When Scottish composer Patrick Doyle catches himself being “new-agey” – and he is fascinated by the coincidences of good fortune that have materialised in his life – the Holywood name he invokes by way of checking himself for being too much of a hippy is that of Shirley Maclaine rather than Gwyneth Paltrow. If that suggests a man whose taste is for an earlier era of the silver screen, it is also true that he sits in age exactly between the two lifestyle gurus, the concerts of his music which are a feature of this year’s Celtic Connections programme in Glasgow being a celebration of his 65th birthday, which actually fell in the spring of last year.

It has taken a while for him to be able to carve out the time accept the invitation from Celtic’s Donald Shaw to be part of the event, he concedes, but the result is concerts with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that promise to be very special one-off events. Today at 2pm and 5.30pm in Glasgow Royal Concert there are screenings of Disney’s Scottish fantasy animation Brave with Doyle’s soundtrack performed live by the orchestra under the baton of Dirk Brosse and guest musicians who featured on the original recording. Then on Thursday at Glasgow City Halls, the orchestra and Brosse perform a programme that combines selections from Doyle’s other film scores alongside new and old pieces that the composer has arranged for the occasion and which will feature contributions from members of his family.

“I was asked by Donald Shaw to write some original pieces, which I have done. I have written a piece for choir and orchestra that is a setting of William Dunbar’s poem Sweet Rose of Virtue which will be performed in the original old Scots by the Glasgow Phoenix Choir. The second new piece is a Scottish Overture, which is about six minutes long and will be the finale of the second half.

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“Plus I have a piece I wrote as part of a Celtic song-cycle just for fun and which was used in the film Whisky Galore but has never been performed live. It will be sung by Maggie McInnes and my two daughters are singing as well. Abigail will sing Tir na Nog from Into the West, which was directed by Mike Newell, and Nuala is singing Never Forget from Murder on the Orient Express, which was originally sung by Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Family connections are important to Doyle, who himself arrived in the middle of family of 13 in Uddingston, whose sisters Ellen and Margaret are singers (the latter appearing on the soundtrack of the Newell film), and whose father was an opera-loving tenor who idolised John McCormack.

“But I was the only one of the family who studied music. I had started picking out tunes by ear on a glockenspiel as a kid, and then my folks got me a piano. At Our Ladies High School in Motherwell I had a very good music teacher, but she left for a promotion in my fifth year so there was no teacher to take me into my Highers. I was in a terrible state as there was nothing else that I was interested in. So four of us asked to go to Dalziel High School in Motherwell, where we had great teachers, and I sailed through the audition for the Academy from there.”

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“The Academy”, is of course, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and an institution that was pivotal in the making of Doyle’s multifaceted career.

Young Patrick had gone to the Junior Academy as a schoolboy who was playing in brass bands as well as studying piano. But he also remembers being aware of how music was used on screen from an early age.

“They used to call me square eyes in the house because I was never away from the television, but I was always studying the construct of it. I used to love watching Bilko [the American comedy series starring Phil Silvers], and was always aware of the music, as well the other technical details of the way that the programme was made. I clocked all that stuff when I was young.”

“But when I went to the Academy it was to pursue music. I think I thought I’d probably end up teaching, and the idea of that was quite appealing. But I was very interested in the drama there as well, and my fellow student Morag Fullerton approached me to write the music for her play at the Edinburgh Fringe and then to co-write a musical review and perform in it.”

From there Pat Doyle, as he styled himself then, found a job with TAG, the theatre-in-education company at the Citizens, before being asked by playwright John Byrne to read for the part of Hector in The Slab Boys. The David Hayman-directed premiere, with Billy McColl, Jim Byars, Robbie Coltrane and Elaine Collins was a huge hit at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and transferred to London. On the strength of it, Doyle and his wife Leslie, who had studied stage management at the RSAMD and worked as a wardrobe supervisor for stage and TV, moved south.

“The Slab Boys was such a success that casting directors would see me as an actor at the drop of a hat,” Doyle remembers, but he was not willing to let go of his love for music. “I wasn’t happy with life going for auditions, and I felt I needed to pursue my music.”

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A meeting with Kenneth Branagh led to a job as musical director with his Renaissance Shakespeare company, with some stage roles as well, and a UK tour with a company that included Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Geraldine McEwan. When Branagh made his film of Henry V, Doyle wrote the music and when the movie opened in Los Angeles it was at the same time as the company were there on tour, so the Doyles settled in LA with their two young children – and a bank loan from Barclays – while he looked for more film-score work. He has produced them at the rate of between one and three a year since, including during the period at the start of the new millennium when he was being treated for leukemia.

His most recent score is for another Branagh movie, a Shakespeare bio-pic All Is True in which the writer and director appears alongside Dame Judi and Sir Ian McKellen.

“I still write by hand initially,” says Doyle, “and for that I chose two Shakespeare texts and composed two songs at the piano that are the thematic foundation for the score. There is a natural rhythm in the poetry that gives you the basis for a melody.”

For other scores inspiration can strike less conveniently. “For Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I heard the Potter Waltz in my head during a meeting and had to ask for paper to jot down the melody line. I don’t compose a piece for film that can’t stand up on a concert stage. Something like Harry in Winter, from the Goblet of Fire score, is written exactly as you’ll hear it in concert.”

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But when it comes to a score like that for Brave, there is work to be done on the dynamics for a live performance. “That has had to be rebalanced for this concert, and that’s been months and months of work. Technically there is a lot that has to be done when you are working with human beings playing live.”

“I’ve also written an introduction to the Brave concert to introduce the audience to the orchestra and that was two or three days’ work. You have a responsibility to an audience and it has got be pukka for the home crowd. I am really proud to be doing this in Glasgow, I love the place and it was great to me.”

Repaying that debt has included working with young musicians in Lanarkshire and at the Junior Conservatoire in recent years – experiences that Doyle says have been among the most rewarding of his life and a reminder of how fortunate he was to have the instrumental tuition that is now being denied to Scottish youngsters.

“I would urge authorities to think twice. I know things are tough but I would ask them to think hard about impacting on instrumental teaching because I have seen at first hand the miraculous results that music can have on a community. It transforms lives.”

Brave in Concert, with the BBC SSO, is at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall today at 2pm and 5.30pm. Patrick Doyle – A Celebration is a Glasgow City Halls on Thursday at 7.30pm.