Tryst founder awarded prestigious music prize
THE Cumnock Tryst’s founder and director has described how he was “overawed” after discovering he’d been chosen for one of the most prestigious accolades in the musical world.
Sir James MacMillan was announced as the latest recipient of an Ivors Academy fellowship, with previous winners including Sir Elton John, Kate Bush, Joan Armatrading, Genesis star Peter Gabriel, Beatles icon Sir Paul McCartney, former The Police frontman Sting and American composer and conductor John Adams.
Sir James, who grew up in Cumnock, says the Tryst festival, which is 10 years old this year, is “laying down a kind of exemplar of how classical music can actually work when it comes to big questions like outreach, diversity, equality”.
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.
“It’s quite a roll call of some significant figures, so I was delighted to be brought into that number.”
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”.
“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 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.”
In addition to the annual Cumnock 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 and a gig with top folk singer and songwriter Karine Polwart in Cumnock this weekend.
The Tryst will also hold a new residential summer school for composers at Dumfries House this August.
The 2024 Tryst festival will run from October 2-6 at venues around the area.
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, 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 workingclass 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.”
A private reception to celebrate his win was held after he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at The Barbican in London on Friday.
That concert also saw the first performance of his work, Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), for choir, organ and orchestra, which was commissioned for a concert in California last year.