Two Short Songs from the Doon Valley

Composed for performance at the 2022 Cumnock Tryst, the community-based annual music festival established by James MacMillan in the Ayrshire town where he grew up. MacMillan comments that “my earliest musical experiences were of making music with friends, relatives, schoolmates and teachers in the town. I remember seeing amateur operatic productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, oratorio performances of Handel, and hearing Cumnock Music Club performances by the Berlin Octet and many other fabulous international musicians.

Because of these seminal experiences I have followed a life of music, composing and working with some of the most wonderful musicians of our time, all over the world.” These two songs are fruit of the local music festival, being settings of poems by two members of Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus. The vivid imagery depicted in the music was inspired by both the natural and geological phenomena of the valley, which stretches to the south of the town of Cumnock along the River Doon, and by its coal-mining heritage.