Ensemble & Composers

David Toms

David retired from a career as a Software Developer aged 47, and has enjoyed a life of leisure ever since. For the last ten years he has lived in Tankerness, where he spends a lot of his time looking after nine rescued dogs. He is a keen amateur musician and plays several instruments. He has been involved with choral music for most of his life, and has engraved and published music for several choral composers. Although he composed music in his youth, since then he has largely confined himself to arrangements.

Emma Thomas

Emma has been living in Orkney for over ten years, mostly in Holm, where she was inspired by the beautiful views and sunsets to create her own compositions.

In her twenties she attended college in Worthing to study Music Composition for Media. She subsequently moved to Orkney before completing a BMus Music degree at the University of Aberdeen. To this day, she has a great interest and passion for creating music.

Fiona Driver

Home educated in Orkney, Fiona taught herself to read music and play the fiddle at the age of 14. As a teenager, Fiona won many competitions for her playing and composing, including the Orkney Young Musician of the Year Competition. Many of her tunes have been played and recorded by fiddlers across the globe. Fiona has a strong interest in classical music and plays violin with the local chamber orchestra, "Orkney Camerata". She also writes classical music and recently composed her first string quartet, "Suite Assynt".

Gemma McGregor

Gemma McGregor is a composer from Orkney who has a doctorate in composition from University of Aberdeen. A recipient of the Ogston Postgraduate Scholarship, she has had commissions performed at the St. Magnus Festival, St. Asaph Festival and Aberdeen Sound Festival. Her choral music has been performed by the BBC Singers, Dunedin Consort and the Quodlibet Chorale. Recent commissions performed include an opera for the 2015 Sound Festival, a piano solo work for a Sir Peter Maxwell Davies memorial concert and Greylighting for Orkney Camerata. Gemma is working on an opera about Saint Magnus for performance in June 2017.

Sandy Dennison

For the last 30 years Sandy has been at the centre of classical music making in Orkney, conducting and playing the viola in Orkney Orchestra and Orkney Camerata.

He has occasionally tried his hand at composing too and his orchestral piece 'Natural Tones' was performed by the Orkney Orchestra in the 1993 St Magnus Festival.

Michael Butler

Following study in composition at the University of Edinburgh under the tutorage of Nigel Osborne, Michael worked in bioacoustics research with teaching and performing music as a sideline. Following a move to Orkney in 2013, he now works for a charity whilst rekindling his love of new music.