Judith Weir inspires young composers

Published: 28/11/2016

Internationally renowned composer, Judith Weir OBE, inspires young composers at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland as she begins the first in a series of lectures as a visiting professor of Composition.

The Master of the Queens Music, a position she has held since 2014, will share her experiences as a composer and inspire the next generation composers to write music that will impact the world around them.

Ms Weir said: “I am coming to meet the students simply as a composer, to share my experience and to find out what this generation of new composers are thinking about and doing. This kind of occasional but regular contact is refreshing for me, and I hope will be for the Royal Conservatoire students as well.

“I taught at the then RSAMD in the 1980s, and have some good memories of the place. But now it’s a very much more powerful institution, encompassing a very big range of art-forms. It’s obviously an important national institution for Scotland, and I’m glad to be able to make my own small contribution to the impressive things that are going on.”

And she added: “It’s getting on for 45 years since I went off to do a music degree and it was very different then. I did receive encouragement from teachers, luckily, during schooldays, but the education of composers at college level has now improved out of all recognition. It’s partly because there was almost no official composition teaching available to my generation that I now feel so enthusiastic to take part in the teaching programme at RCS.”