Stuart MacRae in conversation with Svend Brown - in the Conversations series

Venue Dunard Library, The Hub
Address Castlehill, Edinburgh
Reviewer Pat Napier

Over-energetic ceilidh dancing at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney has left Stuart MacRae hobbling around on elbow crutches. But he was in fine form when talking about his music to Svend Brown.

It is a rare priviledge for a living composer to be granted a whole Edinburgh International Festival concert. It is even more remarkable when that composer is only 25 years of age. So what is it about him that attracts such recognition? Was he a child prodigy? No, because his first piano lesson came at the age of twelve and his earliest keyboard experience (tinkering around with his grandmother's harmonium at age nine) was really only doodling. But he had sung at the Mod and with Inverness Cathedral Choir.

Very quickly after beginning his lessons, he progressed and soon he was playing in the Highland Regional Youth Orchestra, whose conductor was James MacMillan. It was MacMillan who suggested, after seeing a composition, that MacRae should aim to become a composer rather than an instrumentalist. The harmonium, sustained sounds, the interest in writing lots of thematic modules, which would then be joined together and layered to provide smooth movement through the music, earned him the nickname 'Modular MacRae' at Durham University. In speaking about his compositions and their marketing, it became obvious that he had benefitted hugely from his education in music.

Ranging across topics such as abstraction and intuition, programmatic music and pre-knowledge of works, of how a composer can help people know themselves, MacRae revealed that he was a composer from Scotland (rather than a Scottish composer), whose music is firmly rooted in the European avant garde but filtered through his own intuition and often benefitting from such things as very Scottish heterophonic psalmody. Endearingly, he admitted that though his tastes lie with the minimalists, he "wasn't yet brave enough to try these extremes". In his compostions, three things have to come together before things click into place: the conceptual idea or the form come first, then the notes appear. He illustrated these points by referring to the music to be played in his concert.

This fascinating insight into such a young composer's mind promised a bright future and many important works to come from this young man who has, even at this stage, the clearest view that the pieces he is making available for public performance "are pieces that I still feel are representative of me."

© Pat Napier. 19 August 2001

Radio 3 will broadcast an edited version of this conversation during the interval of the Morning Concert on Tuesday 28 August 2001