Judith Weir prepares to be a radical master of the Queen's music

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jul/21/judith-weir-master-of-queens-music

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Judith Weir must be the most modest master of the Queen's music in the job's 388-year history. "The palace asked a lot of people who it should be, and I said Jonathan Dove would be the best person," she said, after her appointment was confirmed on Monday. "But they took no notice of me and a few weeks ago they told me they had had the most suggestions that it ought to be me – so well done."

But it's a mistake to read 60-year-old Weir's self-deprecation as a sign that she is not up for the public profile of the role. I first met her more than a decade ago, but have never known her to be more relaxed, forthcoming or fired-up. Weir, who is the first woman to hold the job, is clearly going to be in her element as she tackles this position.

"They had a great sentence in the appointment letter," she says, "something like: 'The Queen would like the position of the master of the Queen's music to be for the enjoyment and openness of music in the nation.' So it's a very wide description, and they said it's absolutely up to the person who does it to make it their own."

For Weir, that doesn't mean writing pieces for royal occasions. Just the opposite: it means supporting and speaking up for her composer colleagues, challenging the function that contemporary music fulfils in society, and embarking on a nationwide exploration of the state of music education in order to create pieces that will be useful for schoolchildren and amateur musicians.

But before she tells me about her softly spoken but radical plans for the decade-long, £15,000-a-year appointment, I ask if she felt any twinges of conscience in taking up the job.

The last incumbent, Peter Maxwell Davies, who was appointed 2004, was a model of how the master's public voice could still be a dissenting one – about the war in Iraq, the state of education, the traducing of the values of classical music in culture – even while he spoke from the centre of the establishment.

What is Weir's relationship with the monarchy and the 'establishment'? "Britain isn't in any state at the moment to become a republic," she says. "We're not there as a country. And for me, the Queen is a fantastic 88-year-old woman of incredible energy. I just have great admiration for her and it is an honour to do something in her name. And as for 'the establishment' – well, who is the establishment now? Sir Mick Jagger?"

Weir says there is still a sneaking suspicion that the world of classical music is carved up by a few big institutions and a handful of powerful cultural leaders. That really is an establishment; but Weir does not need the role of the master for access to classical music's top table. The opportunity of the role, she says, "is to avoid all that – and go and meet the other people".

By "other people", Weir is talking about the musicians and composers who are working in schools and communities, often unsung and underpaid, the grassroots of our musical culture. "I have an interest in teaching at all levels, but taking up this job has reminded me how sketchy my knowledge really is of what's going on in schools. The yearly stipend will help me to travel around the UK – without doing that, it's very difficult to know what's really happening – and possibly to have the time to do a piece every year for those communities. The question of music education over the last few years has been full of rhetorical behaviour. It's been a Punch and Judy show on both sides. And the media love it as well."

As Nicky Morgan takes over as education secretary, there is a looming sense of disaster about the way music is funded in schools in England and Wales. Weir is more pragmatic. "I feel it's rather a fortuitous new start: we have had an education secretary leave and something new will now happen. Each school is different and what's happening in some of them can be remarkably good."

Weir wants to challenge her composer colleagues to write "in a simpler mode, without changing their style" to create music that is accessible for the widest range of people to play and enjoy.

Weir will not be the kind of person to pontificate from the sidelines, but she will lead by the example of her music. Her work is a kind of transcendence of the ordinary, in which often simple ideas, harmonies, and stories become newly rich and magical. She makes us see and feel a sense of wonder, without preaching, without idealism, but with her feet and her ears to the ground.

There will be challenges in her tenure, most obviously the decision her fellow Scots will make in the independence referendum on 18 September (she admits she is delighted that, whatever happens, the Queen's sovereignty looks likely to remain intact over the whole of Great Britain), as well as whatever the next government decides to do to music in schools. And there is also her blog, which launches on Tuesday and which proves that Weir is as fastidious and poetic a writer as she is a composer.

But at least there was one test that Weir did not have to face: what she was going to be called. The palace never even suggested "mistress" of the Queen's music and neither did she. But a friend of hers did come up with "mastress", she tells me with a twinkle in her eye.