Twenty Years at Edinburgh’s Reid Concert Hall

In this deeply personal essay, Emre Aracı returns to the Reid Concert Hall in Edinburgh for the twentieth anniversary of the University String Orchestra he founded as a student, reflecting on the past with a lyricism shaped by memory, music, and the passage of time. From the interlaced violins on the concert poster to the gleaming crescent atop the organ pipes, Aracı draws the reader into a world where Scottish and Ottoman musical legacies entwine. Along the way, he evokes the spirits of Sir Donald Francis Tovey, Pablo Casals, Albert Schweitzer, Adnan Saygun and Virginia Woolf—summoning a poignant harmony between the enduring soul of a place and the dreams of those who once passed through it.

EUSO 20th Anniversary Concert, 2 June 2012

A violin set against the “Royal Stewart” tartan—favoured by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II—a logo fashioned from interlaced violins, and the bold geometry of plaid: such is the poster for a special twentieth anniversary concert held in the University of Edinburgh’s Reid Concert Hall on 2 June 2012. It is a design most fitting for Scotland’s noble capital. Yet it is the programme, rather than the pattern, that draws the eye: prominently announced is a Schottische in C major, no less, bearing the signature of Sultan Murad V of the Ottoman Empire. Another work on the bill, Bosphorus by Moonlight (Boğaziçi Mehtapları), casts an altogether different spell, bringing with it the mystical aesthetic of far-off lands, gently superimposed upon the familiar symmetry of tartan. The Edinburgh University String Orchestra (EUSO)—which I had the privilege of founding during my student days and conducting for five formative years—now celebrates its twentieth year. And how better to mark the occasion than with such an eclectic programme: one that reaches from foreign shores towards its own cultural heritage; that seeks resemblance within difference; that strives, in polyphony, to hear one voice as a harmonious whole. To its founder, who still thinks of himself as one of them—a student among students—this concert offers the most precious of gifts: not a material token, but a spiritual one.

Emre Aracı with the Edinburgh University String Orchestra in the Reid Hall in 1992

On 1 February 1992, as I stood before the Edinburgh University String Orchestra for its début concert in the Reid Concert Hall, my gaze often drifted towards the organ built by Jürgen Ahrend. There, above the console, gleamed a crescent and star—a quiet emblem that reminded me, each time I stepped into that hall, of the lands from which I came. During my years as conductor, the orchestra would, from time to time, perform works by Turkish composers such as Ahmed Adnan Saygun, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, and Cemal Reşit Rey. It was, indeed, EUSO that gave the first orchestrated performance in Edinburgh of Sultan Murad V’s compositions, in a special concert held in 1997. That the students should now, twenty years on, continue this tradition moved me deeply. 

"To the Lighthouse"

As I boarded the train to Edinburgh from King’s Cross on the evening of 2 June, I took with me a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. While reading this three-part novel on the journey north, I found myself reflecting on its haunting meditation on time—the ten years that slip silently between the book’s pages—and could not help but think of the Dungeness lighthouse. From my bedroom window each night, I used to watch its beam—at times brilliant, at times dim—sensing how life, like that light, flares for a moment, only to fade. And so it seemed to me, as the train crossed the English border and made its steady way through the quiet hills of the Lowlands, that this journey too would stir in me the same fleeting, ineffable emotions that Woolf so delicately renders.

My expectations were not disappointed. Fifteen years on, I found myself once again stepping onto that familiar rostrum in the Reid Concert Hall. The organ, crowned with its crescent and star, still stood before me as it had on that first evening. Through the tall windows, the golden light of Edinburgh’s long summer evening streamed in, uniting—almost mystically—with the crescent above the organ, as though sun and symbol were momentarily at one.

The Jürgen Ahren organ, crowned with its crescent and star (photo © Emre Aracı)

Who had not passed through this hall over the course of a century and a half? Would our own twenty years, too, not be lost to the slow erosion of time? And yet, it seemed as if the memories lingered on, suspended in the very objects of the hall. Did not General John Reid (1721–1807)—soldier, amateur musician, composer, and alumnus of this university—still gaze upon us from his portrait on the wall, flute in hand? It was his bequest that gave this building life, a gift that founded the university’s Faculty of Music and endowed it with one of Europe’s most venerable collections of historical instruments. And does the university not, each year on the anniversary of his birth, honour his memory with a performance of one of his own compositions? 

