Tuesday 19 January 2021

The Cumnock Tryst and Trinity College announce new ten-year partnership

Sir James MacMillan
Sir James MacMillan
Sir James MacMillan's Ayrshire-based festival The Cumnock Tryst is expanding its community engagement and music education work with a new partnership with Trinity College. 

James MacMillan founded the festival in 2014, bringing an array of international artists to Cumnock and since then the festival has developed with significant community engagement and music education initiatives such as A Musical Celebration of the Coalfields, as well as evolving from a four-day festival into a year-round arts organisation.

The festival and Trinity College first collaborated in 2019 with a project called Flow Gently when James MacMillan and Jennifer Martin mentored young composers from Auchinleck Academy over a three-month period in their writing of new works for clarinet quartet which were then incorporated into a specially written script celebrating the life of Robert Burns and performed by Mr McFall’s Chamber.

The new partnership is envisioned to be a 10-year one and aims to create a new centre of excellence in the learning and teaching of composition. This is beginning with a new project and a new book.

Build it Loud is a composition project for Advanced Higher Music Students at Cumnock’s Robert Burns Academy, whose new campus opened in late 2020, bringing together two secondary schools, two primary schools and a school for those with special needs, all under one roof for the first time. To celebrate the opening of the campus, the theme of Build it Loud is the connection between the creative processes in both music and architecture. James MacMillan and Jennifer Martin are mentoring young composers along with a composition student from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland as they write a new piece for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Brass Quintet. 

To build on this, Trinity College has commissioned a new book from James MacMillan and Jennifer Martin Martin to illustrate the compositional process and to support those teaching and learning composition in the upper years of secondary school. The book will be launched at the 2021 festival in October.

Full details from the Trinity College website.

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