-winning biography Fonn - The Campbells of Greepe: Music and a Sense of Place in a Gaelic Family Song Tradition.
She is also the only singer to have sung live by satellite from the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda, being the central soloist at the heart of the Gaelic opera, Hiort, which was beamed live across Europe to several concurrent theatre performances.
Mrs Macdonald was the female soloist for Blair Douglas’ groundbreaking Gaelic Mass and a lead soloist in Lasair Dhè, a pivotal, large-scale work for massed choirs and Cliar, re-imagining the Gaelic psalms through traditional and contemporary music.
She served as a director on Fèis Rois and was a central part of mentoring young tutors following in her footsteps.
Arthur Cormack, chief executive of Feisean nan Gaidheal and a fellow Gaelic singer, friend and former primary pupil of Mrs Macdonald, said: ‘Being around Maggie was invariably a joy.
‘No situation lasted too long without a one-liner being thrown in to lighten any mood and today, although unbelievably sad at her loss, I have been smiling thinking about her.
‘For all that she meant to me as a teacher, mentor, friend or fellow singer, Maggie was first and foremost a wife, mother, mother-in-law and grandmother and it is with John, Shona, Fraser and Maggie’s wider family that my thoughts are as I remember one of the most wonderful people it has been my privilege to know.’
Mrs Macdonald’s cousin and conductor of Inverness Gaelic Choir, Mary Ann Kennedy, said: ‘We have all lost a sister, a friend, a mammy, a colleague, the most exquisite musician and a beautiful soul.
‘Whenever we sing from now on, we will forever have Maggie’s voice in harmony with us.’
Mrs Macdonald died following a short illness.
She is survived by her husband, John ‘Hearach’ Macdonald, her two grown-up children, Shona and Fraser, and five grandchildren.