The Music Never Stopped: St Andrews students on carving out space for music

While the University doesn’t offer a music degree, many St Andrews students still find space for their extracurricular passions. Four student musicians discussed their artistic processes and how they balance music alongside their studies.

ELIZA TSE 

Eliza Tse is a second-year student who released her first album less than a month ago, titled Something’s Happening Somewhere and produced by her friend Lucas Terlinder’s label, Ink. According to Tse, the experimental folk album explores “childhood and growing up. It's about family changing, relationships ending, and evolving when you're young, and how hard that can be. It's a very childhood nostalgia-oriented album.”

Growing up, Tse’s parents always played Joni Mitchell. “She inspires me so much because her music is so direct. It makes you feel such intense emotions […] For me, that's like putting a name on a feeling that I could not have accessed otherwise. That's how I strive to be as an artist, to be able to make people feel that way.”

Tse has over 2,000 songs written and recorded on her phone, jamming on her acoustic guitar with a harmonica around her neck, playing both instruments in tandem. She started experimenting with sound at a young age: “I remember my dad bought me this tiny little audio recorder,” she recalled. “I would take it with me on road trips, wherever we went.” That gift sparked a passion that still burns. 

After high school, Tse took a gap year and attended Catalyst, a music school in Berlin. There, Tse studied Studio Recording and Creative Audio Production. That's where she met Terlinder, her future producer. “He saw so much potential in some of [the songs…] I don't think I would have made an album without meeting Lucas.”

Tse grew up between Germany and New Hampshire. Now studying Psychology and Social Anthropology at the University, Tse shared, “I think that the more things you know, the more creative you can be. The more knowledge that you consume, the more you can express yourself.”

Even though St Andrews isn’t the easiest place to kick off a music career, Tse has carved out space for her passion. “I do think [there are] so many creative people here, and since it's not a school that offers a lot of artistic curriculum, there are a lot of people who are eager to collaborate,” she explained.  

Tse’s dreams of a musical life in a bigger city are still alive, but for now, she appreciates what university life offers. “I want to be out there performing, [... but] I have my whole life to do that. So I'm just grateful to be at school, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.”

LILA DUPONT 

Lila Dupont graduated from the University two years ago with a degree in Psychology. Now living near her hometown in New York and with her album Good in the Blue coming out early next year, Dupont feels “excited to be back in NY. There's a really amazing folk scene that's emerging here.” 

In her first year at university, Dupont began writing music more than she ever had before. Looking back on how her abilities to write and produce music developed over that year, Dupont reflected that it “really solidified that I was gonna do whatever I could to be a musician full time.” Becoming a musician was still “a dream, but I really didn't think it was gonna become my full-time career until the end of my first year.” 

Dupont immediately moved to Nashville after graduating, which “was definitely a crazy adjustment,” she said. “When I was in St Andrews, I was so obsessed with the idea of being right in the centre of where all the artists are,” so moving to a city steeped in music seemed like the natural next step. Still, “[m]oving to a city where everybody is doing the exact same thing that you are was sort of like a big shock, but [...] being able to really immerse myself was really special.”

Even while taking classes and studying for her degree, Dupont still released songs throughout the year. With her producer, Scott Jacoby, she released one five-song EP and eleven singles. Although she missed out on networking and exposure opportunities in cities, Dupont feels lucky to have launched her musical career in St Andrews. “I've written the most amount of music [..] in St Andrews, just because I felt like I was intellectually driven.” 

Dupont's upcoming album explores themes of change, transition, change, and the emotional complexities of finding her footing in a new city. The theme “of the whole record is about leaving Scotland and moving to Nashville and that whole period of my life,” she explained. 

“It was just so beautiful,” she said. Sitting at her desk overlooking the hills beyond town, she wrote "so many, so many songs. I wrote hundreds of songs in St Andrews. It was my most creative place,” she said. 

CECILIA VIEIRA

Music taste can feel like the most intimate portrayal of ourselves, as our playlists grow up alongside our bodies. Cecilia Vieira, a second-year Medieval History student who released her debut song Handrolled on 29 October, began developing her music taste earlier than most. The soothing tones of Jai Uttal's ‘Gopala’ often rang through her mother’s yoga classes and into her unborn daughter’s memory. 

