A decade ago, composer Sir James MacMillan launched a music festival in the Ayrshire town of Cumnock and christened it the Cumnock Tryst. The name was inspired by a piece of music he had composed in 1984, a setting of a love ballad written in Scots by 20th century poet William Soutar. Sir James would perform it in pubs and clubs with his folk group, Broadstone.

The inspiration for the festival itself, however, came from the milieu with which Sir James is today more closely associated – classical music. Specifically it was the St Magnus International Festival founded by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and others on Orkney in 1977.

“He was never a teacher of mine but he was certainly a mentor and I watched him very, very closely through his life and career,” he tells me when we talk. “As an undergraduate I used to go up to the St Magnus Festival and I was just blown away by it. Not only were all these great musicians coming to this very remote place in Scotland, but they were performing in little intimate venues like Stromness Town Hall and the Pickaquoy Centre.”

The Maxwell QuartetThe Maxwell Quartet (Image: © Peter Adamik / stavanger kammermusikk festival)A crucial part of the festival ethos was that Maxwell-Davies involved the community. More than that, he actually composed specifically for it.

“I attended the first performance of his children’s opera, Cinderella, performed by kids from Kirkwall Grammar School and Stromness Academy. And I was there to hear the very first performance of Farewell To Stromness, played by Max himself on an upright piano. All that stuck in my mind. And of course Max had been influenced by Aldeburgh and the fact that Benjamin Britten had set up his own festival there on a similar model.”

This was the Aldeburgh Festival, established by Britten in Suffolk in 1948.

But while the idea for festival was always there, seeded by Maxwell-Davies and Britten before him, it was decades before Sir James was able to act on the desire. “I left it late in comparison to them,” he admits. “I was into my middle age before doing it. [But] I’d always thought about where I would do it, and it became clear around 2014 that the time was right and that the place should be Cumnock.”

It made sense: although born in Kilwinning in North Ayrshire, Cumnock is where he grew up. It’s his home and the place where he had his first experience of music making and of performance – colliery bands and church choirs made up of working class people who, in his words, “sought out beauty in music.” People like his miner grandfather, who played the euphonium, gave him his first cornet and took him to band practice.

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When that first Tryst was held in 2014, critic Michael White was commissioned by The New York Times, no less, to take its measure. Cumnock he found to be a place “buried in the damp and drizzle of the Scottish lowlands … The streets are empty, shops are boarded up. It feels forlorn and broken.” It was, he wrote, “the kind of place where music festivals do not happen.” Which was sort of the point.

So how is Cumnock looking today, ten years on? Better. “People are saying the regeneration is underway and we’ve been talking a lot about regenerating areas like Cumnock, left behind, de-industrialised rural communities that were badly hit by the mines closing,” Sir James says.

“There has been a desire to regenerate these communities. And the people who can regenerate them in a practical sense are politicians, businessmen, social workers, entrepreneurs.”

It is happening, then. A concrete example he gives is 18th century Dumfries House to the west of Cumnock, purchased for the nation by a consortium headed by the then-Prince of Wales in 2007 and now run by his educational charity The King’s Foundation. It hosts Cumnock Tryst events.

But a place needs more than just money and venues if it is to thrive.

“There’s something about the regeneration of the spirit that is absolutely necessary as part of that social regeneration, and perhaps with music being a spiritual art-form – some might say the most spiritual – it can bring a special kind of unexpected, and perhaps slightly more mysterious, kind of regeneration. I think that’s probably what’s going on in Cumnock, in tandem with the community re-finding its identity after the death of coal mining.”

The 10th anniversary Tryst opens on October 2 with a performance by Scottish pianist Steven Osborne, a varied programme ranging from works by Schumann and Bach to Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. That’s in the atmospheric Trinity Church. It closes on October 6 with performances by choral group The Gesualdo Six and, in its first outing, the newly-formed Cumnock Tryst Ensemble.

Between those dates the festival will host the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra, British tenor Joshua Ellicott, more jazz from The Euan Stevenson Trio, performances by the Maxwell Quartet and traditional music from guitarist Seán Gray and Ardrossan-born fiddler Alastair Savage. This being a special year there is also a 10th birthday Gala Concert featuring a local choir and an array of musical helpmates.

The Tommy Smith Youth Jazz OrchestraThe Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra (Image: free)

The festival’s communitarian roots are on display too. The Unbroken Thread is a project for children and young people with additional needs and is a collaboration between Sir James, the Hebrides Ensemble, Hillside School and charity Drake Music Scotland, which creates opportunities for musicians with disabilities.

The Music Of Land Reclamation, meanwhile, is a project in which Highers Music students from The Robert Burns Academy have composed short musical pieces in response to images of the area by photographer Simon Butterworth. And there’s a performance by choral group Cumnock Arts Makes People Smile – or CAMPS for short – which will present a showcase of its recent work.

Inward focussed but avowedly internationalist in vision, the Cumnock Tryst doesn’t exist to win accolades. These have come, though. Last week Sir James was in London where the festival was nominated in the Classical category of the inaugural Sky Arts Awards, facing off against the likes of acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Anoushka Shankar and rubbing shoulders with fellow nominees such as Salman Rushdie, Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen and Brit Award winning indie band The Last Dinner Party. And guess what? The Cumnock Tryst won.

Adding to that success story, this year the Tryst has added an extra day of performances and in February the muscular little festival will expand beyond its Ayrshire base when it ups sticks for Glasgow for a night. As part of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s televised 2025 series, Sir James will conduct a range of new works by young composers who have been commissioned by and mentored at the Cumnock Tryst, among them saxophonist Jay Capperauld and much talked Electra Perivolaris.

“That is a very significant event for us and we’ll be bussing people to it from Cumnock,” he says. “We’ll have a bit of a party that night in Glasgow.”

The Cumnock Tryst runs from October 2 to October 6 

Barry Didcock is an Edinburgh-based Herald writer and freelance journalist specialising in arts, culture and media. He can be found on X at @BarryDidcock