Cumnock Tryst festival to feature biggest community project yet

Audiences at this week’s Cumnock Tryst festival in Ayrshire are set to experience the festival’s biggest community project yet. A Musical Celebration of the Coalfields will see 350 members of Cumnock’s local community take part in a pair of performances showcasing new music written by community members and local composers.

Created and led by The Cumnock Tryst, the project brings together local community groups across Cumnock and the Doon Valley with industry professionals to create two concerts with local people writing, composing, and performing alongside the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the direction of composer and festival founder Sir James MacMillan.

MacMillan said: ‘Working with around three hundred people from across our community in East Ayrshire for around three years now has been one of the most enriching and rewarding experiences I’ve experienced. Through this time together many have created songs for the first time which connect directly into their lives and their families. From the very humorous takes on life in a coal mining community to the inevitable sadness and loneliness that many experienced, these songs have huge heart and I for one cannot wait to hear them performed at our Big Saturday at this year’s Tryst.’

Part of the Coalfields Communities Landscape Partnership the project aims to reconnect local people with the area’s mining history, and ‘regenerate a pride which will help to conserve the rich and unique stories and landscape.’ It is also set to give many participants their first experience of creating and performing music as well as of collaborating with professional musicians.

Across two concerts participants will present 21 world premieres of music written by the community groups in workshops composers, librettists and musicians run between April 2022 and June 2023 in and around Cumnock. These will be performed alongside new commissions from four Ayrshire composers; Jay Capperauld, Michael Murray, Electra Perivolaris and Gillian Walker. MacMillan will close each concert with Eleven, a new work of his own inspired by local sports teams in East Ayrshire.

The wider Cumnock Tryst festival, which will run from 5 to 8 October also features Danielle de Niese, Tenebrae, Michael Symmons Roberts, Findlay Napier, Scott Dickinson and Andrew Berridge and the Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus with Eamonn Dougan

Things Tae Dae, a social group for adults with learning difficulties in Cumnock, is one of 10 local community groups participating in the project. Maureen Preston, who runs the group, said: ‘The individuals in the group have just loved being part of the project and creating a song that really represents everything that Things Tae Dae is all about. The members have never experienced anything like this before, they’ve probably never even heard an orchestra before. When they first heard the finished song [that they had created] they thought it was amazing and they’ll be singing their words in a way that they’ll remember forever.’