VoxCarnyx

Barony Hall, Barony Campus, Cumnock

“Composition is a major part of the Scottish music curriculum,” proclaimed Sir James MacMillan in his preamble to an event that effectively showcased what his Cumnock Tryst festival is doing to invigorate that very discipline in East Ayrshire schools. The problem is, it’s not always treated as such, was very nearly dropped by SQA a few years ago, and it’s not an area that every music teacher feels naturally comfortable with.

That’s clearly not the case at Robert Burns Academy, where even the head of music, Ronan Boyle, had his own composition featured alongside seven short works by his Advance Higher Music class. These were created as part of a Tryst initiative that catapulted upcoming Ayrshire composer Gillian Walker into the school over a period to work with the youngsters, and which culminated on Day 2 of this year’s 10th Birthday Festival in an hour-long omnibus presentation called The Music of Land Reclamation. 

All eight works were performed in sequence against a screened backdrop of images from a stunning project by photographer Simon Butterworth – Abstract Excavationism: The Art of Industrial Land Reclamation – that the pupils had selected as initial triggers for their respective works. These were uniformly short (as SQA guidelines prescribe), individually characterised (dictated by their unique choice of photos), and helpfully drawn together through their generic scoring for flute, clarinet and cello. 

Performed by a professional ensemble – Lee Holland, Butterworth himself and Naomi Pavri respectively – and under the seated direction of MacMillan, the music was heard in it best possible light, even if the cellist’s music took occasional flight, seemingly propelled by the school hall’s air conditioning. Ever the professional, the performances continued seamlessly.

Witnessing such sincere and concise responses to Butterworth’s photographs was a joy. As he explained in his introductory comments, what started off as exploratory snapping around opencast mining sites in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire was transformed by the onset of drone photography, giving Butterworth (whose day job is as a clarinettist with the BBC SSO) literally a birds eye view of the scarred landscape below. Realising the extent to which the captured images aligned with his own passion for the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Barrett Newman and their likes, he reversed the creative process, basing the photography on actual paintings. 

It was clear from the pupils’ own introductions that this had inspired fertile ideas for structuring, texture and mood. Stephanie’s A Constellation on Land envisioned a glittering effervescence captured in her chosen photograph. Amber contrasted dissonant machinery with chirpy birdsong. Chelsie wove a Burns’ air into her iridescent The Fuzzy Tartan, Freya’s Insomnia did what it said on the tin, keeping us fully awake to relish its captivating contrasts, and setting us up for Mr Boyle’s own Tainted Restoration.

Joshua made the most of an additional bass clarinet in formulating the darker reaches of Light vs Dark (Chiaroscuro). The evocative textures of Leah’s neatly-engineered Snowed In fed sweetly into another Freya’s Whispers of the Wood, its playful dialogue and slick contrasts signing off this ambitious project on a well-deserved high.

Ken Walton

(Picture: Stuart Armitt)