THE Cumnock Tryst's founder and director has been given a prestigious accolade for his work in music.
Sir James MacMillan will become the latest recipient of an Ivors Academy fellowship, with previous winners including Sir Elton John, Kate Bush, Joan Armatrading, Genesis star Peter Gabriel, Beatles star Sir Paul McCartney, former The Police frontman Sting and American composer and conductor John Adams.
Sir James, who previously won the Ivors classical music award in 2009, told the PA news agency: “Once I looked to the list of musicians who had been similarly honoured, I was overawed with classical musicians and people in other forms of music, but it’s quite a roll call of some significant figures so I was delighted to be brought into that number.”
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He composed the arrangement Who Shall Separate Us? for the Queen's funeral in 2022.
The piece, based on a “text from St John, one of the Queen’s favourite passages from scripture”, was composed in 2011, in preparation for her death.
Sir James admits he wrote the arrangement “quickly” and it was left in a “drawer for the next 11 years, and there it remained until the day she died”.
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“The music was brought out and the rehearsals began," he said, "but at that stage I had not necessarily forgotten about it. But it had so faded from my mind.
“So it was an interesting experience, hearing the piece that I’d written years earlier, but also the shock of suddenly realising that the music was going to reach a live audience of four billion people worldwide, and that’s never happened to me before and it wouldn’t happen again, I’m sure.”
Sir James, who grew up in Cumnock, is the founder and director of The Cumnock Tryst, which he believes is “laying down a kind of exemplar of how classical music can actually work when it comes to big questions like outreach, diversity, equality”.
In addition to the annual Tryst festival each autumn, the event holds a series of concerts and musical workshops in the area throughout the year, including a recent 'Come and Sing' event to mark the Tryst's 10th birthday, and a gig with top folk singer and songwriter Karine Polwart in Cumnock this weekend.
In addition, the Tryst is holding a brand new residential summer school for composers at Dumfries House this August.
The 2024 Tryst festival will run from October 2-6 at venues around Cumnock.
Sir James also spoke of the current “anxiety” about funding of the arts and music education amid cuts to local government budgets and inflation pressures on venues.
“One should not be pessimistic, though, about these anxieties,” he said.
“There will always be challenges but, the thing is, there always have been challenges, people have been expecting the end of classical music for at least 100 years.”
He also said there is a “continual problem about a perception that it’s only for a particular strand in society – an elite strand, a privileged strand, an educated strand, educated in a particular way, with a degree of money and parental support – but we’ve got to live with those worries and criticisms”.
Sir James, who describes himself as from a working-class background, was inspired to enter the music industry by his grandfather, who was a coal miner and played the euphonium in colliery bands.
He said: “The arts are for everyone, and they should not just be for a particular strand of society, and classical music, especially, should be brought into the milieu of people who perhaps didn’t have those privileges early in life.”
He added that he has not yet celebrated his fellowship win, but will wait until he conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on Friday, where a private reception will be held for him afterwards.
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The event also marks the first UK performance of his piece Fiat Lux – which was commissioned for a Californian concert last year and performed with a US conductor and orchestra.
Sir James also disagrees with the perception that “American audiences generally, are much more conservative in their taste”.
“I encountered a very curious and listening audience in California and that’s what a composer needs,” he said.
Sir James said the forthcoming concert in the UK will feel like “putting on some old clothes” because the orchestra has performed his music before.
“I expect the music to be the same, but the sound world to generate its own British colours,” he added.
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