The second Plug festival at the RSAMD will build on the stellar performances of its debut. Michael Tumelty talks to its visionary, Gordon McPherson.

Next Tuesday the RSAMD's second Plug Festival, an intensive five-day survey of new music, begins to roll. That's as bald a statement as can be made about Scotland's most ambitious and daring new music project. And it's as well to start with it, because, where Plug is concerned, Scotland has catching up to do.

Last year, with the inaugural festival, a lot of people simply didn't know it was on (though it was advertised); or they dismissed it without casting a glance towards it, or decided that, because it was new music, it was of no interest to them.

Some wondered what it was, with the characteristic indifference shown towards contemporary music, while others concluded that, because it featured students, it wouldn't be of a sufficiently high standard to merit a visit. (As far as the media is concerned, The Herald was the only newspaper to cover the festival.) Plug was born out of the RSAMD's annual modern music project, Academy Now!, which some felt had outlived its usefulness. There was also an underlying frustration that Academy Now! had come to rely too heavily on a cadre of established names, while taking no significant account of the burgeoning (and simmering) mass of young composers working and producing music in the academy.

Gordon McPherson, the outspoken composer and head of the RSAMD's heaving composition department, was the catalyst who secured from his masters the imprimatur and go-ahead to unleash the young composers.

What followed was frankly astonishing. It was revealed that almost 30 young composers were working in the academy. The first festival was assembled and unveiled. The results were staggering. I heard 16 of the 30 or so works that were premiered in the first Plug Festival. The levels of craftsmanship varied, of course, depending on the age, experience and confidence of the executants. The critical point, however, is that there was not a duff piece among them. Meeting and speaking with some of the composers, I formed the impression almost of a collective, where they all fed off each other, encouraged each other, collaborated, criticised, slagged off and helped each other. I didn't come across a single oversized ego or isolationist attitude (more than I could say about the so-called professional world).

Moreover, not only were the compositions in Plug all written by students. By far the majority of them were also played by student ensembles and conducted by students (though The Hebrides Ensemble, through its relationship with the academy, made its own contribution).

It was an enormous leap of faith on the part of the academy, reflected Gordon McPherson this week. "There was absolutely no way of measuring it until it was done; but the composers stepped up to the mark and delivered. And so did the players. People forget that the performers were asked to premiere around 30 new works over just a few days."

It was exactly the way an institution like the academy should have moved forward at that moment, if it wasn't to become just another contemporary outlet for MacMillans, Turnages and Maxwell Davieses, said McPherson, who is still as forthright on the subject as he is unrepentant.

"Look. When art colleges do art shows, they don't bring in travelling exhibitions. They don't haul in, say, a Dali exhibition and get the students to look at it. They give them a space and tell them to produce new work and put on a show.

"And if institutions like this don't embrace the new, then classical music really will be finished. We can't survive just by sustaining a museum culture. There has to be something else injected into it."

The dilemma faced by McPherson and his team was how to follow the first Plug Festival. "We can't rest on anything. We have to reinvent it every year," he said, explaining that some of the students will have moved on, a new generation moved in, while others, now graduated or completing their PhDs, such as Oliver Searle, Gareth Williams and J Simon van der Walt, are feeding back into the system and are now part-time tutors in McPherson's growing empire of composers.

In Plug Two, some of the established young names, including John de Simone, Alasdair Spratt, Will Chadwick, Alastair Clarkson, Searle and Williams, all firm, strong, clear voices in composition, will reappear with new works.

The other composers include an entire new wave. In all, there will be around 35 premieres in the five-day fest, featuring the work of about 24 composers. Of the individual pieces there is little to say as none of them have yet been performed.

There are a few striking characteristics to observe about the second festival, however. It has grown, not so much in number of events as in its dimensions. Whereas the bulk of performances last year were small group chamber-type performances, such was the clear success of the venture that the academy has placed its symphony orchestra, chorus, and the RSAMD Big Band at the disposal of the festival, allowing McPherson and his team to programme new works for choir and orchestra, as well as bring in post-minimalist rocker Graham Fitkin to give a talk, adjudicate a competition, run a workshop and have some of his own music played.

As well as fielding a plethora of ad hoc student ensembles to play the music, Plug 2 will feature showcase concerts for The Hebrides Ensemble, John de Simone's Ensemble Thing, along with Oliver Searle and Fiona Ferguson's alumni elite, Symposia, now becoming established as a force in new music.

In another new, and bold, strand McPherson is bringing in the academy's Youthworks department, having gauged that there are good composition voices, too, among the juniors, all aged from 14 to 18. Five of their new pieces will feature in the first half of the closing Plug event, which will otherwise unveil McPherson's long-awaited Creative Scotland commission, a set of three orchestral nocturnes entitled Ghosts.

The entire venture, which almost has the look of a jamboree about it, is a breath-holding exercise for McPherson and his academy colleagues. This, after all, is not just the students being let loose to play themselves. It's part of their work.

"It's not a free for all. I have to balance where and how the composers are exposed. I also have to balance that against the whole of their development over a four year course - there is a pastoral side to it as well.

"I try to give them as much freedom as possible to realise their musical dreams, as it were, but I do have to be careful how and where I let them raise their game. They can see that they have something to say, but they have a big responsibility to make it clear what they want to say."

The Plug Festival at the RSAMD, Glasgow, runs from Tuesday May 1 to Saturday May 5. All concerts (except Hebrides Ensemble) are free. Visit www.rsamd.ac.uk l Tomorrow: Michael Tumelty on the new Scottish Opera programme.