I chat to Scottish composer Jay Capperauld, at the moment the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s affiliate composer

Jay Capperauld (Photograph: Euan Robertson)

The Scottish composer Jay Capperauld is at the moment the Scottish Chamber Orchestra‘s (SCO) Affiliate Composer and this month he has two units of performances of his works. On 19 February SCO premieres Jay’s new piece, Bruckner’s Cranium in Dumfries with performances in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Written as a death-mask homage to composer Anton Bruckner within the 2 hundredth Anniversary 12 months of his start, Bruckner’s Cranium is impressed by Bruckner’s obsession with dying, and specifically the 2 alleged events when Bruckner cradled the skulls of each Beethoven and Schubert when their our bodies have been exhumed and moved to Vienna’s Central Cemetery in 1888.

Earlier than then, SCO revives Jay’s work for youngsters, The Nice Grumpy Gaboon, and later within the season, they are going to premiere Jay’s Carmina Gadelica for wind dectet, impressed by the Gaelic incantations, hymns, and songs collected by Alexander Carmichael in his work of the identical identify.

Bruckner’s Totenmaske (Loss of life Masks), 1896

Jay admits that he’s moderately drawn to unusual tales and is considering story-telling in music, the problem of learn how to create a musical narrative with a narrative in wordless type. Bruckner’s Cranium is impressed by the nice composer’s deathly fixations. Among the tales are anecdotal, however Bruckner did spend time in a sanatorium for what we might now name OCD. The signs of OCD manifest in a manner wherein an individual experiences uncontrollable, intrusive, distressing and recurring ideas (obsessions) that are alleviated by participating in repetitive behaviours and actions (compulsions) which can be attributed to a particular concern of dire penalties (to themselves, family members or others) if these behaviours and actions are usually not accomplished to a perceived passable diploma.

Bruckner’s reported fixations included giving particular directions on his personal burial underneath the organ that he performed at St Florian Monastery and the preserving of lists of his feminine college students to whom he would constantly suggest nicely into his outdated age. The duality in his hyper-religious grandiose sense of divine musical objective coupled along with his excessive shyness and debilitating low vanity. Jay is considering these fixations, not solely learn how to convey the story in music but in addition what does it say about Bruckner himself. Who was the person and the way can we deal these days with the extra problematic parts of his fixations?

Jay intends his piece to humanise Bruckner and get to the crux of the person from a extra empathetic perspective. Musically, Jay is not a lot in what is occurring however in why, as an example, the oboe interacts in the way in which it does. For Bruckner’s Cranium, Jay makes use of snippets of Bruckner’s music which he treats in a hyper-fixated manner, making the music really feel as if we’re listening to it by means of Bruckner’s obsessive qualities. By the compositional course of, Jay tries to replicate Bruckner’s thoughts.

Jay’s curiosity in storytelling signifies that his music is different and a commissioner doesn’t essentially know what they are going to get from the ensuing piece. For Jay, material determines the sounds, and his music could be accessible and optimistic, or fixated on dying. So his 2021 work, Loss of life in a Nutshell is impressed by Frances Glessner Lee’s art work Nutshell Research of Unexplained Loss of life, miniature recreations within the type of a doll’s home of twenty real-life scenes of unexplained dying, to which Jay has added music with a Bernard Hermann-esque Hitchcock really feel. But, regardless of this fascination for dying, in dialog, Jay proves to be vigorous and interesting firm.

Storytelling is so essential to Jay as a result of it tells him what the music must be. However it additionally retains up his personal curiosity, and he means that one sound-world may get tedious, so he retains issues different. He additionally likes the music to talk for itself, nearly as if it’s a sentient being, the music tells you what it must be and also you nearly take away your self as a composer. So for Bruckner’s Cranium, while the piece has a darkish, morbid edge, there may be additionally a extra classical really feel to the sound-world due to the affect of Bruckner, Beethoven and Schubert.