General John Reid (© University of Edinburgh)

And yet, beyond these hallowed walls, the world continued to change with unsettling speed. How much longer would Scotland, in search of its independence, continue to embrace those who had found peace in the strength of unity? Had not Princes Street, once the elegant heart of the city, been reduced to a kind of battlefield by the endless delays of a modern tramway, left incomplete for over five years? And had not the university’s historic Faculty of Music lost its independent status, its library absorbed into the main university collection, first folded into the School of Arts and Media, and more recently placed under the broader aegis of the College of Arts? That evening, 2 June 2012, it was the stillness of the Reid Concert Hall’s objects that seemed to converse with me more eloquently than the silent audience. Whether this was due to the lingering influence of Virginia Woolf, I cannot say. Even the conductor’s rostrum—every time I leapt or swayed—seemed to be whispering something in return. It was, after all, no ordinary rostrum: it had once belonged to Professor Sir Donald Francis Tovey, among the most illustrious of Edinburgh’s musical pedagogues. Concerts were conducted from this very rostrum twenty years ago, and there it stood once again before me—somewhat more battered, perhaps, yet still bearing the brass plaque inscribed with Tovey’s name.

Emre Aracı on Tovey's rostrum

I remembered how, during my student years, I had discovered its original brass railings lying neglected in the basement of the building, and had arranged for them to be refitted. But on this occasion, the railings were absent. Still, Tovey’s rostrum, infused with the invisible energy of all those who had conducted upon it over the decades, seemed to radiate a presence that defied words. The Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh, known as the Reid Professorship, was established in 1839. Its first occupant was John Thomson, a pupil and close friend of Mendelssohn. Following Thomson’s untimely death, Mendelssohn himself wrote to the university's rector, recommending a composer he greatly admired—William Sterndale Bennett. Yet it was not Bennett but John Donaldson who was appointed to the post. In 1859, Donaldson succeeded in persuading the university to build the Reid Concert Hall. Later, in the academic year 1893–94, under the professorship of Friedrich Niecks, the Music Department attained the status of a full faculty. Undoubtedly, however, it was under the stewardship of Professor Donald Francis Tovey—Reid Professor from 1914 until his death in 1940—that the Edinburgh University Faculty of Music would experience its golden age.

Sir Donald Francis Tovey—whose name today is perhaps most closely associated with the critical editions he prepared of Bach and Beethoven, and the analytical programme notes he composed for the Reid Orchestra he founded in 1917—was also active as a composer and pianist. A pupil of Sophie Weisse in his early years, Tovey read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and studied composition with Hubert Parry. His Piano Concerto, which he himself performed as soloist under the baton of Henry Wood in 1903, was later given again in 1906, this time under the direction of Hans Richter. He composed a symphony and an opera, The Bride of Dionysus, and formed a close friendship with the renowned violinist Joseph Joachim, confidant of Brahms. Indeed, in 1905, Tovey joined Joachim’s quartet at the piano to perform Brahms’s Piano Quintet, Op. 34.

In 1935, Tovey composed a vast, sixty-minute cello concerto dedicated to another friend, Pablo Casals. That same year, and upon the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar—who had been deeply impressed by Tovey’s scholarly editions of Bach—he was knighted. Not everyone, however, was among his admirers. In a letter dated 18 September 1927, Anthony van Hoboken, pupil of the formidable Heinrich Schenker, wrote to his teacher from Edinburgh with rather disparaging views of Tovey. Schenker’s avant-garde theories, Hoboken complained, stood no chance of acceptance in a faculty presided over by so dreamy and romantic a figure as Tovey—particularly in Scotland, where, he added with dry wit, a professor’s chair was more secure than the King’s own throne. Tovey, in truth, was the very image of a Romantic. Such was the life and career of the man to whom the conductor’s rostrum in the Reid Concert Hall—still in use by students today—once belonged. Indeed, in this very hall, on 23 November 1934, Tovey, Casals, and Albert Schweitzer posed together for a commemorative photograph. The university had awarded Schweitzer and Casals honorary doctorates.

