No composer writes a euphonium concerto without a good reason. James MacMillan has two reasons for giving this smaller, higher-pitched brother of the tuba the starring role in his latest work.
The first is David Childs. Like his father and grandfather before him, Childs is a kind of Welsh wizard of euphonium playing — probably the finest virtuoso of the instrument in the world today, and a man determined to put it firmly on the orchestral map, rather than being confined to playing the tenor lines in brass bands. MacMillan, 65, is just the latest composer to be dazzled into supplying Childs with a new concerto. Childs has premiered 15 of them already.
But Macmillan’s second reason is more personal. Like Childs — who learnt his craft in the great Cory Band in Treorchy, south Wales, which his father conducted — MacMillan also has deep family roots in a brass band of a former mining community. In his case, the community is Cumnock in Ayrshire. MacMillan’s grandfather George Loy (to whose memory the new concerto is dedicated) was the band’s euphonium player.
What’s more, it was Loy, a coal miner himself, who first thrust a cornet into the hands of the young MacMillan and took him along to band practice. So with this new concerto one of Britain’s finest composers is paying homage to the people, and the musical tradition, that launched his life in music half a century ago.
“My grandfather was a big influence on me,” MacMillan recalls. “He had spent 50 years under the ground, hacking away at the coal face, keeping the lights on, helping us win the Second World War. But men like that sought out beauty wherever they could — and he sought it out in music, which he adored. He didn’t just play in the band, he also sang in the local church choir, and he would talk to me about music all the time. He and my mum introduced me to so much. My mother played the piano, so I found Beethoven sonatas and Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words lying around the house. It made me want to try composing myself. I wrote my first piece when I was ten.”
Would such a music-saturated household have been unusual in a mining town? “Not at all,” MacMillan replies. “As a child I kept meeting men and women who sang in choral societies, Gilbert and Sullivan or whatever. And the standards in those brass bands were, and are, incredibly high. It’s still true that many top brass players in British orchestras came through brass bands in working-class communities. For instance, John Wallace, the principal trumpet in the LSO and Philharmonia for decades, was the son of a joiner in Fife who played in the town’s mill band.”
Is Cumnock today the same sort of town as when MacMillan was growing up? “Cumnock is now referred to as an area of multiple deprivation,” he replies. “It never felt like that when I was growing up, even though there was no money around. My grandfather and father wouldn’t have regarded themselves as poor because they had jobs — miner and carpenter respectively.
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“But then coal mining collapsed and all those jobs went. So Cumnock has had a very difficult 40 years. It’s one of Scotland’s left-behind communities. I’ve just come back from conducting in America, where they talk about the rust belt. But I think Scotland actually invented the rust belt.
“Now there’s a lot of talk about regenerating Cumnock — and much hard work going on, by politicians, social workers, industrialists, even the King, who bought Dumfries House [a stately home just outside Cumnock] for the nation. But there’s another sort of regeneration needed that’s just as valid. Maybe, in a mysterious sense, even more valid and more impactful — and that’s spiritual regeneration.”
Is that where the Cumnock Tryst comes in? It’s an annual four-day music festival that MacMillan founded 11 years ago, and into which he has poured a great deal of his composing, mentoring and organisational energies.
“Yes, I see that spiritual regeneration happening now in Cumnock,” he replies. “Music is a spiritual art form. That’s a phrase I hear a lot from music lovers who don’t necessarily share my world view or my religion [MacMillan is a fervent Catholic who has written dozens of Christian-based compositions]. Music allows us to see ourselves as more than just the sum of our parts. It opens doors to something bigger than ourselves. I would call that the numinous — the door to the divine. Others will have different ways of expressing it. But there’s a common understanding among musicians that our art form has an incredible potential to transform the individual and perhaps communities as well. That’s my big hope for the Cumnock Tryst.”
Even the title of MacMillan’s new euphonium concerto plays homage to Cumnock and its two rivers. It’s called Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock. “I didn’t set out consciously to evoke my childhood with this piece,” MacMillan says. “But I think there may be subliminal memories at work.”
MacMillan is one of Britain’s most performed composers in America and on mainland Europe, where he will be the Dresden Philharmonic’s composer in residence next season (the orchestra will premiere his Sixth Symphony). His sumptuous choral music made a profound impression at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, and his Stabat Mater was performed in the Sistine Chapel at the express invitation of Pope Francis. Few living composers have heard their music performed in such grand surroundings.
Yet when he composes he retreats to the utter solitude of a house buried deep in the Ayrshire countryside. “From my study I can see the isles of Arran and Cumbrae, and there’s a marvellous view right down the Brisbane Glen,” he says. “Right now there are lambs in the fields and a lot of roe deer. I don’t have any close neighbours but there are farms and hills all around. This is the Scotland that I love. And I think it impacts very strongly on my music, even if I’m not always conscious of it.”
Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock will be performed at BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff, on May 1 (and on Radio 3/BBC Sounds) and at The Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, on May 2, bbc.co.uk/bbcnow
