The JAM collective, formed in memory of musician John Armitage, is following last year’s sell-out concerts with performances in St Andrews, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Helen Brown spoke to composer Rory Boyle about the piece he wrote for the concerts and the flowering of new music in Scotland.
This year, a CD of his piano music was released by young musician James Willshire. Recently, he scored particular success with his bassoon concerto, That Blessed Wood, commissioned by the National Youth orchestra of Scotland for its elite band, Camerata Scotland and premiered by the RSNO’s principal bassoonist David Hubbard. It won him a British Composers Award in the Stage Works category at the annual BASCA ceremony in London.
Currently, he is also working on Murray Grigor’s film to commemorate the 600th anniversary of St Andrews University “with my great hero, Sean Connery, narrating!
“I particularly love opera, the theatricality of it and the way it combines all the elements – sound, movement, words, voices. And writing for children is a pleasure and a challenge – you mustn’t talk down to them.
“When I worked with schoolchildren in Edinburgh, it made me realise what an untapped source of talent and creativity there is. Everyone should be able to develop that, to have the kind of chance for a lucky break in this kind of music.
“A lot of young people now are what you might call the X-Factorgeneration, when there is so much more out there to experience and enjoy and create yourself if you’re given the opportunity.
“Children have huge creative energy. We have wonderful specialist music schools in Scotland but we could do with encouraging more.”
After 25 years, he came back to Scotland to live in his native Ayrshire in 2000 and since then has combined his own writing with teaching at his alma mater, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He loves teaching and finds himself amazed and inspired by a lot of what he hears from his youthful students.
“Me listening to music must seem like a busman’s holiday to other people but I love working with young people. It’s such a vibrant place and the standard of performance is astonishing. When I was young, composers were considered a bit oddball but in Glasgow they are embedded in the fabric of the place.
“There’s no ‘Glasgow school’ though we worship diversity and develop each student’s own voice.
“Pigeon-holing people is a great mistake calling someone like Richard Rodney Bennett a film composer, for instance, when he has written so much more than that.
“I agree with Elgar a good composer should be able to turn his hand to anything, any type of music.”
And is it a good time to be a Scottish composer?
“There are more around now, very talented people but it’s hard to get your voice heard, to get commissions. There is so much creativity but I think it’s harder for young people than it was in my youth.
“Lennox Berkeley said that to me when I studied with him, that it was difficult for his generation and more so for mine. That’s why I think JAM is a fantastic organisation, giving composers the chance to create new work and hear it played.”
“This time, I hope it works!”
There seems little fear that that won’t happen. Tallis’s beautiful, spare and highly atmospheric music has inspired other musical “descendants” such as Vaughan Williams, whose Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is immensely popular. Rory commented: “I adore it. I haven’t approached it in quite the same way but I have toyed with little bits of O Nata Lux, like variants on some of the motifs and patterns.
“Tallis uses a lot of irregular phrases and I was captivated by the simplicity of a particular four-note phrase, a fragment that just wouldn’t go away and that I made quite a play of. The last three notes of his piece start mine.”
The inspirational Elizabethan also led an interesting life that Rory feels also had an effect on what he has created now, in the 21st century. When I suggest that the music and the man inspired him, Rory agreed: “That’s putting it very well. The details of his life are slightly sketchy but what is known is that he lived through the reigns of four different monarchs, turbulent times, especially religiously between Catholic and Protestant forces and survived.
“He seems to have been a great pragmatist and at the same time a perfectionist, someone who kept his head on his shoulders and adapted to the different and difficult times he lived in. And he lived to old age.
“I think that the way my piece is written, with the instruments and voices pitched against each other in places, reflects that life lived in conflict. Every commission is enjoyable for me but I loved doing this one. It came at the right time.”
The piece is also a significant part of Rory’s own musical life story – it’s his 60th birthday year this year. Born in Ayrshire, his talent for music was encouraged by his family “my mother would have loved to have been a musician” – and the family minister who recognised something special. “My sister and I learned the piano but I also used to do things like fill bottles with water and find the different notes!”
