LET me throw a name at you: Julia Munday.
Remember that name; I think you will hear it again. She is around 20, and is a second-year BMus student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is a composer and last week I heard three of her pieces during the RCS's Plug festival of new music. Over the decades I have heard new works by hundreds of young composers. Hand on heart, and with every instinct I have, Julia Munday is an absolutely outstanding voice; a composer with potential at which I could only guess. Earlier last week I raved about her exquisitely gauged little dream piece for piano, The Stars Will Fall.
On Friday her latest work, which won the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Award, was unveiled. It was bizarrely titled Female Scottish Composer. Alas there was no programme note to give us a clue. But it was written for violin, fiddle, clarsach and harp. So, also, was the fine runner-up piece by Lewis Murphy, entitled On Common Ground. Murphy's piece, literally exploring the interaction between the traditional and classical worlds represented by the instrumentation, was an atmospheric journey through these worlds, which perhaps ended rather abruptly.
Munday's was an extraordinary explosion of imagination and invention, an almost Ivesian mix of two worlds interchanging, overlapping and weaving into an indivisible whole; and did I hear the Titanic theme in there? It was magical in its effect, and it took my breath away.
The same concert featured pianist Simon Smith rippling through Richard Ayres's gamelanesque No 8, and piper Fraser Fifield's baleful wailing through Ayres's lament, MacGowan. Friday belonged to Julia Munday.
HHHH
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