The Seven Hills Project, you could say, started off ambitious, and then got even more so. When St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh – Scotland's only specialist music school, and one of just nine specialist music and dance schools across the UK – dreamt up the scheme for its 50th anniversary, it was already a bold undertaking. The school would commission seven new pieces of music, one for each of the Scottish capital's hills. Since then, however, the project has ballooned, bringing in teachers and students from right across Scotland alongside some of the nation's most accomplished composers, and even setting its sights on publishing, online resources, sound walks and more.
Birthday celebration
The project was originally the brainchild of former head of music at St Mary's, Paul Stubbings. ‘The idea was to think about the lead-up to our birthday concert,’ explains Valerie Pearson, the school's head of strings and now Seven Hills' driving force. ‘A lot of what we do is connected with our surroundings in Edinburgh – in terms of its geography and people, but also its musicians, teachers and musical ensembles. So we wanted to look outwards from the school and to connect with them.’
Another connection was with best-selling Edinburgh-based writer Alexander McCall Smith, already a supporter of the school, who happily agreed to write a new poem inspired by each of the city's hills, to feed into the music.
Pearson herself only took on her role in the summer of 2020, by which time the project was already underway. ‘And it was sort of slowly revealed to me at that point!’ she says, laughing. ‘But it was actually a good project for me to take on, because I’ve had a portfolio career history in both performance and composition.’ One aspect of which, she explains, is that she has a PhD in composition herself.
Curriculum connections
Pearson quickly found herself refining the project's details and integrating the new pieces deeply into the school's curriculum. ‘At one stage that had seemed like an impossibility – the original thinking was that we'd ask our partner ensembles to perform them. But the best way for young people to get to know new music is to play it. So I persuaded the school that we should get the students playing the pieces. The rehearsal process is now fully embedded into the school's curriculum, and we’ve been including the new pieces in our end-of-term concerts.’
First among the composers to be involved was Ayrshire-born Jay Capperauld, who was inspired by Edinburgh's famous city-centre ancient volcano, Arthur's Seat, and the insights into deep time it offered to ‘father of geology’ James Hutton. Capperauld's Theory of the Earth was premiered online in August 2021 by professional percussionist Tom Hunter (also a St Mary's teacher) plus five of the school's students on piano and string quartet. ‘It was such a rewarding process getting to know the musicians and writing for them,’ Capperauld explains. ‘You can then really write to their strengths. And in the end, rehearsals became more like workshops for the young players.’
Performance challenges
One particular test for the performers was the unconventional way that Capperauld had conceived the piece. Interlocking, repeating cells – generating layers of music, rather like the layers of rock that Hutton had identified – would be cued from player to player, rather than the musicians following an overarching, through-composed score. How did the students respond to that unusual request? ‘There were actually quite a lot of decisions being handed over to them, but because their musical experiences had already been so intensive, they developed quite an innate musical ability to judge pacing and musical structure,’ Capperauld explains. ‘And they built up a great system whereby they'd glance at each other to make sure the other players knew when they should come in.’
Following Capperauld's premiere, three more new works – Tom David Wilson's clarinet quartet Imagined Conversation on Blackford Hill, Neil Tòmas Smith's Calton Hill-inspired Enlightenment for mixed nonet, and Helen Grime's horn duet Braid Hills – have been performed and recorded. The most recent addition is Dottyville by Ailie Robertson, inspired by Craiglockhart Hill, more specifically the hospital for victims of shellshock located there during the First World War (two of whose most famous patients were the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen). Dottyville was premiered in October, though unusually written for the professional violin-and-cello Gaia Duo rather than for St Mary's students – for the practical reason, Pearson explains, that the premiere performance happened too close to the start of the school year for pupils to take it on.
It was early on in the project that Pearson began considering involving other Scottish schools. ‘I went to a non-specialist school myself, and I remember really benefiting when musicians came in to work with us. I think everyone can be creative in terms of composition, but obviously not everyone has the opportunity to have friends at school who can play for them. I was convinced that there were lots of really frustrated composers out there.’ She contacted schools across Scotland and, though Covid inevitably made the process of collaboration more complicated, she managed to involve several other institutions in projects to create new pieces based around their own local surroundings.
School exchange
One of those schools was Culloden Academy near Inverness, and Capperauld returned to lead projects there, in collaboration with Culloden's head of music, Joanne Burgess. ‘The original idea was that we'd be working face to face with students from St Mary's,’ Burgess explains, ‘but we were in the midst of Covid, so we had to adapt slightly.’ Activities quickly shifted online, and of the seven Culloden students who initially expressed interest, five wrote new pieces, which were then workshopped by Capperauld and St Mary's students. ‘The St Mary's pupils recorded every one of our students' compositions,’ explains Burgess, who feels that the relationships set up between student peers – even if 150 miles apart – were crucial to the collaboration's success. What does she feel her students gained? ‘Not to be scared of composition, mainly – it can be such a hard thing to teach. They grew in confidence, and they were inspired by the work that the pupils in Edinburgh had done. When you’re living in the Highlands like we are, you don’t get to see as many concerts as people living in Edinburgh or Glasgow, so it's been really valuable for our students to have that connection.’
Pearson agrees. ‘It was a really cool, two-way thing, and the mutual respect between the two schools was great. You could tell that the St Mary's pupils were really impressed with the Culloden compositions, and they gave lots of positive feedback on the music – and likewise, the Culloden students seemed to really appreciate the St Mary's performances.’
‘From my side,’ continues Capperauld, ‘the pupils were really engaged and enthusiastic. In fact, one of them even contacted me with some more general questions about being a composer, so it was good to be able to talk more broadly about my own experience and make it into a more holistic experience.’
Future evolution
Pearson has noticed a similarly strong engagement with the project from the St Mary's pupils, as well as noticeable changes in their confidence and even performing styles. ‘It's been really interesting to see the transformation in terms of pupils taking on some of the more extended techniques requested by the composers – I can see the results in some of their playing in more core repertoire pieces.’ Because of Covid restrictions, online video recordings became the default vehicle for the new pieces' premieres, offering more learning opportunities for pupils performing in the project. ‘It's incredible how well these young people adapted to turning up and doing a professional recording with a professional film crew – they’re experts now,’ Pearson adds.
© F DUNCAN
Pupils taking part in the Seven Hills project in Scotland
Recording the pieces also led, Pearson explains, to questions over whether a performance could ever be truly perfect. ‘They realised that there would always be a bit of the recording they weren’t happy with, but also that we are all going to make mistakes. I think that element of stoicism is really healthy in their approach from a mental wellbeing point of view. And likewise, when we now hear a piece of new music in a concert or recording, many of the students have a point of reference in something they have played themselves, so they can consider it in a far more informed way.’
From its already ambitious beginnings, the Seven Hills Project has clearly evolved – and there are further developments being mooted for the future too. Pearson mentions the school publishing the seven new works – there's already been interest from professional ensembles, she says – as well as developing an archive of background material, and even expanding the project further into sound art and electroacoustic pieces embedded within the Seven Hills' environments themselves. It was already a bold scheme to celebrate the school's 50th anniversary, but it looks like the Seven Hills Project will continue to flourish year on year.