“My mom used to play this song a lot when she was pregnant,” Vieira said. “Whenever I listen to it, it's like I can remember being in the womb.” 

Vieira’s passion for music grew alongside her early childhood in the artistic Brazilian neighbourhood Santa Teresa. “There are so many elements in Brazilian music that are just not really present in American popular music or things like that,” Vieira explained. “There’s this whole other world of instrumentation that's really inspiring to me. Brazilian rhythm is, like, famously challenging and really cool.”

At 13, Vieira first picked up “the s****iest guitar of all time.” She laughs at the memory, saying, “You could barely play it!” But her tenacity with the instrument impressed her mother, who “realised that it was not a phase.”

A move to San Diego, California, and enrolment in a school with advanced artistic opportunities allowed Vieira to explore her blossoming interest in music. Yet despite writing and recording songs from the age of fifteen, Vieira was hesitant to release any of her music. 

“Part of the reason why it took me so long to release things is I feel like I am bearing my entire soul and just, like, lying naked in front of the world,” Vieira said. 

Working on the song extensively as a final project for class eventually led to a sense of pride that pushed Vieira to leap into releasing her music.

“It's the first song that I've ever felt so incredibly proud of in the sense of I would listen to this on repeat if it wasn't me that made it,” Vieira said.

The song provided Vieira a sense of creativity she experiences only with songs she truly feels passionate about. “With the songs that I love the most, it just feels like this channel opens up and it just, it comes into my brain,” she said. “I feel like it's not mine. I'm just sort of, like, the wider vessel for this creative thing.”

Future releases seem almost inevitable for Vieira, a person reliant on the art form as a way to process emotion. “There's all kinds of ways of coping with life and, you know, being a human in this really vast and confusing world,” she said. “And songwriting and singing is just the way for me.”

LILA KIKUCHI

If you’ve ever heard jazz played in St Andrews, you’ve probably seen Lila Kikuchi perform, whether from behind a trumpet, guitar, or microphone. Her artistic journey is vast in every sense: she has played across genres, instruments, and the globe since travelling from her hometown of Tokyo to St Andrews. 

Her interest in music began early with what she jokes was the “classic Asian thing where I took lessons in violin and piano.” From there, Kikuchi taught herself the ukulele and guitar. Her foray into trumpet was a twist of fate. “I started in middle school, because at my school you had to play an instrument, and I actually wanted to do saxophone, but there were too many people who wanted to do it,” Kikuchi explained. When a teacher asked for one volunteer to switch to trumpet, Kikuchi stepped forward.

Coming to St Andrews was a turning point for Kikuchi’s music, as she could immerse herself in a musician community for the first time, and she joined the band Thrush.

“When I made music in high school, I was the only person I could rely on, essentially […]  I didn't really have that network of peer musicians, and I was doing everything in a vacuum,” she said.

Since then, Kikuchi has shed an obsession with perfection and gone down a path of authenticity partially inspired by her bandmates. 

“I think Thrush helped me a lot because it’s not perfect, and it's, like, low-key bulls**t all the time,” she joked. “But, that's what makes it so fun and good, and just real.”

Kikuchi’s authenticity is evident in her most recent music, including a song she recorded an hour before leaving St Andrews for the summer. “It was one mic in the room, so you get all the sound of the room, the creaking from the guitar, and I think you can kind of hear the clock ticking in the background sometimes,” she explained. 

The rawness of Kikuchi’s music mirrors her creative impulse, which is often rooted in strong emotions. “If I feel something so heavy, [...] so big and I don't know where to put it, then when I put it into a song, it feels like a weight is lifted,” she said. “And it feels productive because you're transmuting this energy into sound.”

Kikuchi’s work reaches beyond an abstract level, especially her upcoming projects, because of her fascination with physicality. 

“I'm doing geography, and so there's a lot of emphasis on place and space, and my next music project, I want it to be very space-oriented,” Kikuchi explained. As she turns her attention to translating the physical realm into music, Kikuchi is focused on “the memories of the space and just, trying to capture as accurately as possible the feeling of that place in music.”

Illustration by Francesca Jeffs