Praised for his “athletic” and “impressive and stylistically Scottish playing” (Dr. John Turner & Melinda Crawford) and heralded as “a real fiddler” (Bonnie Rideout), Tim Macdonald is a regular performer, scholar, composer, and teacher of Scottish-Baroque music.
Tim was the first US National Scottish Fiddling Champion to win on a Baroque violin, and his performances with Trio Settecento, Susie Petrov, Colyn Fischer, the Bach and Beethoven Ensemble, and many others have taken him from New York City’s Frick Collection to the villages of Indonesia, countless country and contra dances, Scotland’s Blair Castle, and beyond. Recent projects include helping to perform Scotland’s first opera, The Gentle Shepherd, in full for the first time in over two centuries, lecturing on applying the rhetorical ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to modern fiddling, playing fully-staged Elizabethan jigs with Steve Player, joining classical superstar Rachel Barton Pine for an encore of traditional tunes following her performance of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and serving as music and dancing master at a thoroughly-researched recreation of a 1770s American tavern. His radio appearances include WQXR classical radio (New York City), BBC Scotland’s Take the Floor, and WBOM radio (Rockford, IL).
He is the chairman of the Chicago Branch of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, the Musician-in-Residence for the Oak Park English Country Dancers, and is in demand for SCD balls, English country dances, contras, and “Playing for Dance” classes. He is perennially in charge of dance music at The Jink and Diddle School of Scottish Fiddling and has also played for English-Scottish-Contra Week (ESCape) at Pinewoods.
In addition to performing, Tim runs a private teaching studio and teaches at fiddle camps and clubs. His compositions won first place at the first two Scottish FIRE Composition Competitions and are now available in print. A “remarkably capable” scholar as well as a player (Johann Buis), Tim was an Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellow at the Newberry Library, where he researched the period-correct performance of Scottish-Baroque music, focusing on the work of Robert Mackintosh. He has guest lectured at Wheaton College (IL), the National Centre for Excellence in Traditional Music (Plockton, Scotland), and elsewhere, and presented his paper on Mackintosh at the 2017 Musica Scotica conference in Stirling. He also plays the viola d'amore, harpsichord, and concertina, serves on the board of the Great Lakes Baroque (with artistic director Jory Vinikour) and on the leadership team of his local church, is an award-winning software developer, and ran the Chicago Marathon for charity.