Page 210 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

process of picking her successor. The role has no fixed responsibilities, but it’s customary for its

holder to write music for royal occasions.

And next month the Aldeburgh Festival mounts a retrospective of her music. It ranges from the
mini-opera she wrote for solo voice 45 years ago, King Harald’s Saga (“Jane Manning sang it

everywhere and gave me a career”), to two new pieces: a string quartet and an orchestral

work, Planet, inspired by photographs of Earth taken from space.

I remind Weir of another anniversary. It’s just over half a century since we first met, in what
was then quaintly called a “harmony and counterpoint” class when we were first-year music

students at Cambridge. She laughs. “It was a completely different world, wasn’t it?” she says.

“The computer played absolutely no part in our lives as musicians. The internet hadn’t been

invented. If you wanted to get a souvenir of a piece you had written you had to lug in a big reel-

to-reel tape recorder. Speaking as a composer, I’m much happier about the way things are now.”

Weir was presented with a Royal Philharmonic Society honorary membership by King Charles last year
MATT CROSSICK/PA
And as with athletes constantly shaving microseconds off world records, musical standards have

risen too, haven’t they? “Enormously,” Weir says. “Today’s students have absolutely no trouble

performing old pieces of mine that were once thought very difficult. In fact a bassoon player
suggested to me that Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring should be transposed up a semitone every