Developing in April and Could are the premiere performances of Jay’s Carmina Gadelica for a ten-piece wind ensemble. Carmina Gadelica is the identify given to a set of historic Scottish people poetry consisting of hymns, prayers, charms and incantations from the vanishing Western Isle cultures of Scotland, collected by Alexander Carmichael within the 1800s. Nevertheless, there have been allegations that Carmichael altered the poems to suit the writer’s intentions, to create a world extra aligned with the romanticism of Sir Walter Scott. This calls into query the authenticity of the revealed work and Jay wonders what has remained of the true texts. His music for Carmina Gadelica displays the unique items with strolling songs, lamentations and so forth, but while the music is made to sound Scottish, Jay leaves it open as to how genuine the music is. In a way, Jay’s Carmina Gadelica is genuine, in spite of everything, Jay is Scottish (he was born in Ayrshire), however musically that is Scotland through influences reminiscent of Ravel.

SCO at Craigmillar – Seen and Heard with Jay Capperauld

Jay has been SCO’s Affiliate Composer since 2022, nevertheless it took some time to return to fruition so his first main works have been carried out within the 2023/24 season which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the orchestra. His first piece for them, The Origin of Color was premiered on the opening live performance of the orchestra’s 2023/24 season. But he has identified the orchestra for a far longer time than this. The primary piece he wrote in highschool (the Cumnock Academy) was written on account of three gamers from the SCO coming to do a workshop on the faculty when he was 15 or 16 (and actually, two of these three gamers are nonetheless within the orchestra). This was his first try at composition and the highschool college students who took half within the workshop had their items performed and recorded by the SCO gamers. Now 15 or 16 years later he has the great privilege to be working because the SCO’s Affiliate Composer and collaborating within the fiftieth anniversary celebrations.

However he doesn’t simply write music for the orchestra, he’s embedded in all features of orchestral life and through our dialog it turns into obvious that Jay is as engaged with these different features whether or not or not it’s neighborhood work, faculties or writing for youngsters as with the extra formal compositions. The function of Affiliate Composer is attempting to interrupt away from the concept of a composer as an remoted being who simply seems at rehearsals. In addition to the commissioning of latest works, Jay is concerned within the artistic studying aspect of the orchestra, collaborating in initiatives within the day-to-day lifetime of the musicians. As a part of the SCO’s residency in Craigmillar (Edinburgh), Jay runs Seen and Heard, a cross-arts mission the place neighborhood members create artwork works and reply musically to them, and vice versa. Members wouldn’t have to be musical, and the mission is given with SCO musicians.

Jay Capperauld & Corrina Campbell – The Nice Grumpy Gaboon

One other side of that is The Nice Grumpy Gaboon, commissioned as a part of SCO’s Households Live shows within the 2023/24 Season in collaboration with kids’s creator Corrina Campbell. The work places the SCO on the centre of a piece about friendship and forgiveness. Jay describes it as a beautiful, candy story, but at 40 minutes lengthy, it’s probably a giant ask for youngsters, but the response of the youngsters was distinctive and Jay nonetheless has dad and mom speaking to him about their youngsters listening to the work final 12 months. The SCO’s 2025 performances embody one for faculties and relaxed performances for youngsters aged 4 to eight in Aberdeen and Inverness.

Jay has additionally been concerned within the SCO’s Soundbox, an artist growth programme providing a platform for music creators from any musical or cultural background. The music creators are usually not essentially classical and so the programme challenges them to return into the SCO sound world. Which means that creatives from people, jazz/pop/rock or digital backgrounds are writing musical notation for the primary time. Jay has discovered it superb how the contributors react, and generally when their piece is premiered it’s the first time they’ve heard their music carried out by reside musicians. He has been mentoring the scheme alongside older mentors.

These kinds of initiatives are all a part of the SCO’s remit, difficult their gamers’ observe too. The intention is for every single day to be a college day in order that the gamers are studying whether or not it’s in orchestral rehearsals, working with composers or working with exterior music creatives. Jay describes them as an orchestra on the transfer and he loves that the method as a composer could be something. For Jay, music is music, and he’s eager to be concerned in so many various features, neighborhood, training and live shows. All are one and the identical, taking music significantly.

Jay quotes Sir Peter Maxwell Davies who evidently stated that whoever he’s writing for he at all times wrote up, and this motto has stored Jay in good stead.

