The “Muse Room” is the room in my house where I make music and my wife makes visual art. Published the first Friday of the month, each issue of Letters from the Muse Room will include news and updates about my music, as well as something that has inspired me creatively over the past month.
Dear friends,
My news and inspiration are one and the same this month: At the beginning of October, I had the amazing opportunity to attend The Cumnock Tryst in Cumnock, Scotland!
It’s a music festival led by Sir James MacMillan, Scotland’s greatest living composer, and features four days packed with performances at venues in and around Cumnock. This video is a nice summary (and our group makes a few appearances!): https://vimeo.com/365497264.
Cumnock is a small town in the county of Ayrshire, and it’s where MacMillan grew up — the Tryst is his way of giving back to the place he came from.
It was a terrific time of hearing great music and spending time with great people (our group is the picture at the top of the email) — certainly inspiring in many ways. The beauty everywhere is breathtaking. The countryside, the architecture, the venues where the music is performed.
I greatly enjoyed the performances too, including:
– MacMillan’s Cumnock Fair
– Krzysztof Penderecki’s Three Miniatures for Clarinet and Piano
– An acoustic set by famous Scottish singer/songwriter Barbara Dickson (including a terrific performance of “Eleanor Rigby”)
– Steven Osborne performing Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas
– George Frideric Handel’s coronation anthems
I was also inspired by a pair of works from another Ayrshire composer, Jay Capperauld.
He had a piece on the closing Festival Chorus concert, which included spoken and whispered sound effects. The effects reminded me of the piece I wrote with Melanie Penn that came out of our first trip to Cumnock, A Journey of Becoming.
And one of the concerts was dedicated to Capperauld’s piece Afterlife, for alto saxophone and piano. It was an evening-length* work that was too dissonant for some of the people in my group, but I found it enthralling.
* “Evening-length” is a concert-music term that just means a piece is long enough to take up a whole concert by itself.
I felt it had a wide range of emotions and ways of creating and releasing tension, and it was performed magnificently. I couldn’t find any audio clips online, but I hope it’s a piece that gets recorded and performed a lot more.
On our last day in Cumnock, I was asked what my takeaway was. My response was that I wanted to create a piece that was like Afterlife, with the same ambition, scope and range — but something that everyone in my group would enjoy listening to.
I said something similar a few days ago when describing my goals as a composer: I want to write music that fellow concert-music composers enjoy as well-written and not being toned-down for the masses, but that non-musicians also enjoy without feeling that it’s inaccessible or too dissonant or too hard to follow or lacking anything to hold on to.
It was really an incredible opportunity and a very inspiring trip. I hope I’ve been able to share some of the inspiration with you.
Peace,
AJ Harbison