Classical music in Scotland
Concerts, largely composed of "Scottish airs", developed in the seventeenth century and classical instruments were introduced to the country.
Several Italian musicians were active in the capital in this period and there are several known Scottish composers in the classical style, including Thomas Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie, the first Scot known to have produced a symphony.
By the late nineteenth century, there was in effect a national school of orchestral and operatic music in Scotland, with major composers including Alexander Mackenzie, William Wallace, Learmont Drysdale and Hamish MacCunn.
Important post-war composers included Ronald Stevenson,[1] Francis George Scott, Edward McGuire, William Sweeney, Iain Hamilton, Thomas Wilson, Thea Musgrave, John McLeod CBE and Sir James MacMillan.
[5] Music in Edinburgh prospered through the patronage of figures including Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (1676–1755), who was also a noted composer, violinist and harpsichordist.
According to Jamie Baxter, by 1775 Edinburgh was a minor, but functioning European musical centre, with foreign and native resident composers and professional musicians.
[2] In the mid-eighteenth century a group of Scottish composers began to respond to Allan Ramsey's call to "own and refine" their own musical tradition, creating what James Johnson has characterised as the "Scots drawing room style", taking primarily Lowland Scottish tunes and adding simple figured basslines and other features from Italian music that made them acceptable to a middle class audience.
[10] In the 1790s Robert Burns (1759–96) embarked on an attempt to produce a corpus of Scottish national song, building on the work of antiquarians and musicologists such as William Tytler (1711–92), James Beattie (1735–1803) and Joseph Ritson (1752–1803).
Thompson was inspired by hearing Scottish songs sung by visiting Italian castrati at the St Cecilia Concerts in Edinburgh.
He collected Scottish songs and commissioned musical arrangements from the best European composers, who included Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1732–1809).
[15] From the mid-nineteenth century classical music began a revival in Scotland, aided by the visits of Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) and Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) in the 1840s.
[17] Max Bruch (1838–1920) composed the Scottish Fantasy (1880) for violin and orchestra, which includes an arrangement of the tune "Hey Tuttie Tatie", best known for its use in the song "Scots Wha Hae" by Burns.
[21] MacCunn's overture The Land of the Mountain and the Flood (1887), his Six Scotch Dances (1896), his operas Jeanie Deans (1894) and Dairmid (1897) and choral works on Scottish subjects[14] have been described by I. G. C. Hutchison as the musical equivalent of the Scots Baronial castles of Abbotsford and Balmoral.
[20] John McEwen's (1868–1948) more overtly national works included Grey Galloway (1908), the Solway Symphony (1911) and Prince Charlie, A Scottish Rhapsody (1924).
[14] Conductor Hugh S. Roberton (1874–1952), founded the Glasgow Orpheus Choir in 1906 and Donald Tovey was appointed the Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh in 1914.
[24] The influence of modernism can also be heard in the work of Erik Chisholm (1904–65) in his Pibroch Piano Concerto (1930) and the Straloch suite for Orchestra (1933) and the sonata An Riobhan Dearg (1939).
He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music, for which he brought leading composers to Glasgow to perform their work.
Stevenson developed a tonality from Scottish music, creating settings of folk songs including concertos for his instrument the piano (1966 and 1972).
[24] Albeit born in Yorkshire, the composer Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988) spent much of his adult life as Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh.
His opera Columba, with libretto by Edwin Morgan (poet), was partly inspired by his love of Iona and the western isles.
A native of Lancashire, Salford-born Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016), lived on Orkney from the 1970s, and co-founded the St Magnus Festival there.
[26] Pieces inspired by, or dedicated to his adoptive home, or Scotland more generally, include Farewell to Stromness (1980), An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (1985) (one of the few orchestral pieces to feature a bagpipe solo), Ten Strathclyde Concertos (1986–96) (written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and soloists) and the operas The Martyrdom of St Magnus (1977) (inspired by the novel Magnus by George Mackay Brown) and The Lighthouse (1980), based on the Flannan Isles mystery.
1950), who has undertaken numerous commissions by the BBC and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, was influenced by Stockhausen but also returned to the folk idiom.