For five years between the ages of eight and 13, he was a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, absorbing the wonderful vocal music every day. By the age of 16 he knew he wanted to be a composer – “I just found the idea of living in a garret tower and writing music immensely attractive!” and came back to Scotland to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he was taught by Frank Spedding. As a student there he won the BBC Scottish Composers’ Prize and a Caird Tavelling Scholarship took him back south to continue his studies with the distinguished composer Lennox Berkeley.
Since then, he has been a prolific and versatile composer, winning many awards and accolades. He has written for many leading performers including a marimba concerto for Dame Evelyn Glennie and his collaborations with writers include projects with Vikram Seth, Richard Stilgoe and Dilys Rose, with whom he wrote a prize-winning opera, Kaspar Hauser, Child of Europe.
His repertoire ranges from chamber music to documentaries and choral works and he has also written four operas for children. In 2002, he became Composer Laureate for Schools with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, in partnership with the City of Edinburgh.
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People are frightened of modern classical music, so they say but the popularity of JAM and its concerts in Scotland seem to contradict the belief that it’s difficult and difficult to listen to.
Like last year’s events which garnered five-star reviews, JAM will unite a plethora of contemporary musical talent to play the work of contemporary composers with a nice historical twist built in. Ayrshire-born, Scottish-based composer Rory Boyle was asked to create a short piece for this year’s concert series and JAM will be presenting his specially-commissioned creation, Tallis’s Light, alongside its original inspiration, a beautiful little four-part hymn by 16th century composer Thomas Tallis himself, O Nata Lux (Light Born of Light).
The musical mix under conductor Michael Bawtree is an interesting one brass ensemble (the five-part Pure Brass), choral groups and organist Tom Wilkinson. The voices come from the combined forces of Edinburgh University Chamber Choir, University of Aberdeen Chamber Choir and the University of St Andrews Chapel Choir, with soloists Claire Seaton, soprano, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, mezzo, Iain Paton, tenor and Michael de Souza, bass.
A formidably talented force, in fact, and assembled in memory of a man who loved music and was determined to give young musicians the chance to shine.
JAM:sound theatricals is being performed at Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews on Thursday October 20, at St Cuthbert’s Church, Edinburgh on Friday October 21 and on Saturday October 22 at St Machar’s Cathedral, Aberdeen. All concerts start at 7.30pm. Tickets, free for children, range from £5-£15 from Box Office number 0800 988 7984 or jamconcert.org (link).
John Armitage had a highly successful “day job” in advertising but grew up surrounded by church and choral music through his father, a Precentor at Westminster Abbey and later the Rector of St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street. John became a gifted and busy trumpeter who subsequently went on to study music as a mature student. He sadly died in 1998 at the age of only 63 but as an accomplished player who also believed in the power of music to inspire and promote achievement, before his death he talked to his son, Edward, about how to encourage unknown or living composers by commissioning, performing and recording their work.
In the summer of 2000 Edward brought together a group of like-minded musicians to pursue this goal and from there JAM was born. Each year, Jam invites composers to submit music for brass quintet, organ and choir and from these, plus a commissioned work by an established composer, a concert programme is put together. Since then, the organisation has commissioned or performed over 60 new works.
This year includes pieces by Benjamin Britten and two Scottish premieres, Two Cairns by established composer Stuart MacRae and Invocation by Phillip Cooke, one of the young composers who sent in his work on spec. The programme also features Paul Mealer’s Ubi Caritas, part of the Duke & Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding ceremony earlier this year and his setting of the Tennyson poem, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal. Both this and Jonathan Dove’s The Far Theatricals of Day are previous commissions created specially for JAM.
This year’s premiere, Rory Boyle’s Tallis’s Light, is the product of more than a year’s work but almost a lifetime of inspiration. Rory explained: “I first came across this wonderful little gem of a piece by the Elizabethan Thomas Tallis, O Nata Lux, when I was a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor as a little boy and it has always haunted me. It’s so simple, it’s almost sublime but although I had tried to do something with it some years ago, it just didn’t gel somehow. So when I was asked to write something for JAM and for the wonderful and unusual combination of voices and instruments, it was a wonderful opportunity .
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