Albert Schweitzer, Casals and Tovey in the Reid Concert Hall, 23 November 1934

During the concert interval, I descended once more to the room reserved for the conductor and soloists—just as we had done twenty years before. There, Tovey’s Bechstein piano stood silently, alongside his writing desk. On the wall, a framed photograph of the Joachim Quartet, and beneath it, an old slip of paper inscribed and signed by Joachim himself to his “dear friend” Tovey. Stacked on the floor were boxes of old Reid Orchestra programmes—fragile volumes from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. I lifted out a few. Though their owners have long since passed on, the words they contain continue to speak. One programme read: 20 March 1930, the 14th season of the Reid Symphony Orchestra, with Tovey conducting a concert at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Another: 21 May 1942, the orchestra’s 26th season. Tovey had died two years prior; the baton now in the hands of Professor Sidney Newman. The soloist, Ukrainian-born pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, was performing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in C minor. Beneath the programme, a sombre note:

“There is complete Air Raid accommodation in the basement of the Hall and the corridors. Shelters are also available at the West End (St John's Church) and in Rutland Square. In the event of an air raid an announcement will be made from the platform”.

Reid Symphony Orchestra, 21 May 1942

A strange heaviness came over me as I read those words. In today’s concerts, we bristle at the interruption of a mobile phone—but what those before us endured, and under what conditions they continued to create music, puts such irritations into perspective. Though those individuals may appear to have been forgotten, the truth is quite otherwise. The unexpected rediscovery in Tovey’s room brought me into quiet communion with little James in To the Lighthouse, his longing to reach the distant beam now mirrored in my own search for a vanished past. As Woolf so delicately suggests in her novel, no soul truly disappears so long as we continue to think of them; and in that moment, I felt once again that the empty seats of the hall were not empty at all. Tovey, Schweitzer, Casals, and so many others we have loved and lost—perhaps they were all still there, still listening.

That evening, as I stood once more in the Reid Concert Hall—on this journey from Edinburgh back towards the musical history of my own homeland—my thoughts turned to another cherished composer from Turkey, who had, too, once crossed this threshold: Ahmed Adnan Saygun. While working on my doctoral research on his life and works in Edinburgh, I had, by sheer chance, stumbled across the faded pages of a journal in the archive of the Adnan Saygun Research Centre at Bilkent University. There, recorded with quiet clarity, was Saygun’s own visit to the Reid Concert Hall in November 1946. I imagined him wandering through the streets of Edinburgh, map in hand, just as he described—meeting the affable Professor Sidney Newman, observing the unfamiliar yet enchanting surroundings of this “charming” city, and recording his impressions in detail.

Ahmed Adnan Saygun's Edinburgh journal, November 1946

Here is a selection from Saygun's Edinburgh journal:

“1 November 1946: The Edinburgh train departs at two o’clock. A long journey—and then, Edinburgh. At the station I am met by Miss Dorothy Lyall. We go together to the Caledonian Hotel and dine. I am exhausted...

2 November: In the morning, a guide takes me to Mr Newman at the Institute or School of Music. A sympathetic man. But he is neither a Scot nor especially involved in folk music. Among the instruments in the museum, I am delighted to discover our own three-stringed "cura". Newman’s pupil arrives, and that suffices. At noon I dine with a pianist named Miss Portch at the International Club. Tomorrow evening, I am to hear some English works and Scottish folk tunes at her home. In the afternoon, D. L. and another take me to see the Scottish countryside. We travel about 35 kilometres to a small town called Peebles. A sweet place... After tea, we return to Edinburgh and the hotel.

In Edinburgh Saygun stayed at the Caledonian Hotel on Princes Street

3 November: I spend the morning and afternoon walking through Edinburgh, map in hand. I like this charming city immensely. In the afternoon, at the National Gallery, I am pleased to discover a Rembrandt, a Van Gogh, and a Degas. In the evening, D. L. arrives and we dine before going to Miss Portch’s house. Among the guests is an eighty-year-old woman named Frazer, who with her sister has collected Scottish folk songs. Regrettably, they lack a scientific approach, and are unable to answer my questions clearly... They perform several folk tunes. I must study this music more closely. In September, there is to be a galic folk festival—it would be worth attending. I played a few pieces from records, and a little on the piano too. They expressed interest in my works. Whether it was politeness, I cannot say. But I shall send them.

4 November: At three o’clock I go to meet Wiseman at the BBC. I listen to a school group rehearsing a broadcast—not very good, but how I wish we could do even this well. Wiseman assures me there are better ones. He, too, seems not to be technically engaged in folklore. A pleasant man. We part with plans to speak again at greater length next year. Dinner. Then D. L. takes me to the station: departure at ten. Once again, I sleep poorly.

