Composer Sir James MacMillan has seen the fortunes of his home town improve. Luckily, it’s a perfect place for music
Driving into the west of Scotland from England for the first time is a surreal experience. Just north of Gretna Green there’s a point when everything suddenly and inexplicably doubles in size and scale, as though God, in an act of joyous whimsy, pressed the button marked “200%” while designing the place. It was at this point that the rain began.
We’d been driving for about six hours by then, during which the sun had done its best to melt our windscreen. Through county after county we’d passed, barely a cloud overhead and not a hint of anything but the same to come. Then an angry purple-grey sky appeared without warning. After suffering through weeks of Saharan heat in London, I said a silent prayer to St Medard. My fiancée, whose delight had more than equalled my discomfort, suppressed the frown threatening her forehead’s composure – then smiled with utter bliss as the hills spread wide their arms and that double-sized landscape revealed its grandeur.
Cumnock lies about an hour and a half north of Carlisle, not far from the coastal town of Ayr. I was curious about the area from which a singular musical talent had emerged, intrigued to see the towns, villages, hills and streams that formed the young James MacMillan’s hinterland. Their names on the map before me, progressively more Scots the further north we motored – Crawford, Abington, Douglas, Muirkirk – suggested Sir Walter Scott and high romance. The reality can be described in a word: deprivation.
The Scotland of the composer’s youth was a country of pit villages and brass bands; of strong Catholicism linked inextricably with republican socialism; of working-class pride, yes, but also of poverty and alcoholism. The pits are all closed now, their place in the local economy replaced by seasonal work serving tourists. Drug addiction has replaced alcoholism as the worst social ill, its ravages terrible and obvious on the faces of too many locals.
I mention this to Sir James as we drive out of the town in his silver Land Rover, a symbol, along with the well-cut tweed coat and good Swiss watch, of his great success. “Oh yes,” he sighs, “it’s a real problem. You can see the needles in the streets around your hotel.”
In common with Michael Gove, that other strigine Scot beloved of the English Right, Sir James has such courtly manners, such softly spoken courtesy, that the sheer force of what he says can knock one flat.
“There’s so little employment here outside the holiday industry,” he reflects, “and little was done to help people get new skills when the mines closed. Of course, there was also great resistance to the idea of change, there’s no denying that. People are hopeless, so they look for happiness in drugs. They blame Thatcher and the Tories for everything that’s wrong – the resentment in this area is still enormous – but they didn’t do enough to help themselves.”
With the pits went the brass bands, though Sir James and others bring together brass players from local schools each year for a festival known as the Cumnock Tryst in an attempt to rekindle that focal forge for musical talent. He himself began as a brass player, as well as playing the piano and organ and singing in choirs. “There was always music at home and in the family, particularly from my grandfather. He was a euphonium player and took me to my first brass band practices. He encouraged me to play the organ, too – I’m still more of an organist than a pianist. My mother was a good pianist, so that music was always there.”
After a quarter of an hour’s drive, we arrive at Dumfries House. This Palladian jewel, restored by the Duke of Rothesay (as the Prince of Wales is known in North Britain), combines one of Robert Adam’s finest houses with original Chippendale furniture picked specifically for it by the 5th Earl of Dumfries. It is in this regard a rare survival, so many great houses having been divested of their bespoke furniture over the past century in order to meet egregious inheritance tax bills.
That survival was only possible because Prince Charles took a personal interest in the house and its contents, arranging for it to be bought for the nation and setting in train a number of schemes which, a decade later, have borne remarkable fruit. For the idea was not only to save a historic house and collection, but also to revitalise this depressed area by giving people the skills and jobs of which they were so deeply in want.
Locals were employed and taught to renovate the house and reshape grounds. Other unemployed were hired and trained to be front-of-house staff. Estate cottages were converted for holiday use and the house advertised as a wedding venue. Sir James’s son held his own wedding breakfast there, following a nuptial Mass at St John’s, Cumnock. That church, built by the 3rd Marquess of Bute, is also where MacMillan’s parents were married and MacMillan himself was baptised. Sports facilities and conference rooms were built for hire and the grounds opened to the public, free of charge.
Dumfries House is now the second-largest employer in the area, a focal point of the tourist industry in the west of Scotland. Just as there was once rivalry between the Marquess of Bute at Dumfries House and the Laird of Auchinleck at Auchinleck House about who was the greater host, there is now rivalry between the staff of the two venues about which is better. Sir James tells me how he hopes this spirit of competition and enterprise will spread throughout the wider area. “You can see what’s been done here, what a great venture this is,” he says. “It’s given people hope again.”
Dumfries House will be the setting for the Cumnock Tryst 2018’s pièce de résistance, the festival promenade concert. Three short, intimate chamber recitals in three separate rooms will combine with an architectural tour of the house so that people can, in Sir James’s words, “hear beautiful music in one wonderful space after another”. One of the works he has composed for this year’s festival is a setting of Robert Burns for the bellringers and singers of Greenmill Primary School. This will be performed in the house’s entrance hall as part of the promenade and was written with the space particularly in mind. “It’s a wonderful acoustic for that combination, because it’s so resonant and yet not harsh,” Sir James says. “The tones really do ring in here.”
As we walk around the exquisite rooms in which the other two recitals will take place, there is real glee, approaching childlike excitement, in Sir James’s voice as he describes the furniture, architecture and history of the house. This is a place he has known all his life, though only recently from the inside. “My grandfather and the Dowager Marchioness sat on the same pew in church. I always remember that, rich and poor together in the sight of God. Of course the local people would never have been allowed in the house – though they may have got a look at it when they were employed as beaters on the estate.”
How apposite that this house, this glorious harmony of architecture and furniture risen from desuetude, should be the setting for the Cumnock Tryst. For the festival is not only designed to bring music back to this county which once rang with the sound of brass and voice. It is also a social enterprise, the earnest contribution of a man trying to revive his home town by giving it the tools to regain its dignity. Where once, not so long ago, plaster crumbled and peeled from the walls, architraves now sit proudly after tender attention from local craftsmen. Sir James hopes to do the same for Cumnock. On the basis of my brief but bountiful visit, I should say he’s succeeding magnificently.
David Oldroyd-Bolt is a writer, pianist and communications consultant
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.