Fiddle player, singer and composer Isla Ratcliff is a passionate and inventive musician from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Since releasing her debut album The Castalia in 2021, Isla has been receiving increasing attention for her fiery fiddle playing and her rich singing voice. She was a Semi-Finalist in the BBC Young Traditional Musician of the Year 2022 competition, and she was nominated for Up and Coming Artist of the Year 2022 at the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards. She has performed across Scotland, the UK and Europe, including at Celtic Connections, Cambridge Folk Festival, Sidmouth FolkWeek, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Seall Festival of Small Halls, the BBC Proms, and festivals in France, Germany and Denmark. Isla’s second album, The Scottish Four Seasons, is due for release in 2025.
Isla’s debut album The Castalia features traditional and self-composed tunes inspired by the 4 months that she spent in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada in 2019. Described as ‘quite the best debut album that has come this way in a long time’ (The Living Tradition), her album expresses her love for the tradition, its ethos of community, and the power of music to bring people together.
Isla’s second album, The Scottish Four Seasons, is a Scottish trad arrangement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Due for release in 2025 to mark the 300-year anniversary of the work’s original publication, Isla’s album highlights the dance-like nature of Vivaldi’s music and reflects on how Scotland’s climate has changed in the past 300 years. Featuring Isla on fiddle, accompanied by string ensemble and piano, this contemporary Scottish folk interpretation of a 300-year-old classic crosses the genre boundaries of classical and folk music and highlights important environmental concerns.
Inspired by landscape, people and experiences, Isla aims to create music that excites, soothes and challenges the listener to think. Her work is underpinned by her interests in tradition, community, cultural politics, the environment, and music’s positive impact on our wellbeing.
Isla’s compositions include fiddle tunes, songs, ensemble arrangements, theatre scores and short film scores. Aged 16, she won the lyrics category of Amnesty International’s Power of Our Voices protest songwriting competition with her song ‘Death Row’. In 2019 she devised a musical-theatrical production A Reawakened Monument of Antiquity, inspired by the music and cultural-political context of A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs (1784). She is currently composing a fiddle tune for every Munro that she climbs (172 to date!).
Isla is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (MMus Scottish Music, 2020) and the University of Oxford (BA Music, 2017). As a child, she received her musical education first through the Suzuki Method and then at the City of Edinburgh Music School at Broughton High School. Aged 13, she played a trad duet with Nicola Benedetti in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.
As well as a performer and a composer, Isla is a fun and inspiring violin/fiddle teacher. She teaches classical violin through the Suzuki Method, both privately and in schools, and she teaches a weekly adult group fiddle class at the Scots Music Group. She holds a DipABRSM Teaching Diploma with Distinction. As a community music practitioner, Isla has worked with early years, primary school children, young parents, people with disabilities, and people with dementia, delivering songwriting workshops, teaching violin and supporting music rehearsals.
When she is not playing music, Isla enjoys hillwalking, cycling, cross-country skiing and reading. She speaks Russian, having learned by immersion at the Russian Embassy School in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia aged 10-11, and she is now learning Scottish Gaelic and Norwegian.
Isla Ratcliff 