What was your introduction to music?
I was lucky enough to grow up with a grand piano in my house. I remember being about four, sitting underneath it and tapping on the sounding board and then trying out the keys. From a young age, I loved how you could build these pillars of harmony on the intervals. I started playing the piano soon after that, first with my mother and then with a local teacher and I started composing around the same time.
What's been a highlight of your career?
At the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), one of the most joyous things was when we worked with Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow University to celebrate Shakespeare's 400th anniversary. We wanted to do something unique so we took themes from A Midsummer Night's Dream and gave them to four composers. They wrote 15-minute orchestral pieces that were performed by the BBC Scottish and RCS symphony orchestras. We gave the same prompts to groups of actors, including our first cohort of D/deaf and BSL-user actors. Together, they produced an original work that translated what Shakespeare meant to the modern era. It was broadcast live by BBC Arts and became Scotland's contribution to the BBC Shakespeare celebration. An amazing student-led collaboration across the arts that I don't think could have been achieved elsewhere.
What's your perspective of music education in Scotland?
It's challenged, just like the rest of the UK. On the one hand, there's some good news that more students are staying on to do a Higher in Music but the qualification has become quite generalist. It adds breadth to a young Scot, but it doesn't prepare them for entry to a conservatoire, which requires consistent music teaching at a high level from a young age.
Austerity has meant that local authorities have less money and they have many competing priorities. It's often too easy to cut something that is seen to only effect a future voter than something more immediate like potholes or refuse collection. All of them are important things so I don't envy local authorities facing those decisions. The RCS wants to be part of the solution here in Scotland in a number of ways, including making sure that teaching is seen to be as a creative part of a portfolio career for all our graduates. Some of the top soloists in the world are also teachers. In the UK, I think teaching might have been seen as not glamourous as a performing career, yet any musician needs to have the capacity to learn for life, to reinvent and teach themselves. Ideally, you have this virtuous circle of teaching others, bringing what you teach into your own performance and then cycling that back through. We want to release an army of teachers into Scotland. We're working in partnership with the Prince's Foundation, where we set up an outpost of our Junior Conservatoire to work with East Ayrshire. To me this is a model that we could replicate elsewhere.
Is austerity impacting the RCS?
Definitely. First of all, we want anyone that has an ability, whatever their socioeconomic background, to have the ability to explore and flourish. However, what we're seeing is that it tends towards those whose parents can afford lessons. That means you've got a smaller pool and the danger is that music becomes elite. One of the things I've loved in Scotland is there are people of all economic backgrounds at concerts, opera, and ballet. We don't want to lose that. We want people of all economic backgrounds in our institution. I want all of them to be working well and I hope that we can find ways to partner with the government to make it better.
Anything else to add?
I think everyone in the field of music needs to be making the case about how powerful music and how important it is to society. We're living in a metric-driven society where every government wants to see economic growth quickly, and while it's hard to point to direct evidence, we know that the skills that young people get through music will be essential to a shifting economy. Artificial intelligence will take on many of the tasks that humans used to do, from accountancy to legal conveyancing. If we want a creative adaptable workforce we need it to be delivered in part through the arts. The challenge with music is that it requires consistent investment. You need that regular teaching so that students can make progress. So somehow, we have to make the case that it's important for our society, it's important for our communication across social divides. If we're going to solve this, it's the artists that are going to be one of the answers.
