The 2025 McEwen commision was awarded to Emily Doolittle whose choral work Cairn with a text by Perthshire writer Dawn Wood was premiered by the University Chapel Choir led by Katy Lavinia Cooper in the University Memorial Chapel on Tuesday 27 May 2025.
Please check back soon for a recording of the Cairn premiere.
McEwen curator Drew Hammond with Director Chapel Music Katy Lavinia Cooper, poet Dawn Wood and McEwen composer Emily Doolittle
Programme note
Emily Doolittle - Cairn
Cairn is a collection of choral pieces about stones and fossils found in Scotland, based on poetry by Perthshire-based writer and artist Dawn Wood. This is my third collaboration with Dawn: I really enjoy working with her, both because of her vividly evocative poetry and because of a joyful and open creative process. Each of the poems can be understood metaphorically, but also describes an actual encounter Dawn has had with a found stone. Much of my music is based on sounds, processes, or ideas from the natural world, but I typically focus on the ephemeral or transient – a birdsong, wind, rain. For these pieces I really enjoyed tuning into the much longer timescales of stones – their quiet steadiness as ideas, species, and even geographies come and go.
Emily Doolittle 2025
Performer biographies & full details of the 2025 premiere can be found in the McEwen concert programme 2025.
Emily Doolittle
Emily Doolittle’s music has been described as “masterful” (Musical Toronto), “eloquent and effective,” and “the piece that grabbed me by the heart” (The WholeNote). She has an ongoing interest in zoomusicology—the relationship between animal songs and music—which she explores in both her composition and through interdisciplinary collaboration with biologists. Recent activities include the premiere of Reedbird, commissioned and performed by the Vancouver Symphony, the premiere of (re)cycling I: metals for found and recycled percussion objects by Architek Percussion at the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, and writing the music for a 2023 Audible audiobook adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. She is currently working on a set of pieces about turtles for Canadian pianist Rachel Iwaasa (commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts) and an algorithmic composition based on data about Arctic plankton, in collaboration with Ashkan Tabatie, for pianist Anna Showalter. Emily is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Dawn Wood
Dawn Wood was born in Omagh, County Tyrone and studied at Queen’s University, Belfast. She moved to Dundee in 1986 and now lives in Perth and Kinross. Her background is science- related, gradually becoming interdisciplinary. Her doctorate, Making a Third Place: the Science and the Poetry of Husbandry, was part-based at the Centre for Natural Design at Dundee Contemporary Arts. As a result of this research, I published my debut poetry collection, Quarry, which was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First collection Prize in 2008. I have since published four poetry collections, the most recent in 2018. I currently work in educational science as a part-time tutor in Postgraduate Medical Education, University of Dundee and I am also a trained hypnotherapist. Writing poetry is something that I am driven to do, to make sense of my experience of being in the world and to push the edges of what I think I know.