The Kate Young String Quintet play Worthing on back of new album

They play the Pavilion Theatre Atrium on Tuesday, September 24 at 7.30pm, with the new album Umbelliferæ released three days later on Friday, September 27.

Inspired by traditional folk music from Edinburgh, Kate will be bringing her innovative and other-worldly compositions to the stage. Having explored traditional folk music globally, Kate embraces her discoveries in her own songs, unique soundscapes within her own Scottish folk background.

She is driven by the exploration of new sounds found in traditional music around the globe, which feed into her compositional world. As a musician, Kate combines voice with fiddle-playing techniques to conjure intriguing soundscapes as she navigates her way across musical genres.

The result, she promises, for Worthing will be “an immersive show of moving melodies and tranquil songs about the wonders of British nature and herbology.”

“The whole thing all originated from a commission from Celtic Connections back in 2016. I wrote the music for an eight-piece band, string quintet plus bass and drums and harp. Right from the start I took the concept and wanted to write songs inspired by plants. I had studied herbalism before that, and I was just inspired by the plants. I looked through the different names for plants and the folklore surrounding the traditional uses for plants. I've done some courses on that. There were the words and the stories but also in herbalism there is intuition and I saw a correlation to how a musician works. It is based on knowledge but it is also based on your intuition, a feeling about how a song should come together. There is no one easy way to put plants into music but it would be something specific like trying to imagine that a dandelion was a person, and that’s what fuelled my inspiration.

“We started as an eight-piece and then it was condensed down to a quintet, and the international band we are playing with is coming to Worthing. I play fiddle and sing.”

As for the new album: “The name is from the genus of plants that look like umbrellas, that have aerial parts like sweet cicely or fennel or carrot. And they spread their seeds in the wind. I just loved that as a concept for the album. I wanted to find a way to disseminate this ancient knowledge that we have had for hundreds of years but which your average Joe doesn't know about. Many people know about how you can use a dock leaf but there are lots of other things that people used to know, things that were part of general knowledge and that people just don't know now. My wish would be for that knowledge to come back and to bring it back but in a gentle way. I don't want to preach to people and tell them what they should or shouldn't know but I was set on a path that I found very inspiring and then I did my own research.”