| Dear Members, We are now into our third week of isolation and lockdown, and like last week The Biographers’ Club is inviting members to contribute reflections, diaries or pieces of memoir prompted by the extraordinary times we are living through. We have already had some wonderful pieces, and these will be posted on our website over the next week or so in the news section of the site. Your writing will form a unique and wonderful archive of this terrible time. The writing should be short – no more that 300 words. Please email us your work to;[email protected] Biographers’ Book of the week Each week a member from the committee will be picking a biography that is well worth a read, and if you have a biography you would like to recommend then please do email us and we can feature it as next week’s biography of the week. We would love to hear from you. [email protected] This week Committee Member and Festival Director Caroline Knox picked A Scots Song: A Life in Music by James MacMillan 96pp Birlinn Publishers £7.99  For many book festival directors, these are very sad times. Just over three weeks ago, I was working flat out to finish the Boswell Book Festival programme knowing that the Festival might never happen in May. It was the strangest situation and one that changed much faster than anyone had anticipated so that the day our printed programmes arrived was the day we announced we had postponed the Festival until October. The Big Book Weekend, an online festival which is being supported and streamed by the BBC has just closed submissions from Festivals who have been cancelled and will run over 8-10 May 2020 It has made me reflect on the role of festivals in UK cultural life and in the great composer James MacMillan’s gemlike memoir, I found some of the answers to what makes festivals important particularly in places where poorer communities all too often miss out. His wonderful music festival The Cumnock Tryst, which takes place in and around the Ayrshire mining town of Cumnock, where he grew up, is our ‘sister’ Festival . I will never forget being in The Old Church of Cumnock for the 2018 world premiere of James’s oratorio All the Hills and Vales Along. The performance included The Edinburgh Quartet and tenor soloist Ian Bostridge along with the Festival chorus and the Dalmellington Band. Where such events are more commonplace, they can lose some of their power but here we were in this old mining town, pinching ourselves that this was happening on our doorstep. It was beyond wonderful. Sir James MacMillan became an overnight, international sensation in 1990, aged 31, with the Proms premiere of his requiem, Confessions of Isobel Gowdie,, inspired by Scotland’s witch trials. A steady stream of works has followed, with commissions from many of the world’s major orchestras. A prominent part of his work is his religious composition, which includes settings of both the John and Luke passions, Tu Es Petrus (for the 2010 papal visit to Britain) and numerous smaller choral pieces. His works are heard all around the world – Seven Last Words from the Cross has been performed in 24 countries since its premiere in 1994, and his Stabat Mater received a private performance at the Sistine Chapel in 2018. He is a trenchant commentator on a wide range of political, social and theological issues, many of which spring from his commitment to the cultural life of Scotland and a passionate advocate of community involvement in music. In his riveting pocket memoir, Macmillan reveals what it was like to strike out as a young composer from the intolerance of modernism at a time when the avant-garde establishment could make or break careers. By following his own musical instincts and intelligence, he unleashed the creativity to develop his own distinct musical language, which was unafraid to tap into the traditions of the past. To watch the performance of Stabat Mater in the Sistine Chapel click here. The Biographers’ Club News The BBC report that makers of the children’s book The Gruffalo have drawn their characters practising social distancing to help children understand the regulations.  Author Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler created the panels as a “light-hearted” way of spreading the message.They feature The Gruffalo, Stickman and The Smeds and The Smoos – all keeping a safe distance from one another.The characters are also seen helping the vulnerable with their shopping The Gruffalo was first published in 1999, and tells the story of a mouse taking a walk in the woods – where he out-smarts a terrifying creature with terrible teeth and a “posionous wart on the end of his nose”. It went on to sell 13 million copies, and had been turned into a stage play and an Oscar-nominated animation. Each week we will try our best to bring a snippet of news from the world of Biography, if you have any news that you would like to share then please do get in touch We will be back after Easter with more news and entertainment, and from all of us at The Biographers’ Club have a wonderful Easter. All best wishes, The Biographers’ Club |