The River, Hamish Napier's composition for Celtic Connections’ New Voices series, was partly inspired by the Spey: specifically the mile-long stretch that flows past the folk musician’s childhood home, where his classically-trained mother first taught him to love music, and his father to love nature, history and the outdoors.

“It’s where my mum sang to me when I was wee, and helped me write my first ever tune,” says the 33-year-old. “It’s where I spent hours and hours practising, always with the roar of the river in the background. If I’m asked where this piece of music comes from – that’s the answer.”

Even among today’s wealth of contenders, Hamish Napier is one of Scotland’s busiest and most multi-faceted folk musicians. His skills on flute, whistle and piano feature in acts as diverse as the Cask Strength Ceilidh Band and the wholly extemporised duo Nae Plans, meanwhile accompanying the likes of Eddi Reader, Mairi MacInnes, Ross Ainslie, Mike Vass and Jarlath Henderson. Also a beautifully eloquent singer, and first-class alumnus of Strathclyde University’s Applied Music programme, Napier spent a postgrad year at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College, studying jazz, US roots music and composition. Besides gigging and recording, his crammed career portfolio currently includes a lectureship in theory and composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, on its traditional music degree course, tutoring for the Highland Fèis network, and directing the Aberdeen International Youth Festival’s Ceol Mor big band.

For Napier himself, this array of activity simply mirrors the milieu in which he works. “There are so many strands to Scotland's music,” he says. “It’s constantly evolving, borrowing from and merging with other roots and contemporary genres, and I want a reflection of exactly that in all I do.” He cites the late Martyn Bennett as a central inspiration: “Martyn had his eyes and ears open to everything around him, not just music but comedy, characters, heritage and landscape. Like him, I aspire to take in as much as I can while I’m here.”

Those ambitions promise to bear richly abundant fruit with the Celtic Connections premiere of The River, which also pays tribute to his very earliest musical sources.

In writing The River, Napier also pondered his title’s metaphorical and philosophical dimensions. Simultaneously reflecting Napier’s enthusiasm for traditional dance, as the rhythmic heart of Scottish music, these ideas centre particularly on one of the piece’s 10 component sections – simply entitled The Dance – which Napier says composed itself as he slept one night, while visiting a reiki-practising relative on Mull.

“The natural cycle of the river is one epic, glorious and ever-changing dance,” he explains. “We humans seem to think we are separate from the natural world around us, but go for a swim in the eddy under the Old Spey Bridge, and you’ll feel no boundary where your body stops and the river begins. Every object around us is just a very temporary clump of stuff, created from a vast blob of interlocked material. Everything that exists is never a "thing" for long, and will soon disperse itself to form something else.”

As this suggests – and Napier acknowledges – he “ended up going pretty deep into the whole thing”, and even where other sections relate more directly to the Spey itself, he has mined the river’s history and lore across an alluring array of thematic tributaries. Among them are the life-cycles of salmon and mayflies, the area’s formerly water-borne timber trade, folk-tales involving a particularly malevolent local kelpie, and the specialisms of Speyside fly-fishing. Underlying it all, however – as with Napier’s entire creative practice – is his bedrock fealty to Scotland’s traditional idioms. “You just cannae beat a good tune,” he says. “The music in The River is all standard, staple Scottish forms – strathspeys, marches, jigs and reels – and one of my key aims is always to write strong, enjoyable melodies, that other folk might end up playing in sessions.”

With next weekend’s première also launching a recorded version of the piece, as Napier’s first solo album, his stellar live ensemble also features Sarah Hayes, Martin O’Neill, James Lindsay, James Duncan Mackenzie, Ross Ainslie, Dave Milligan and Tom Gibbs. Anticipation is already running high – and for no-one more than Napier himself: “I’ve been wanting to write a New Voices piece for years,” he says. “I’ve played in five other people’s, so I’m really, really excited to do my own.”

Hamish Napier's The River premieres next Sunday, January 17 at 1pm in the Strathclyde Suite, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Tickets: www.celticconnections.com