FOR 19-year-old Anna Massie, a first-year Applied Music student at Strathclyde University, the start of her second semester yesterday will likely have been spent in rather a daze. For the previous night saw Massie, who plays fiddle, guitar and mandolin, named BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year 2003.

Launched by musician and record company director Simon Thoumire in 2001, and backed by Radio Scotland as of last year, the competition has already proved itself a major career springboard for its two previous winners, Gillian Frame and Emily Smith. With the final staged at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as part of Celtic Connections, the top prize includes an album deal with Thoumire’s label Footstompin’ Records, and bookings for major festivals, this time including October’s Celtic Colours event in Canada.

Thanks to the joint imprimatur of the BBC and Celtic Connections, Massie can now look forward to an immediate and substantial hike in profile, exposure and reputation, such is the trust already placed in the contest by international promoters and festival organisers.

And thanks to Celtic Connections’ programming of the final during its four-day Showcase Scotland event, more than 100 of said international folk-brokers - plus another 50 from the UK - were at the festival over the weekend. Many of them will have been present among the sell-out crowd for Massie’s winning performance, or caught her first taste of the limelight playing at the Festival Club later that night.

"My biggest aspiration is to have a professional career as a musician, and hopefully this has just given me the most enormous leg-up - it’s amazing," says Massie, who began learning guitar from her multi-instrumentalist father as a seven-year-old in her native Fortrose, and has been playing in ceilidh bands since she was 13. In a six-way play-off that brought new meaning to the words "closely fought", these years of experience - and Massie’s resulting ease and warmth in front of an audience - were clearly a significant factor in her victory. "I’m just really used to playing in public, which maybe made me a bit more comfortable under all the pressure," she says.

"Stagecraft and presentation are important aspects of what the judges are looking for," confirms Thoumire. "The whole point of this competition is to enable young traditional musicians to start a performing career, so we’re not just looking for talent - we’re looking for people who understand how to put on a performance."

The five runners-up must have been consoled by Thoumire’s announcement of Arts Council funding for a seven-date Scottish tour in April, with all six finalists.

For now, though, once Massie’s post-celebratory haze has cleared, she has an academic schedule to catch up on. "All my second-semester essays were supposed to be handed in yesterday," she says.

"But once they knew I was in the final, everyone was very nice about giving me extensions." Sue Wilson

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?id=107752003

Music has always been Anna Massie's passion. As a youngster she used to stand in the wings of village hall stages in the Scottish Highlands, watching her father's ceilidh band, sensing the enthusiasm of musicians and dancers alike, and wishing she could be part of it all.

By the time her chance came to join the band, she was, at thirteen, a multi-instrumentalist and already showing the flair and feeling for the tradition that would take her to the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of Year 2003 title.

Brought up in a household where music was a constant soundtrack - her father plays guitar, banjo and mandolin, Anna started playing guitar at the age of seven when her father returned from Edinburgh Festival with a guitar bought from a car boot sale. Kinlochbervie, in the north west corner of Scotland, where the family lived at the time, had few distractions, and Anna immediately showed dedication and aptitude.

When, a year later, the Massies moved down to Fortrose on the Black Isle, near Inverness, Anna was given a violin and sent to classical music lessons. At first she hated it. She refused to practise and recalls being "really
nasty" to her teacher.

By this time playing mandolin also, having taught herself by matching the violin's left-hand fingering to the guitar's right-hand picking technique, she changed her mind about the violin after seeing a young fiddler playing in a ceilidh band at Lochinver Games. Taken backstage to meet him and after quizzing him about how much he practised, Anna  decided that she could do that too.

The violin became fun rather than torture and with lessons in traditional fiddling from Debbie Swanson, with whom she studied for four years, as a well as continuing her formal music studies, Anna became thoroughly versed in both the classical and Scots traditions.

She played violin with the National Children's Orchestra of Scotland and as one of the Inverness centre for traditional music, Balnain House's star fiddle assets, she was invited to play for the Princess of Thailand during
her visit to the Highlands in 1995. She also appeared on the children's television programme, The Riddlers, playing fiddle.

Throughout her teens Anna continued to play - and still does - classical and traditional music. She joined her father's band, the Kerry Blues Ceilidh Band, in 1996, and spent almost every weekend playing at dances around the Highlands, gaining experience and developing her  stagecraft and comfortable way with an audience.

At the same time she became joint leader of the Highland Region Youth Orchestra, touring Ireland and Poland, and was a regular with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for four years. She subsequently became leader of her school orchestra and worked for both Balnain House and the Highland Council as a fiddle instructor, taking weekly classes of up to twelve adults and children.

Between leaving school and beginning her studies on the BA(Hons) Applied Music course at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow in October 2002, Anna spent a year in Canada, living just outside Toronto, where she played and absorbed Cape Breton and Irish fiddling styles. She also worked for the summer in New York as a violin instructor and bunk counsellor at French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts, the largest private summer camp in the United States.

An avid listener to all kinds of music, from traditional to heavy rock, Anna cites Eileen Ivers and Natalie MacMaster as her main fiddle influences and Martin Hayes and Blazin' Fiddles among her other favourites. On guitar she enjoys Tony McManus's playing and concedes that Dick Gaughan's classic guitar instrumental album Coppers and Brass, a favourite of her dad's, may well have filtered into her style as learning by osmosis plays a large part in her playing.

In 2000, Anna took part in McDonald's 'Our Town Story' in the Millennium Dome in London, as a member of the Highland cast portraying a highland wedding under musical director, pianist Andy Thorburn. Later the same year, she reached the semi-finals of BBC Radio 2's Young Tradition award and in 2001 she was invited to take part in renowned accordionist Phil Cunningham's celebrations for his 25th year as a professional musician at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.

The highlight of her career so far, however, has been the night of Sunday, January 26, 2003, when she won the much coveted BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of Year award in a thrilling and entertaining final.
Many, many more accolades and achievements are sure to follow for this hugely talented and very natural musician.

Anna has been in increasing demand for festival appearances and concerts, travelling widely in the UK, Canada and Europe in 2004.