Young voices sing to the music of Beltane

Published on Monday 4 April 2005 01:19

EVERY YEAR, AS the sun dips on 30 April and rises on May day morning, a strange ceremony is played out on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. Revellers re-enact an ancient Celtic celebration of life, fertility and the coming of summer - just the sort of scene you’d imagine Stravinsky envisaging, Russian-style, when he penned his famously earthy, unorthodox and racy masterpiece The Rite of Spring.

The Edinburgh-based Beltane celebrations so fascinated local author Dilys Rose - and more importantly her teenage daughter - that when she was asked to come up with a text that could be set to music by the Ayrshire-born composer Rory Boyle and form the centre of the latest stage in a long-term project he is engaged in with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO) and Edinburgh school pupils, she knew instantly she had the ideal storyline.

The fruits of this collaboration can be heard later this month at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, ten days before this year’s hilltop ceremonies, when the 60-strong choir of Portobello High School teams up with members of the SCO in Scotland’s answer to Stravinsky’s ritualistic bte-noire.

Boyle is quick to point out that his new work, The Fires of Bride, is not intended to have the same devastating impact on Edinburgh audiences that Stravinsky’s had on the Parisians of 1913, when the police had to be called in to quell the riots. But it will, he says, convey the moods of celebration, spiritual mysticism and optimism that are central to the Rose’s text.

The performance is just part of a three-year project, being run jointly by the SCO, Edinburgh City Council, the Scottish Arts Council and several other bodies, which places Boyle as Composer Laureate for Schools at the centre of a fascinating schools initiative.

The SCO’s education unit launched the programme in 2003, when it outlined the scheme’s main objectives. The most basic of these was a requirement for Boyle to write one work each year that would combine pupil forces with players from the SCO. The first commission - Different Journeys - was premiered last year. The Fires of Bride is the second, to be followed up next year with the last of the three, which Boyle is describing at this point only as "the big one", a grand finale featuring the whole of the Edinburgh Secondary Schools Orchestra alongside the SCO.

More importantly, these works have also been designed to form the basis of a progressive three-year link-up with a selected Edinburgh school. The school chosen, by competitive process, was Portobello High, and Boyle has been working with 17 senior music students there.

Boyle’s focus is exclusively on the composition element of the school syllabus, an area that has proved troublesome for teachers, who generally lack training in it, and consequently for the pupils, who are often steered towards conservative efforts by their safety-conscious teachers.

A reflection of that nervousness is likely to be expressed in an expected announcement by the governing Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) that Invention - as it is called - in the Higher exam will now only be marked internally by teachers as a pass or a fail.

How ironic, then, that against such anticipated downgrading, the SCO project and Boyle’s sustained in-house involvement should be aiming to loosen the creative reins for the Portobello composition students. "They’re certainly more confident about what they are doing, and it has been satisfying to see them develop," says Boyle. "But it’s still a battle trying to prise them away from a reactionary stance that is predominantly pop-based and therefore very conventional."

The fruits of Boyle’s involvement will form part of this month’s Queen’s Hall event, and the ten student works on offer won’t just come from Portobello. Other elements of the Composer Laureate project have enabled Boyle to exert his influence in other Edinburgh schools.

Through an integrated professional development programme, the composer has also been conducting workshops with secondary teachers across Edinburgh, which, Louise Martin says, is intended to give the project a wider and more lasting benefit. Sure enough, some who were perhaps reticent at putting their schools forward in the way Portobello did have come to the sessions hoping to benefit from Boyle’s expert guidance.

But even so, Boyle immediately detected among many that lack of confidence which has continually dogged the completely successful integration of composition into the school curriculum.

That’s not to say that this aspect of the project has not had its successes. Indeed, the next important stage is the launch of a website this summer - www.icompose.com - that will open the scheme nationally and internationally to teachers who are seeking resource material and guidance in ways to approach composition in the classroom.

In other words, this month’s public event, the Queen’s Hall concert, is just a snapshot of a project whose legacy will potentially be far-reaching.

But within Scotland, I fear, it will do little to encourage music teachers to adopt a more adventurous approach to composition, especially when the incentive to make that happen is not coming from those at the SQA who draw up the curriculum and who, ultimately, provide the safe and easy option.

Imagine what we’d have missed out on if Stravinsky had followed that route.

• Rory Boyle’s The Fires of Bride is premiered at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 20 April, at 7:30pm.