Routes Quartet: The self-sufficient ensemble bridging the gap between classical and folk music

To most classical audiences a string quartet is an established and familiar setup. The Routes Quartet, however, by combining the format with their unique blend of folk, classical, jazz and fiddle traditions, is turning these audience expectations on their heads. Taking the unique approach of writing all their own music, the quartet bridges the divide between classical and folk music in particular, working and reworking melodies thought up by the group’s members into new works for the ensemble which bring together influences from both sides of the genre divide.

The group’s recent album Arche is now available to listen to and, from Thursday, audiences will also be able to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the album was made in a new documentary film by filmmaker Paul Jennings. Through this in-depth exploration of their creative practices, the group aims to open their unique blend of genres up to new audiences, while showing other groups – both classical and folk – a pathway between these two very different sound worlds.

When they’re not making music together violist Emma Tomlinson, fiddle players David Lombardi and Madeleine Stewart and cellist Rufus Huggan are scattered across Europe, so I caught up with them via Zoom.

Violist Emma Tomlinson founded the quartet with cellist Rufus Huggan after a chance meeting at a pub ©Paul Jennings

Could you give Classical Music a brief overview of the Routes Quartet’s creation and growth?

Emma Tomlinson (ET): Rufus and I met in the pub. My background was in chamber music and the classical sphere, while Rufus had done some classical but was studying on a traditional music course, so we said, “Why don't we make a quartet and focus on Scottish traditional music?" We looked at existing traditional music and some of our own compositions, but we approached them in quite a traditional way. That first album was a mix of our own stuff with existing traditional music.

When the two fiddle players we started the quartet with went on to do other projects, David and Madeleine joined us and we ramped it up a notch in terms of our own composition and improvisation. Our latest album combines our own compositions with sounds that we've captured over time and manipulated into soundscapes that link the album together.

Rufus Huggan (RH): We made a firm decision that weren't going to try, simply just because we're in the shape of a quartet, to emulate everything about the quartet, but the decision to perform only works created by the ensemble was a mixture of happenstance and necessity. On the one hand, you've got four people, all of whom write and play a lot, but on the other hand, you have four people who are really rather difficult to get in the same room together so it is simply so much easier for us to play our own material.

What does the writing process look like for the Routes Quartet?

ET: We come together with a tune that one of us has written and we play it over and over again and learn it. Then we ‘reverse work’ it, coming up with bridges and deciding where the tune is taking us. In this process, we work as a traditional music band more than a string quartet.

David Lombardi (DL): I'm in Brittany – I’ve lived in France for two and a half year – so we always need to plan a period of time to work on these pieces. On the first day we might just decide what material we're going to work on, then we play together and if a moment is good we'll try to analyse it and write it down as a reference. We're not composers as such; our aim is to make music that we enjoy playing, but we now write the music down in case another string quartet would like to perform the same thing. That's not the goal, but if they do that we love it.

Rufus Huggan: 'Having the folk music mindset makes it much easier to have ideas rather than worry about what's on the page' ©Paul Jennings

Madeleine Stewart (MS): Normally this process happens in person and it's very easy to bounce ideas around that way, but over the lockdown we wrote a bunch of sets over Zoom. Instead of starting from improvising and coming up with stuff on the spot, we were writing stuff down first and then experimenting with it. It feels so much smoother to be in person and to react in the moment because that's the way traditional music works.

DL: While we can obviously write parts for each other, we are not just our instruments, we each have our own touch, our own style. In classical music, if you're performing a string quartet, you might try to think about who composed it, how it should be performed, but when we play we are still four trad musicians; everyone plays their own variations, styles and ideas.

ET: Part of the challenge has been capturing that because the string quartet is so delicate. We've really had to get to know each other and get that blend and balance and almost anticipate what each other are going to do. I'm quite excited to see what the next 10, 20, 30 years bring – the more we get to know each other, the better that balance is going to be.

Fiddle player Madeleine Stewart finds the instantaneous collaboration encouraged by the folk music tradition 'smoother' ©Paul Jennings

How do you feel the two disciplines of classical and folk music complement each other within the Routes Quartet creative process?

RH: In traditional and folk music there's a lot of oral tradition, a lot of singing as communication; work songs and function for the music. There's very little theory going on, it's all about the playing, the function and the form. When classical music musicians try to play traditional music, they tend to struggle because there's no absolute right answer to it, there's no singular version of the melody. Having the folk music mindset makes it much easier to have ideas rather than worry about what's on the page. You can come up with an enormous number of ideas very, very quickly and then using a classical mindset you can lock in and get the attempts towards perfection.

The quartet is very self-sufficient – with work written and performed by the players and management by violist Emma Tomlinson – how do you make sure the group doesn’t become insular?

MS: All of us have a lot of different projects and people that we play with, so individually each of us has a lot of outside ideas and inspiration. If we were only playing in the Routes Quartet, then I think that we would run the risk of rehashing the same things over and over again, but living in separate areas and being surrounded by lots of different people is a very good thing.

David Lombardi: 'When we play we are still four trad musicians; everyone plays their own variations, styles and ideas' ©Paul Jennings

ET: Celtic Connections is on in Glasgow at that moment, and we've all played, been to gigs and been inspired by this exchange of music. Translating that to a global scale because of the internet, we can listen to a Scandinavian tune or a Bluegrass band for example and it can influence what we write or how we arrange. We're always soaking up other influences.

DL: We have also been involving other musicians and singers in our jamming, and improvising string quartet music around what they do, seeing how we react to that external element. Of course, we also have different tastes in music. We listen to so many different styles and, consciously or unconsciously, all these interests come out in the way we make music.

How does the quartet’s unique approach to making and playing music manifest in its latest album, Arche?

ET: The newest album has brought our improvised starting point together with tunes that we've all written and we've ended up exploring how we can transition from a very open improvised soundscape into tunes. We all sat in the room and set up the microphones and went with it. I think the album's quite special because of those different elements coming together.

RH: Once we've reached whatever equilibrium we have between string quartet and folky, trad-y sound, we then go into the studio and all of a sudden, we have the entire third layer of microphones and postproduction ideas. That really affected the final outcome, especially in terms of some of the interlude tracks – which are much more heavily post processed and a bit more modern – being intermixed with all the ideas we import from the classical world.

'Once we've reached an equilibrium between string quartet and folky sound, we go into the studio and all of a sudden we have an entire third layer of microphones and postproduction ideas' ©Paul Jennings

You will also soon be releasing a documentary-film about this album. What can audiences expect from this upcoming release?

ET: The whole 10 days of recording this album was filmed. Filmmaker Paul Jennings interviewed the two producers (Greg Lawson and David Donaldson) and each of us individually about our own ideas on writing and arranging for a trad string quartet, what our personal influences are and what we hope to get out of the album. It also looks at why Greg decided to come on board, what inspired him to be part of the project, and the same with David. David also taught us all about the microphone, so hopefully in the future we can be even more self-sufficient and not need anybody else; we’ll know how to set it up and just go.

We are taking the film on tour to some academic institutions where we’ll give workshops, Q&As and performances. We’ll also do concerts where we will screen the film for the first half of the gig and in the second half, we'll play the album. We'd love to hear from people about what the film elicits in them. I'm personally hoping that traditional string players will think a bit differently and be a bit more expansive in how they approach string writing in the traditional music moving forward. Equally from a classical perspective, it would be great to get people to think about how to be more creative and a bit freer, off the score.

The Routes Quartet are set to perform on BBC Radio 3's In Tune at 5pm on 6 March