Working in contemporary music, I am used to eyebrows being raised by friends and family when I answer their seemingly innocent dinnertime question, “What are you up to at the moment?”. My responses over the years have ranged from “staging an opera about alien abduction underneath Concorde” to “ensuring that a soprano can get a tattoo live on stage while she sings”. However, I’ve never previously experienced anything like the familial spluttering in response to my most recent answer – “putting on a concert with 100 tuba players in a garden outside Edinburgh”.
I do understand some of their surprise, but to be honest 100 tubas seemed like such a logical solution to the problem I was given that I’m not sure I understand it entirely! James Waters, artistic director of the Lammermuir festival in East Lothian, Scotland – and regular partner-in-crime for some of Red Note Ensemble’s wilder productions, including the aforementioned opera under Concorde – phoned me one day last year to say “I have found an interesting – and very beautiful – place to put on a concert. I just don’t have a clue what music to do.
Come and have a look!” Duly invited out to look at Amisfield Walled Garden – a beautifully laid out space near Haddington, maintained and much cherished by a group of committed volunteers – I was taken not only with how lovely it all was, but also just how big. Originally the kitchen garden for a now vanished stately home, it must have been quite the kitchen. The walls are those of a castle – an intimidating 20 feet high– and the space itself extends over the equivalent of several football pitches.
James – face beaming with delight at setting a challenge that he knows I’m not going to turn down – turned to me and said: “Let’s fill the garden with sound!” Challenge duly accepted. To my mind, with something that size, you’ve got three options. Either massive amplification (a little rock’n’roll for Lammermuir, perhaps), a lot of bagpipes (always an option in Scotland, but the contemporary repertoire is sadly limited), or those quintessential outdoor instruments – brass ones.
And then the essential question: what on earth are they going to play? I do have some history with large-scale brass performances. I myself don’t play a brass instrument – although my brother was a founder member of the brass band in the town that we grew up in – but I have worked with many brass players over the years, and staged a number of mass-participation brass events in my other job as festival director of New Music Dublin.
However, I have no handles at all on the contemporary brass repertoire beyond that, so it was time to call in a second associate from the contemporary music underworld – the celebrated trumpeter Marco Blaauw, well-known for his playing with Ensemble Musikfabrik in Germany to help us work out what everyone was going to perform. Marco breezed into Scotland, trumpet in hand, to “try out the acoustics” of the garden. Those bitingly cold days in Amisfield in December are precious memories, as Marco also brought along John Wallace – fellow trumpeter extraordinaire, former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and best known to the general public as the impeccable soloist performing alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at Charles and Diana’s wedding – to have a listen.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
