The path to Enlightenment

With rehearsals underway for Enlightenment – the third work in our Seven Hills Project – we caught up with composer Neil Tòmas Smith.

How did you feel when you were asked to be one of the composers for the Seven Hills Project?

I was really pleased to have been chosen. The School has given me so much so I want to make this a success and also a really good experience for the pupils. I haven’t written anything for a large ensemble for a while, so on a musical level it’s really exciting to have the resources to work with a larger group of players – it’s really great when these things align.

Calton Hill has huge resonance for the School, as it will be its new home in five years. How did the Hill inspire the creative impulse of your composition?

Alexander McCall Smith’s poem was the starting point for exploring and re-exploring Calton Hill. I took the historical overview of the poem and went into it in more depth – that was a big part of the creative process. Calton Hill has so many meanings layered over it, over time, that you have to choose one facet; what interested me most was its association with the quest for enlightenment. My first step was to read about the Scottish Enlightenment and, rather than focus on the aesthetics of music during that time – because they’re all about sensitivity and emotion – I grasped the philosophical aspect, that iterative questioning of knowledge. I also read about music theory in the 18th century, which focused a lot on what was natural – the major scales – so I was interested in probing the unnatural aspects that modern composers are interested in, in an Enlightenment vein. Those were the main things I took into the music and I created very pliable material that gets transformed and then transforms back into itself, so you get these cycles that go round and round, reflecting the iterative process of questioning knowledge.

Knowing that pupils would premiere the piece, did that influence any compositional choices?

Building confidence is the main thing. Musically, I didn’t want to write an openly virtuosic piece but although the individual parts are relatively straightforward, their relationship to one another is pretty complicated. There are some rhythmic, temporal issues that are not at all easy and when I wrote the piece I stepped back and thought, it’s tricky but I think they’ll manage it. I wanted to give the pupils a different way of thinking about things that are familiar – whether that’s rhythm or timing or tuning. The whole end section, for example, gives them freedom about when they play and asks questions that they perhaps don’t often get asked by music. I wanted to encourage them (that’s my intention anyway!) to rethink what they think they know about music and develop an autonomous judgement that relates to the Enlightenment theme. In that end section, the trickiest thing is knowing when not to play – the challenge is to sit back and listen, to not be afraid of the silence, and that presents musical challenges both within the piece and also in relation to the kind of music they’ve played before.

“Some people might say you’ve got to learn the classics first before coming to new music but if, at this early stage when you’re open to so many new things, you have these very different musical experiences – which is why this whole project is so amazing for the pupils – then I think it will make you more open and flexible, which is a vital aspect of being a musician today.”

As an alumnus of the School, how have you found working with the new generation of young musicians and has it brought back any memories of your own time here?

It’s been great – it’s definitely different to working with professionals, but in a good way! The pupils are really open and the School has scheduled a lot of time to look at the piece in detail. I’ve been back to the School many times and there’s no getting around that very particular feel to the building. I went downstairs the other day and saw a tiny room that I remembered practising the piccolo in – with ear plugs – there was, and still is, always something musical happening in every single space. Tom David Wilson, to whom I’ve dedicated this piece, was incredibly important to my musical journey – its catalyst really. The guidance I received from him when I started his composition classes at the age of 15, and the musical education I received from him and then the School, made all the difference.

Neil read Music and completed a Masters in Composition and Analysis at York, spent two and a half years at the Stuttgarter Musikschule, completed a PhD at Nottingham, and is currently finishing a postdoc with Maastricht University. However, his musical journey really began with Saturday composition classes at the Royal Conservatoire in Scotland (then the RSAMD) with Tom David Wilson. Through Tom, Neil became one of the School’s first extended pathway (now S6 ext) students, and it’s to Tom that Enlightenment is dedicated.

Please help us to take new music and opportunities for music making to as many young people in Scotland as possible through The Seven Hills Project. To make an online donation, please visit https://stmaryscommunity.ptly.uk/supportus Thank you!