Jay educated as a saxophone participant on the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and dabbled in composition. Composing was extra of a ardour mission, he had a fascination with composers however was not meant to be a composer himself. He was 15 or 16 earlier than he determined to check saxophone and on the time thought all composers have been useless. That was till he got here throughout James MacMillan, who additionally occurs to be from Cumnock. It was the top of composition on the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who steered that Jay ought to examine composition extra formally and he ended up doing a Masters in composition. He admits that he doesn’t play the saxophone very a lot any extra. He’s having such a blast doing composition and is grateful that he’s capable of forge a profession with alternatives to be artistic.

His inspirations are many and different, tending in direction of particular person items moderately than a single composer’s oeuvre. He mentions Stravinsky’s The Ceremony of Spring which has been with him the longest as he noticed Disney’s Fantasia when he was round 4 and due to an obsession with dinosaurs the music stayed with him. Nevertheless, he grew up listening to Heavy Steel, with Black Sabbath being a giant affect. But, the music of Ravel was an affect too. He mentions Harrison Birtwistle’s remark that affect was like a odor that creeps underneath the door, it isn’t at all times absolutely intentional. His music for Bruckner’s Cranium is totally different as a result of it’s explicitly pushed by the music of the three composers, Bruckner, Beethoven and Schubert, however usually, his inspiration comes from all kinds of issues, tales, artworks, movies and different exterior influences. He can come throughout one thing and there’s a spark, he thinks there’s a piece in that.

He’s at the moment engaged on an accordion concerto for Ryan Corbett commissioned by the Nationwide Youth Orchestra of Scotland. This work is impressed by the early electrical experiments by Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) in reanimating frogs’ legs. Referred to as Galvanic Dances, it’s a sequence of dances arising from Jay’s weird imaginative and prescient of a Can-can of dancing frog legs. The work will likely be premiered on 1 August 2025 at Perth Live performance Corridor, performed by Catherine Larsen-Maguire. The orchestra will even be travelling to current the programme in Berlin for the Younger Euro Traditional. Jay feedback that it’s phenomenal to be working with Ryan Corbett. This isn’t Jay’s first work with NYOS and his piano concerto Endlings was premiered by pianist James Willshire and the NYOS, performed by Rebecca Miller, in 2018. He finds the younger musicians of the orchestra so open and passionate about new music, in spite of everything for all of them repertoire is new. Jay describes working with them as galvanising, and he’s wanting ahead to the Summer season live shows.

Jay Capperauld (Photograph: Euan Robertson)

He has extra SCO commissions within the pipeline, however he’s additionally engaged on The Origin of Color once more, explaining his items to highschool college students with the entire orchestra there to play his music as a part of SCO Immerse. The piece takes its inspiration from a brief story in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics sequence known as With out Colors, which tells a surrealist story of the creation of color on Earth. As a part of SCO’s Immerse programme, the piece makes use of synaesthesia as a manner into the programme, and there will likely be a painter creating photographs based mostly on The Origin of Color, the intention is to create an open artistic dialog between music and artwork. Composition has solely simply returned to the Scottish faculty curriculum and Jay is eager to get highschool college students .

The Nice Grumpy Gaboon by Jay Capperauld
Scottish Chamber Orchestra

7 February, Caird Corridor, Dundee (faculties solely)

8 February, Aberdeen Music Corridor

9 February, Eden Courtroom, Inverness

World premiere of Jay Capperauld’s Bruckner’s Cranium

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Maxim Emelyanychev

19 February, Easterbrook Corridor, Dumfries

20 February, The Queen’s Corridor, Edinburgh

21 February, Metropolis Halls, Glasgow

World premiere of Jay Capperauld’s Carmina Gadelica

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Lorenza Borrani

30 April, Holy Trinity Church St Andrews, St Andrews

1 Could, The Queen’s Corridor, Edinburgh

2 Could, Metropolis Halls, Glasgow

World premiere of Jay Capperauld’s Galvanic Dances
Nationwide Youth Orchestra of Scotland, Ryan Corbett, Catherine Larsen-Maguire

1 August, Perth Live performance Corridor