THIS year is awash with major musical anniversaries. I've focused on two particular ones in recent weeks – Mendelssohn's well-stocked bicentenary celebrations and the looming 50th birthday of Scottish composer James MacMillan. But to that we should add Henry Purcell (died 1659), George Frederic Handel (d. 1759) and Joseph Haydn (d. 1809).
More importantly for January, though, is Robert Burns, born the same year that Handel died, and whose musical legacy is arguably as significant as his poetic one, given the extent to which traditional airs of the day, particularly fiddle tunes, in
spired the creation of his lyrical verse.
Evidence of that is, as we speak, under the academic microscope of a three-day international conference entitled "Robert Burns 1759 to 2009", organised by Glasgow University's Department of Scottish Literature, which features a musical premiere tonight bringing together the Ayshire voices of MacMillan and Burns.
MacMillan's new composition – a setting of Burns' Lament for Mary Queen of Scots, repeated on 23 January in the St Cecilia's Hall under the auspices of the Royal Society of Edinburgh – is more than just a kinship gesture. It marks a quirky symbolic link between Burns and the mainstream composers of central Europe at the time, none of whom the Bard ever met, but who – through the crafty entrepreneurship of an Edinburgh publisher and go-between – created a body of chamber-sized song arrangements of Burns' and other Scots poetry that is utterly unique.
They included such lesser-known figures as Ignaz Pleyel and Mozart pupil Leopold Kozeluch. But among the more famous were Haydn and Beethoven. The publisher was one George Thomson, whose musical associations with the much-respected Edinburgh Musical Association and international business links gave him access to the A-list musical celebrities of the day.
Thomson had an eye for a good sale and the bravado of a door-to-door salesman. With salon-style Scots and Welsh song arrangements selling like hot cakes in the genteel social circles of London, he seized the opportunity to tap a similar market in post-Enlightenment Scotland. From Haydn alone he commissioned 429 folk song arrangements, many of them to Burns's words.
The common element in all these publications was the instrumentation. Thomson prescribed a combination of voice with piano trio (violin, cello and piano) that, to the composers, would have been a challenging extension of their existing work in the highly popular and practical piano trio genre.
Haydn's plentiful examples are particularly fascinating. "It's highly likely that his very last acts of composition were on these Thomson arrangements," says Glasgow University's music professor Marjorie Rycroft, who has led a mammoth research project to edit the songs and to commit all of Haydn's arrangements to CD.
Rather appropriately, her collaborators in this project mirror directly the original Austro-Scottish partnership, combining the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt (named after the Austrian town where Haydn, under the patronage of the ruling Esterhazy family, spent almost his entire working life) with Scots soprano Lorna Anderson and tenor Jamie MacDougall. On the academic side, the research "trio" involved in preparing the material have included, as well as Rycroft herself, fellow Glasgow music lecturer Dr Warwick Edwards and their musical colleague in the Scots literature department, Dr Kirsteen McCue.
For the Glasgow team, the exhaustive task of editing and publishing the music began in the early 1990s, ignited both by Rycroft's accomplishments as a Haydn scholar, and McCue's decision, following graduation from Glasgow, to pursue doctoral research at Oxford into Thomson's Scots song publications.
Around 2002, their work was noticed by the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt who, having recorded all of Haydn's known piano trios, had been looking for a new project to get their teeth into. Within a short time, six CD volumes of folk song arrangements were released, in which Burns's words were pre-eminent.
This afternoon, at the Glasgow conference, the whole team will launch a repackaging of the CDs, which puts them into a more logical chronology, and makes them an enlightening addition to our understanding of Haydn's late years and of a specific genre that swept Britain during the early 19th century. There's an undeniable tweeness in the genteel intimacy of the instrumentation, but no lack of sophistication and inventiveness in Haydn's simple but ingenious embellishments of the airs.
And many of them position Burns's art in a fascinating light too, not least through the knowledge that he was directly involved in Thomson's earliest machinations to create such stylised arrangements of his songs.
Despite opinions that suggest Burns's bantipathy towards art music – warnings to Pleyel that "not one iota of the original air should be changed" – there is plentiful evidence, such as his known friendships with Edinburgh's highest-minded musicians, that points to a working knowledge and understanding of it.
The premiere tonight of MacMillan's new Lament, commissioned by the Glasgow-based Centre for Robert Burns Studies, seems a fitting way to mark this 250th anniversary conference, and the summation of the Trio Eisenstadt's Haydn project. MacMillan has scored his Lament for the same musicians but, says Rycroft, has structured it as "a little dramatic scena that closes with a solitary cello". It's a potent reminder of the instinctive musician in Burns.
• For more information on Burns events, visit
www.gla.ac.uk/events