Scottish fantasies
Malcolm Hayes marks St Andrew's Day with a musical tour of the Scottish landscape, from moor to mountain, island to highland and loch to sea
Malcolm Hayes takes us on a voyage through the music inspired by the highlands and islands of Scotland
The feeling of ‘atmosphere’ in landscape, as in music, is difficult to describe – and unmistakable when you sense its presence. The wide and spacious scenery of Scotland’s mountains, islands and moorland has always had a special appeal for composers, not just those from the country itself, but from across the European cultural world.
The artistic fascination of the Scottish landscape has much to do with a sense of remoteness, relating to Scotland’s geographical position on the far north-western fringe of Europe. In earlier centuries at least, this made it difficult to reach; if and when you did get there, the mysteriousness of the surroundings was deepened by the fact that you could usually only catch tantalising glimpses of those dark and brooding mountain ranges whenever the grey rain-clouds sweeping in from the Atlantic Ocean allowed a long enough break. The wet and often
stormy climate meant transport along the tracks and roads of much of the country was difficult, and sometimes impossible. Over time, the idea of the Scottish landscape as a kind of inaccessible, legend-haunted dream-world began to take root in the imagination of composers.
This combination of widespread mountainous terrain and a rain-swept climate meant that, unlike in England, the land itself was never able to support a very large population. While Scotland’s resources of traditional music were exceptionally rich (and still are), ‘high art’ music, with its need for a developed urban infrastructure to sustain it, could only develop more gradually. Then, in the weather vane swing manner of cultural fashion, the perspective changed. The rise of the Romantic age in Europe brought about the new idea that the mountainous landscape, far from being a dangerous place best avoided, was now a choice attraction both to creative artists and to an audience increasingly living in urban surroundings. And Scotland had already produced one of Romanticism’s most influential creations.
From 1760 onwards, James Macpherson published a sequence of ‘translations’ of
Gaelic epic poetry as narrated by one ‘Ossian’. While based to some extent on Scottish Gaelic tradition, the tales and characters of The
Works of Ossian – among them the story of the Celtic hero Fingal – were largely fabrications, concerned with all manner of bardic broodings by the imagined blind and ageing poet in a suitably misty landscape. This did not prevent the poems from becoming wildly successful throughout Europe. The much-read novels of Walter Scott now raised Scottish Romanticism’s allure even further. Suddenly, in the musical world too, Scotland was ‘in’. Beethoven, no less, found himself making arrangements of Scottish folk songs. For an ultra-gifted young composer in search of inspiration, Scotland became somewhere to visit.
Mendelssohn’s immortal ‘overture’ The Hebrides, completed and premiered in 1832, is a fully fledged symphonic poem in all but name (Liszt did not coin the term until two decades later); and the music conjures its early-romantic, island-studded soundworld with astonishing imagination and finesse. The irony was that the Scottish landscape’s place in the international musical scene had now been established not by a Scottish composer, but by a German one. The country’s own classical music resources were well behind England’s at the time, let alone Germany’s; it was bound to be a while before home-grown Scottish composers of talent could materialise and flourish.
Gradually this began to happen – as with Hamish Maccunn, whose overture The Land of the Mountain and the Flood was premiered at London’s Crystal Palace in 1887 when its composer, the son of a Greenock-based shipowner, was a student aged 19 at the Royal College of Music (the title comes from a poem by Scott). Maccunn’s melodic gift is evident in the overture’s likeable main theme (made famous as the signature tune of the BBC TV series Sutherland’s Law in the 1970s).
Maccunn died aged only 48, having never quite replicated this early success, but by then other native-born composers had begun to make their mark. Edinburgh’s Alexander Mackenzie combined his traditionalist German-trained streak with an interest in his country’s folkmusic and, at least by association, with the rural surroundings this came from, as in his orchestral From the North and (with solo violin) Pibroch and Highland Ballad. Another son of Edinburgh, Learmont Drysdale, caused a stir in the early 1890s with his orchestral works Thomas the
‘‘The artistic fascination of the landscape has much to do with a sense of remoteness ’’
Rhymer, The Spirit of the Glen and the Robert Burns-inspired Tam O’shanter. The inspirational quality of the Scottish scene was then explored by John Mcewen, notably in his Solway Symphony – dating from 1911, and showing a distinct influence of Debussy and Richard Strauss in its post-wagnerian evocation of the Solway Firth that separates the English and Scottish west coasts.
The years after the First World War saw the launch of the Scottish literary renaissance, whose leading figure was the poet Hugh Macdiarmid. There was particular concern to reconnect with the nation’s grass-roots vernacular: Macdiarmid himself wrote extensively in Scots as well as English. The leading musical figure in this vintage was
Francis George Scott, whose preferred voiceand piano genre – featuring fine settings of Macdiarmid and Burns among others – explores much in the way of local musical colour. A nextgeneration talent was Erik Chisholm, whose more modernist approach did not preclude engaging also with Scotland’s native music and its wider setting, as in the slow movement of his First Piano Concerto ‘Pìobaireachd’ (Pibroch), with its Bartókian sense of surrounding rural space.
Yet the irony remains that much of the most vivid music written in response to the Scottish landscape has come from composers who are not Scots themselves. The London-born Arnold Bax’s early attraction to Irish culture was effectively ended by the 1916 Dublin Easter Rising and the subsequent war of independence against the British. Needing a new source of inspiration, Bax found this in Morar on Scotland’s west coast, whose interaction of land, sea and sky memorably colours his between-the-wars cycle of seven symphonies, from the wonderfully evocative Third onwards.
Several decades later, Peter Maxwell Davies’s discovery of the Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown led him to visit Orkney itself and, soon after, to relocate there permanently from his native England. The impact of the local scene, culture and history of this cluster of northern islands is palpable in Max’s music from then on – memorably so in Stone Litany (settings of runic carvings found inside the burial cairn of Maeshowe) and the choral cycle Westerlings. The varying motion and patterns of the Atlantic waves, seen from the window of his first Orkney home in Rackwick on the island of Hoy, was a key idea in the creation of his Second Symphony.
Even in a contemporary composing scene whose stance is on the whole more antiromantic than not, today’s generation of Scottish-born composers demonstrate the enduring appeal of their native surroundings. James Macmillan’s From Ayrshire, a miniature two-movement violin concerto written for
Nicola Benedetti, portrays the world of his birthplace with the spellbinding vividness of a Scottish Janá ek. Judith Weir’s opera
The Vanishing Bridegroom, assembling three different Scottish folk-tales into a single work, has passages that brilliantly suggest the strange half-light of those long northern summer nights. And Thea Musgrave’s Loch Ness – a Postcard from Scotland has its orchestra’s tuba-player entertainingly portraying the famous local underwater inhabitant. Yes, it will always rain rather too relentlessly in Scotland. But in musical terms, today’s landscape looks bright.