ST M ARY ’ S M USIC SCHO OL
Annual Review 2020/21
FROM CELEBRITY 6 TO CELEBRITY 17 Will Conway, Artistic Director A founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (and 40 years on, still its principal cellist), past principal cellist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and current Artistic Director of the Hebrides Ensemble among many, many other professional responsibilities, Will Conway joined St Mary’s Music School in 2007 as Head of Strings. Today he is the School’s Artistic Director and the driving force behind the inspired genesis of the Celebrity 6 series, which saw 17 of the world’s most important international professional musicians engage directly with pupils during lockdown. Q: How does the role of Artistic Director contribute to the vision of St Mary’s Music School?
Q: Celebrity 6 is a triumph inspired by the adversity of lockdown. Where did the idea come from?
My role as Artistic Director is to listen to opinions, to lead on ideas, and to identify people who I know will bring something very special to the school. I have always been mindful that while we are a small school in Edinburgh, we are also a national music school, sending our pupils on to establishments throughout the UK and beyond. Other specialist music schools benefit from being further south, closer to London, where there is more access to a wider range of musicians, so we need to get those people to come to us. I’ve made it my responsibility to engage with heads of academies and conservatoires around the country; that, and my work with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and international contacts I’ve made there, have helped me to identify players who can come to us and lead our Nigel Murray and Edinburgh Masterclasses.
When lockdown happened, there was an amazing response from the School. The collective energy, the creative solutions, the Zoom lessons, the recorded assemblies, the aural work and the fun quizzes all performed an incredibly important, galvanizing role. Paul Stubbings and I discussed how we could continue to deliver our Masterclasses series, John Cameron came on board with great ideas, and together we came up with an online solution using a combination of YouTube recordings and live Zoom. We had eminent musicians from all over the world stuck at home, not able to perform, and a whole term of online provision to create for our pupils. Six events spread throughout that first term seemed to fit and that’s why we called it Celebrity 6.
“Our public Nigel Murray and Edinburgh Masterclasses are only possible through the generosity of enlightened philanthropy – we can have the best ideas in the world but without philanthropy we can’t make them happen. The funding provided for the public masterclasses has allowed us to invite people like Steven Osborne, Renaud Capuçon, Nicola Benedetti and Nicolas Altstaedt to come to the school.”
I looked for people who represented the instruments and disciplines offered by the School and I used my connections, people I’d met or played with in my own professional career, through which to contact and invite these people. I also spoke to our own tutors and teachers and students and asked for their wish lists for instrumentalists and genres too. In the first series we had Tommy Smith – an entirely natural jazz choice for Scotland – and by the third series, at Eve’s suggestion, we had Arve Henriksen, the Norwegian trumpeter. I wanted to make Celebrity 6 as inclusive and collaborative as possible and that’s been an important part of its success. I’m spearheading it and using my own contacts but lots of people have contributed to this.
Q: How did you go about selecting the celebrities?
Q: Did the format changed at all over the three terms? Yes. To start with, it was about delivering a mini masterclass over a digital platform. It was straightforward for our guests - an hour of their time for the actual session plus a little prep time to review pupil recordings I’d sent in advance. But after the first term, we began to develop the idea of asking people to talk about their career in music and how it was being affected by the pandemic, so it became less about masterclasses and more about giving vision to our pupils.
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