1 Fundsache - Weihnachtsgrüße von Donnie

Hallo, habe heute diese Message auf Donnie's Homepage gelesen:



Message From Donnie
Dear Friends
It barely seems possible that Christmas has arrived upon us once more and that as ever, for my own part at least, we all engage in the end of year rush to finish things of.
It has been a very busy year on a number of fronts and in particular, I have spent a great deal of time working on trying to pull together an £8 million pound project here on Skye. This is a new centre for the Creative and Cultural Industries bringing together a critical mass of arts and new media activity and creating about 30 new jobs in the process. We are now just about ready to start on the actual process of building and we are looking to have the centre open for Sept.2007. This as some of you may know is also the Highland 2007, the year Scotland celebrates Highland Culture, so there will be specific programmes and events taking place relating to that theme. It has been a long hard struggle to get the financial backing and political support for the project and it is immensely satisfying to know that we are just about there. This type of project has become very familiar to me as I was very closely involved in developing the new Education and Cultural Centre on Islay, opened in 2003.
This year I have also been very busy as Chair of a major digitisation project called ‘Tobar an Dualchais’ or in Scots, ‘Kist o Riches’. This major £2.8m project, will digitise 18,000 hours of sound recordings in both Scots and Gaelic and make them available on-line. At the moment many of these precious recordings are simply not available to anyone, as they are held within secured archives and therefore something that should be a major educational resource is simply not available. Much of the material is also held on formats that are now in danger of degrading quite rapidly so conservation of the collections is also a major part of the project. This project will create about 23 full time jobs and importantly many of them will be in the Highlands and Islands. What is also very satisfying is that in many cases the jobs will be in locations where the original material was recorded/collected and therefore instead of being a resource which was removed from the community it is now a resource which is returning and in the process giving people access to good jobs, in digitising and transcribing. 18,000 hours is of course an incredible amount of material and will form one of the most remarkable educational resources ever created. As far as I am aware it is the biggest heritage project of its kind currently in existence.
In addition, I have also been part of a team which has successfully attracted £500,000 Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for a visual arts research project, ’Window to the West’, which will look at the link between our visual culture and the language and culture. Once again this is an area which has never been previously looked at in any depth, and, given my own professional background in the visual arts, it is a project that I am very excited about. As some of you may also know, I was very heavily involved this year with the production of the book ‘A Waxing Moon’ / ’Gealach an Fhaìs’, a very well written history, published in both Gaelic and English editions, of the story of the development of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and the wider story of the regeneration and development of the Gaelic language in Scotland over the last 30 years. It is a very readable book, which I can highly recommend for the Christmas Stocking for those of you who have an interest in the language. I have also been involved as part of the course development team, in the work to create a new degree course at SMO, a BA Gaelic and Traditional Music which it is hoped will be available Sept. 2006. This will be the first course of its kind looking at traditional music very much from the language perspective and the only course taught through the medium of Gaelic. Additionally I have been working on a Ministerial advisory group looking at the use of advance technologies in delivering Gaelic medium education in our Secondary Schools. So as you can see, there has been a great deal happening on the development front, relating to language, education and arts and cultural heritage. It has been a very busy year. To add to that I have also become Patron to ‘Mypas’ an exceptionally good project which offers young people services, counselling, support and training, looking particularly at drugs, alcohol, sexual and mental health and is very much a project which young people themselves access rather than an education project which is foisted on them. I am delighted to be able to help.
On the music front it has been a slightly quieter year, particularly on the live performance side. However, I did enjoy some fantastic shows with the band, in Kilmarnock, Stirling, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Arbroath and of course the Mauchline Holy Fair and I would like to thank you all for making them so pleasurable. I am really looking forward to getting out on tour in 2006 once the new studio album is released which is now looking likely to be around April. Despite, the relatively sparse number of full live shows, I did enjoy giving a number of performances at special events such as the Glasgow Hogmanay, the Special Olympics closing ceremony which was a truly inspiring event and of course the numerous appearances at Hampden Stadium during the World Cup qualifiers. The latter performances, as some of you may be aware, became the subject to a really petty, juvenile and rather nasty little political stunt by two political minnows desperately in search of ‘media oxygen’ and sadly, for them, based entirely upon a lie. I had hoped that our paid politicians had more to do with their time than worry about which order the verses of Flower of Scotland may or may not have been performed in. However, sadly some people don’t seem to have the decency to simply admit that they were quite simply wrong and to apologise for the offence which their ill-considered actions may cause. However, it did not detract from the immense pleasure of these events and the excitement of performing with 50,000 of the Tartan Army and for one of the games at least to an estimated TV audience of 18-20 million viewers which is of course an amazing feeling. It was also fun to be able to record my own version of the song, which went out as an official promotion on the morning of the Scotland v Italy match at Hampden. Unfortunately the team performances, despite the more recent improvement under manager Walter Smith, did not result in Scotland qualifying - but it was fun while it lasted - another day will come !!!!
On the recording front there has been delay after delay on the contractual, budgeting and scheduling side and as a consequence I have made the decision to change record labels and will shortly be signing with a Scottish based label. I am concluding the contractual arrangements at present and will be announcing this very shortly. I am really looking forward to getting into the studio and working on the new songs and in particular to approaching the recording in a different, perhaps more direct way with the songs at the centre of everything. Recording is always about finding the right ‘space’ in which to place things and often it is more dependent on what you leave out as much as what you put in. It all sounds a bit enigmatic but I suppose it really is always a bit of a journey. So, I am looking forward to meeting you all at the end of the journey and having the pleasure of sharing the music with you.
I will be ending off this year and welcoming in the new, in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle, where the BBC have invited me to perform ‘Auld Lang Syne’ live at ‘the Bells’. This will be broadcast nationally and also the idea is to beam down to the big screens in Princess St. and to get the 300,000 crowd singing along. I will be performing with Phil Cunningham and his specially formed ‘orchestra’.
Anyway I look forward to invading your sitting rooms and hopefully starting off 2006 as your first, ‘first foot’and to seeing you all at Celtic Connections in January. Until then and until we meet again in 2006 can I take this opportunity to thank you all for your support and interest and to wish you all the best for the Christmas and the New Year.
Finally can I thank all the guys in the band, Chris Harley and Alan, Joan in the office, David Ross of GWTF and finally Richard for all his considerable efforts in designing and maintaining this web-site. Thanks to them all.
Beannachdan na Nollaig agus Bliadhna bha Ùr
Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year