THESE columns have often been graced by the words of my good friend Dr John Purser.

He is Scotland’s foremost musicologist, a poet, composer, playwright, researcher at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College in Skye, where he lives with his wife Bar, working a croft and planning the third edition of his magisterial opus, the great book Scotland’s Music.

Its subtitle describes it quite dauntingly: “A History of the Traditional and Classical Music of Scotland from Early Times to the Present Day”. That’s right. Read it again: “A History of the Traditional and Classical Music of Scotland from Early Times to the Present Day.”

That is to say, everything.

All musical genres and forms; all the instruments; all the modes of practice and performance; all the halls and stages, spaces and platforms; all the social orders, strata and contexts. Nothing escapes his encompassing (see www.johnpurser.net/).

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The first edition in 1992 was superseded by the second edition in 2007. Both drew from John’s work as writer and presenter of the BBC radio series of the same name, first broadcast as 30- to 90-minute programmes on Sunday afternoons, then completely revised, rewritten and recorded in a series of 51 30-minute programmes.

Given the nature of its subject, one might have thought that this book and the radio series would be widely and freely available in all Scotland’s schools, colleges and universities. But it is not. It should be in all of our libraries, of course – the ones that have not been closed down.

But it is not.

Why is this? It would probably require active government intervention to ensure the book’s widespread availability and that clearly is not going to happen. Scotland has no minister for the arts and there is little sign that anyone in any political party in this country or even in England cares enough to do anything about it. What sort of country cares so little for its music – and yet produces such wonderments? Presumably the sort of country that votes against its own independence. Well, the crowd chose Barabbas.

We shouldn’t be surprised. No. We should be. Surprised, dismayed, angered, disgusted, enraged, insulted by our lords and masters, who neglect and obfuscate the best things we have. Well, we can do better.

The Bubblyjock Collective, an ensemble formed in 2023, is one truly inspiring and hopeful sign that things can be done, are being done. Scotland’s music is indeed being well-served by three young people, musicians of the first order, devoted and dedicated, as their website puts it, to “promoting and performing music by composers born or based in Scotland”.

It goes on: “The collective has three main aims: to revive forgotten and neglected works from archives; to commission new works from Scottish composers; to tell the story of art music in Scotland: the composers, the pieces, and the performers! We focus on music from the 19th century to the present day.”

Here’s their website address – www.bubblyjockcollective.com/. Give yourself a nice present and click on that. You’ll meet them.

Its latest venture is a concert celebrating the centenary of Glasgow-born composer, Buxton Orr (1924-97), at 6pm on Friday, taking place at the Scottish Music Centre, 100 Candleriggs, Glasgow G1 1NQ – see www.bubblyjockcollective.com/ and click the website’s events section.

Neil Sutcliffe is a classical accordionist from Stirling and passionate about promoting his instrument in the music scene in Scotland. Since completing his Bachelors degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow in 2021 with Djordje Gajic, he has been regularly performing, teaching and working with composers, storytellers and dancers. In 2023, with Rosie Lavery and Michael O’Rourke, he released an album with Toccata Classics of previously unrecorded works for accordion by Ronald Stevenson (for more, see www.neilsutcliffe.scot).

Rosie Lavery, sometimes known as “The Ginger Soprano”, is an opera singer and conductor born and raised in Glasgow, a graduate of the Alexander Gibson Opera Studio at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a regular soloist and recital singer, performing across the UK and Europe. She speaks French, German, Italian and has been learning Scottish Gaelic for some years now – thegingersoprano.com/ Anna Michels is a Scottish-Dutch pianist currently based in Glasgow.

After graduating with an Artist Diploma from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, she began working there as an accompanist and improvisation teacher – www.annamichelspiano.com THE Bubblyjock Collective website informs us: “Neil, Rosie and Anna have known each other for years, as friends and colleagues in music-making. All three studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in Glasgow, and it was here they began to ask questions about Scottish composers and classical music in Scotland.

“Composers are often known and celebrated for their nationalities, and grouped by the styles associated with their countries and periods. So why did we know so little about Scottish compositional styles or celebrate great Scots composers of the 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries?”

I asked Neil what we might we look forward to in Friday’s concert.

Neil Sutcliffe: The centenary concert for Buxton Orr will introduce you to his music in an informative and fun way. We will be performing a mix of songs, such as Orr’s setting of the nonsense (and yet surprisingly dark) verse Mr And Mrs Discobbolos, and his Songs Of A Childhood, which is an unromanticised look back at the Scots bairns poetry of his youth.

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Alongside these will be two instrumental works – the Bagatelles for solo piano, and a fresh new arrangement for accordion and piano duo of his string work Celtic Suite, where he plays with the traditional Scottish tune-types, reel, strathspey, jig and port-a-beul.

Each piece will be introduced by researcher Seb Schneeberger, who will help guide us through Orr’s life and work – so you should come away with a sense of the man and the music intertwined.

Alan Riach: These works aren’t often performed or heard, are they?

Neil: These works are rarely performed. There was a fantastic recording of Orr’s vocal repertoire by Nicky Spence on Delphian in 2017 but aside from Spence, there are few performers that give them the time they deserve!

Going back to the Bubblyjock Collective website, you can see the depth of commitment behind this: “Individually, we were all on our own journeys into Scotland’s rich heritage of art music – discovering repertoire, composers, and recordings of which we’d previously been unaware. Now, by no means are we the first people to champion Scottish classical music, there are many performers, academics, and teachers who have been working to promote this music for years. And yet, much of it still goes un-talked about, un-performed, under-appreciated. That’s where The Bubblyjock Collective comes in.”