5 November: In the morning, the train window reveals nothing. A terrible fog. We arrive at King’s Cross an hour late”.

Reading these entries, written in the composer’s own hand, I felt an uncanny proximity—not only to Saygun, but to the Edinburgh he had seen, the music he had heard, the very autumnal light that must have streamed through the windows of the Reid Hall. It was as if the past, for one fragile moment, had returned to keep me company.

In 1946, on what was likely his first visit to Edinburgh, Saygun wandered the city with a map in hand, pursuing new discoveries with a folklorist’s curiosity and wondering, with characteristic modesty, whether the interest shown in his own compositions was genuine or merely polite. How could he have imagined that, decades later, his works would be performed in that very same concert hall by Edinburgh students themselves? In an age where the headlines are fed by the smallest misfortune, and where the subtleties of cross-cultural dialogue seem doomed to vanish between the lines, I take comfort in believing that such encounters, though seemingly ephemeral, remain embedded in the quiet soil of these very words. 

I also find solace in recalling a concert this past February I conducted at Istanbul’s Adile Sultan Pavilion, where, before an audience of five hundred Scots, the Istanbul Chamber Orchestra performed alongside Cihat Aşkın. At the climax of his soulful rendition of Bonnie Highland Laddie, the entire Scottish contingent rose to their feet in a thunderous ovation. And I think, too, of the splendid ball that same weekend at the Çırağan Palace Hotel, where the Scottish pipes were joined by the Turkish tulum, and Scots and Turks alike took hands and danced together. So vivid were these memories that, for a moment, I forgot I was in Scotland at all—in Edinburgh, and within the familiar walls of the Reid Concert Hall.

Emre Aracı returns to the Reid Concert Hall in June 2012 for the EUSO's 20th anniversary concert

That evening’s 20th anniversary concert was shared between three conductors: myself; James Lowe, who succeeded me at the helm of EUSO; and their current conductor, Iain McLarty. Though EUSO is an amateur orchestra, open not only to music students but to those studying any subject across the university, it has played a quietly significant role in the development of numerous conductors and composers over the years. Indeed, in conversation with James Lowe—now a seasoned conductor with engagements at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and once an assistant to Bernard Haitink—we found ourselves recalling EUSO’s annual Scottish tours. These were often as memorable for their mishaps as for their music.

Lowe recounted how, after a concert in a remote village church, the orchestra remained behind to dance and celebrate into the small hours. Cold, and in search of warmth, someone pressed a button beside the organ, believing it would activate the heating system. It didn’t—it rang the church bells. The next morning, the villagers arrived at the doors with the local constabulary in tow. On another occasion, following a performance of Holst’s St Paul’s Suite in Melrose, an elderly lady approached the students and remarked, “I last played this piece with Mr Holst himself”. She added, wistfully, “I only wish you’d played his Brook Green Suite as well”. True to their word, the orchestra returned the following year and honoured her request.

Iain McLarty, Emre Aracı and James Lowe at the Reid Concert Hall, 2 June 2012

As for my own Concerto for Violin and Strings entitled Bosphorus by Moonlight—composed during my student years in Edinburgh—it was most recently performed at the opening of the 11th Mersin Festival, with Cihat Aşkın as soloist and the Artemisia Chamber Orchestra conducted by Alpaslan Ertüngealp. But it was first premiered on 10 May 1997 at the Reid Concert Hall, by EUSO under the baton of James Lowe, with Christina Ball as soloist. It seemed only fitting that the first movement should return to the Reid Hall for this 20th anniversary celebration.

Later that night, walking alone along Princes Street, I looked up and noticed the moon rising above Edinburgh Castle. But it was no ordinary moon—it had fused so completely with the castle that it appeared not as a moon at all, but as a great, glowing lighthouse in the sky. Perhaps, I thought, it was Lily Briscoe’s painting at last.

Full moon above Edinburgh Castle, 2 June 2012, (photo © Emre Aracı)

And should you, dear reader, find yourself caught up in the festive spirit of Edinburgh this August—should you wish to gaze upon that same moon, or visit the Reid Concert Hall’s Museum of Instruments—you may be pleased to learn that Turkish Airlines is launching direct flights from Istanbul to Edinburgh as of July...

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Edinburgh’un Reid Konser Salonu’nda 20 Yıl’ in the July-August 2012 issue (No. 71) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

© Emre Aracı 2025. All rights reserved.

The content of this blog is the intellectual property of the author. No part of these writings may be reproduced, quoted, or distributed without prior written permission.