As James Waters steps down as NYCOS Chair, NYCOS Artistic Director Christopher Bell sits down to talk about his time with the organisation. From his early love of singing to his role in NYCOS’ founding, James shares his journey, reflections on 30 years of incredible music-making, and what makes NYCOS so special. Plus, he recalls the unforgettable moment when NYCOS made history as Scotland’s first live performance after the pandemic.
Christopher Bell (CB): I’ve known you for many years as a singer, an arts administrator, and a festival director, but I don’t know how you got into music and in particular how you got into singing.
James Waters (JW): My father was a music advisor; he was a baritone, and when I was about 15 or 16, he heard me singing and thought I might have some kind of a voice. He talked to the head of music at my school and got me interested in it. I had delusions of being a great operatic singer, which were crushed by a postgraduate year at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama: the truth hit me that although I could sing in tune, nobody would ever pay to hear me. So I went off and did something else after that.
CB: You were involved in the very first meeting about NYCOS over 30 years ago. Do you recall anything of that meeting? Do you remember who was there?
JW: It was in the basement of the NYOS office. Pat MacMahon [singer] was there from the RCS, Richard Chester [Director of NYOS], and crucially, John Robertson from the British Federation of Young Choirs, the organisation that provided some pump-priming money to get us going. And I suggested the name Raymond Williamson as someone to approach as NYCOS’ first Chair.
CB: NYCOS is about to celebrate 30 years, and because you were there before we started, I’m just wondering what you have observed over that time, not only for us but also perhaps in the music sector or the singing sector in Scotland?
JW: When I came back to Scotland to study in Glasgow, I was absolutely brutally staggered by the level of choral singing in Scotland, and not in a positive way. I watched you work in various places, and the prospect of having a seriously good youth choir in Scotland, which could create large numbers of good singers in Scotland, was incredibly exciting. I think it’s gone significantly further than I thought it ever could.
Your model of creating your own feeder choirs across Scotland was actually visionary. NYCOS has always had a very, very good line of strategic development. The line of regional choirs through the Girls’ Choir and the Boys’ Choir, through to NYCOS itself and the Chamber Choir, has been an incredibly logical, linear development. And it sings sensationally well. It’s not a youth choir. It’s a fabulous choir that happens to be young. I’ve heard youth choirs sing very beautifully. I’ve heard youth choirs sing very musically. I’ve heard youth choirs sing very well in tune. But NYCOS adds real emotional commitment, and I will continue to come to hear NYCOS sing because it touches me in a way that very few other choirs do.
CB: Thank you very much for the time that you have devoted to NYCOS over the years, and in particular the last four years as Chair, which have been very challenging on so many levels—not least a COVID pandemic that devastated the singing world in Scotland because people were banned from singing at absolutely every level from 9 to 109! Thank you for guiding us through that.
JW: I have to say that one of the most exciting moments of my professional life was when NYCOS was the first live performance of any kind in Scotland on Calton Hill in May 2021 post-pandemic. You gathered singers at 6 a.m., and the papers and TV crews all came. It was so successful that we actually crashed through the eight o’clock news on BBC Breakfast Time. Politicians tweeted about it, and it made headlines right across the world. That was the NYCOS spirit at its very finest.
