The Music of Hamish MacCunn

INTRODUCTION As a single light shining brightly obscures other objects of equal or greater worth from sight, such is the fate of so-called ‘one-work’ composers whose popular favourite keeps other contenders firmly in the shadows. To the casual observer Hamish MacCunn (1868-1916) would seem to fall into this category. Like many other people, I came to MacCunn through his one well-known piece, The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, which, as a boy growing up in Colinton, Edinburgh, I thought of as the perfect musical corollary to hill-walking in the nearby Pentlands. It exactly expressed the exhilaration one felt in the landscape, and, by extension, the unique pride taken in one’s native country. It appeared regularly in the programmes of the Scottish National Orchestra (as it then was) at the Usher Hall, but nothing else by MacCunn did. Scottish Opera neglected to stage his operas and choral societies rarely explored his cantatas. His countrymen’s attitude to him is still a benignly patronising one, putting him unthinkingly on the same level as William MacGonagall because of his ‘quaint’ name. What has emerged from further research is a composer whose inexhaustible gift for memorable melody, whose harmonic daring, whose musico-dramatic savvy deserve to be brought from the shadows, studied and celebrated. The curve of MacCunn’s life may be considered typical of an early developer. Having experienced fame as a composer in the full tide of youth – when it could present opportunities and elicit commissions – he chose not to reinvent himself musically but was content to polish, refine and, to some extent, repeat those traits which had served him well. If ever a composer were defined by the forms in which he wrote, then it is MacCunn; all his compositions come about as responses to external, non-musical stimuli, virtually always words. There was no place for abstract works after his student exercises at the Royal College of Music and he seems to have been little affected by that institution’s bias towards symphonicism. Consequently his work-list contains orchestral ballads and character pieces, cantatas, operas and songs; there are also several chamber and piano pieces all of which are descriptive in intent. MacCunn saw this descriptive/ dramatic manner as the way forward for music, and the structures he creates are in keeping with his vision. He avoided sonata form movements, preferring non-developmental, closed forms; in this regard he shared a similar outlook to his compatriot MacKenzie. Even the three early orchestral works, The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, The Ship o’ the Fiend and The Dowie Dens o’ Yarrow, in spite of their being nominally in sonata form, contain development sections which are, to varying degrees, episodic. In his opera Diarmid, the lip service paid to the Wagnerian system of Leitmotiven remains just that, and, though effective, it in no way approaches the symphonic organicism of the German’s music dramas. After Diarmid (1897), circumstances start to control the composer rather than the other way round, which had been the arrangement hitherto. The necessity of earning money through conducting West-End shows reduced the amount of time available for composition; he had a wife and son to support and a comfortable standard of living to maintain. There were some large-scale commissions he fulfilled in these years and - as it turned out - a final substantial personal project, the Four Scottish Traditional Border Ballads; but overall, as Maurice Lindsay pithily points out ‘The gifted all round musician died at 48. The Scottish composer died at 30.’