Music in Renaissance Scotland

Composer Neil Tòmas Smith discusses the dialogue with the Scottish Renaissance in his new work for Orchestra, Baroque Orchestra and Soprano.

When beginning my latest piece, Hidden Polyphony, I was incredibly ignorant of Renaissance music, Scottish or otherwise. I had heard of Robert Carver, whose work is preserved in the stunning Carver Choirbook, but I did not know the music, and I had engaged very little with continental composers from earlier centuries.

It is difficult to overstate how wrong I find this in retrospect. It only took one listen to Carver’s O Bone Jesu to convince me that this was probably the greatest surviving work to be written in Scotland from any century. The titanic chords on ‘Jesu’ that occur throughout the piece made such an impression that they feature heavily in the conclusion of my own.

My studies had always concentrated on many hundreds of years later, examining music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was intriguing probing for crossovers in compositional interests between modernists and people writing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Interest in construction and esoteric systems was as much a theme of the Renaissance as it is in our own time, for example. Indeed, certain aspects of the mensural notation in use at the time allowed for temporal transformations rather more easily than does our rhythmic notation today. I am far from the first to make these connections; indeed, there is a strong vein of Renaissance inspiration running through British contemporary music, through Harrison Birtwistle, Oliver Knussen, Judith Weir, Peter Maxwell Davies, and beyond.

I was fortunate to have some great guides in this new area, chiefly Dr. James Cook at the University of Edinburgh, who talked me through the Scottish sources and gave me access to some unpublished parts of the Carver Choir Book, some of which turn up in Hidden Polyphony. I also discussed the literature of the period with James, as well as Prof. Greg Walker and Dr. Kate Ash-Irisarri, which led to the selection of certain texts to furnish the piece, particularly the work of poet William Dunbar.

Even a tourist like me in this field can sometimes luckily stumble upon something. Through my dad, I obtained a book on the Aberdeen Breviary, which is an important collection of services for Scotland’s saints. The introduction to this mentioned a line of music written in a beautiful hand on one of the Breviary manuscripts; it had not been identified. When mentioning this to James, it turned out he was not aware of the fragment, nor was it mentioned in other studies that collated Scottish sources. A short while later, a PhD student, David Coney, identified the fragment, which will feature in some forthcoming research.

It is very gratifying to have made some very small contribution to the study of this music while having taken so much for my own creative ends.

Further research and reading can be found here:

https://www.nls.uk/whats-on/renaissance-scotland-and-europe-1480-to-1630/

https://manuscripts.nls.uk/repositories/2/resources/14998

https://www.rsno.org.uk/liveevent/wagners-ring-symphony/

www.ntsmusic.co.uk

https://academic.oup.com/ml/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ml/gcae076/7896101?redirectedFrom=fulltext