William Sweeney and the Voice of the People

Extract

‘Rise to birth with me now, my brother …’

William Sweeney's most extended work to date is also his best-known, thanks to its having been broadcast three times. Most recently, and appropriately, his 70-minute setting of Hugh MacDiarmid's epic A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was heard on Radio 3 on Hogmanay. What better moment than the gateway of the New Year for Sweeney's musical gallimaufry, which in its rich diversity and mixture of song and speech, not to mention musical styles, is a faithful tribute to the poem it sets? In a sense, Sweeney's setting repays a very old debt. For it was the voice of Hugh MacDiarmid, lecturing in East London in 1974, that ‘put things together’ in the mind of a 24-year-old ex-avantgarde composer-clarinettist not quite sure what direction he wanted to follow. MacDiarmid's London lecture suddenly brought back to Sweeney an essential but hitherto unrecognized element in his own psyche: the revived folksong-movement of his leftwing Glaswegian childhood, spear-headed by the late Norman Buchan M.P. At Knightswood Secondary School, Sweeney had become fascinated first by contemporary jazz – Davis, Coltrane, Evans – and then Stockhausen (‘via Schoenberg’), and his principal study had been clarinet, continued at the RSAMD, and – from 1970 – at the RAM in London with the redoubtable Alan Hacker. Yet as a child, Sweeney had particularly loved the unaccompanied singing of Archie Fisher's sister Rae, and significantly, he ‘always felt disappointed when the guitars came in and spoiled it’.