And that’s the foundation for the concert scheduled to take place on Friday, featuring the music of Buxton Orrthe Buxton Orr concert. Well now, I can hear the collective gasp. Buxton Orr! And about time too! Or the other gasp: Buxton Orr … who?

I asked Sebastian Schneeberger, who has been working on Orr’s music and conducting the first-hand archival research which underlies the performance, a few questions about the composer, and his place in classical music, in Scotland, and in world terms.

Alan: First, Sebastian, could you tell us a little about your own research, and particularly Buxton Orr, and where he and his music should be thought of in the big world of classical music?

Sebastian Schneeberger: Let’s start with his nationality. He can comfortably identify as a Brit but to delve deeper he would have to be called an Anglo-Scottish composer. He moved from Scotland at the age of nine and never again lived there for any significant period of his life but he visited often and wrote a fair few Scottish pieces as a dedication to his heritage.

He also reportedly maintained his “Scottish burr” his whole life and he apparently had the sort of candour that Scots are known for.

Alan: How would you describe his music to a first-time listener?

Seb: Stylistically his music is very eclectic at every stage in his compositional journey. His early music (from 1950-70) had clear influences from Britten and Wagner. He had a slight shift away from “Brittenian” composition in the mid-60s for a couple of possible reasons: first his music had been called Brittenesque in recent reviews, which I think isn’t a phrasing that a composer wants to hear; and second, he received a long letter of positive and negative criticisms from Benjamin Britten himself.

Overall in this letter Britten was very impressed with Orr’s music, which had been sent for review, but Britten’s use of language in general and Britten’s slight of Orr’s libretto for his first opera which was written by a dear friend of his, caused some offence.

Alan: So Britten was a key figure for him?

Seb: He certainly never lost an admiration for Britten’s music. In later life, when a friend and fellow composer said, “I don’t really get Britten’s music”, Orr replied with, “Your loss!”

IN his later music Orr shifted into what the musical theorist Rudolph Reti called “pantonality” in his book, Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth-century Music (1958).

At this point, Orr’s style was more comparable to Alban Berg. He would create pieces with a great deal of dissonance with varied versions of a tone row but no unintentional discords.

Alan: This sounds pretty heavy, intellectually charged, a challenge, perhaps, to many listeners.

Seb: Well, there’s some truth in that. “To modulate (even serially), is to shift from one tonal centre to another” is a piece of advice Orr received from his teacher Benjamin Frankel which outlines their school of thought quite well.

He and Frankel were quite pioneering in this pantonal discipline which they often referred to as “tonal-serialism”. Hans Keller in 1970 wrote of Benjamin Frankel that: “His private analyses of Schoenberg’s dodecaphony, are more thorough and more unswervingly musical, than anything I have seen on the subject in public print” and Buxton Orr was Frankel’s heir apparent in this field when Frankel passed away in 1973.

Orr would then finish Frankel’s unfinished tonal-serial opera Marching Song and would be recognised by many as the new expert of finding the harmony in the writing of serialists. This is why in 1974 he recorded a later broadcast analysis for the BBC Proms delving into the Alban Berg pieces which were being performed.

Alan: Alban Berg is one of the great composers, I think. I go back to his violin concerto again and again, especially at times of serious doubt or even despair. And the way the world is going, it’s the kind of music we need more than ever.

I don’t know how to say this plainly but its absolute seriousness restores a kind of hope to me. Nothing frivolous or easy, and challenging, certainly, but deeply affirming of life.

Seb: Tonal-serialism I would say was Orr’s main focus between 1970-97 but in that time, he explored many styles, including open form; neoclassical brass bands; tonal and tonal-serial operas. A trait of his composing that I can say carried through his entire career was a great care for text.

In the 70s he wrote about himself that his primary talent was for text settings and in his written analyses of Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg, he paid close attention to the words of poetry that the composers had based the music on, marking which notes uttered which words.

He was a great admirer of Steven Sondheim in later life, also due to how caringly Sondheim married music with texts.

Alan: Could you give us an outline of your own research, and what your own recent work has uncovered? What should the music makers in Scotland pay attention to, today?

Seb: My research uncovers the life story of Buxton Orr and how certain life events correlate with some of his compositions. My primary focus in my research was on his tonal-serial journey (1970-97) and what serial techniques he tried, which he adopted and how he used serialist techniques in pieces which are often far removed from atonality.

They often pivoted from one tonal centre to another through tone rows and are certainly challenging to the concept of atonal music, just as the music of Alban Berg did – but this being said, calling these tonal-serial pieces all “mainstream” might be a stretch!

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I think due to how polarising serialism has been as a musical concept, music makers of today should be paying attention to composers like Orr who break down the barriers and explore this relatively unexplored sound-world of tonal-serialism.

Alan: There’s always more to be done. We’ll make sure that The National sends a copy of this article to Nicola Benedetti. And if we’ve been concentrating on some of the more challenging, modernist and musically advanced aspects of Buxton Orr’s work, we should add that the concert on Friday is filled with wonderfully tuneful, immediately accessible pieces.

And the Scottish component of his identity will be in full aural presence! His Scottish heritage is explicit in Songs Of A Childhood, a song-cycle of Scots children’s poetry and Celtic Suite, his suite for strings, which The Bubblyjocks have arranged for accordion and piano duo.

The full programme includes The Painter’s Mistress (1974) with a text by James Elroy Flecker; the Celtic Suite (1968); The Ballad Of Mr And Mrs Discobbolos (1970), a setting of a nonsense poem by Edward Lear; bagatelles for solo piano (1952) and Songs Of A Childhood (1962), settings of Scots children’s poetry.

This is simply an invitation to explore. Open the doors, to use Edwin Morgan’s phrase: or, open your ears. There’s more to take in.