A few months ago, Gramophone magazine asked me to prepare a profile of the Scottish composer James MacMillan, who celebrates his 55th birthday this year. Knowing his output from my work reviewing church and choral music, I thoroughly enjoyed delving deeper into this highly imaginative and accessible voice, so reprint my article here, not quite as it appeared in Gramophone. Since then, however, I have been seeking out MacMillan's music and have taken a great liking to everything I have heard. Might I recommend readers of this to head towards this disc when it appears later this month? I've reviewed it for September's Gramophone, so my lips are sealed; let's just say, I loved it!
This
is going to be Scotland’s Year in the limelight. September sees the historic referendum to
determine whether or not, 700 years after the Battle of Bannockburn effectively consolidated Scottish Independence, and after 307 years of union, Scotland breaks away from
the United Kingdom to become a fully independent state. Meanwhile, the eyes of the sporting world
will focus on Glasgow in July when the city hosts the 20th Commonwealth Games. Receiving
rather less coverage in the global media, but nonetheless significant in its
own small way, October will see the launch of a brand new Scottish music festival,
the Cumnock Tryst, which will welcome some significant artists to the country attracted
not so much by the architectural gems or gentle climate of this small Ayrshire
town, as by the festival’s Artistic Director, James MacMillan, the doyen of the
current breed of Scottish composers, for whom 2014 is also something of a
landmark; he turns 55 this year.
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James MacMillan |
Having
past the half-century mark, MacMillan can be excused his periodic splenetic
outbursts as he fends off what he sees as attacks on his native land, his profound
Roman Catholic faith and, of course, music, in his Daily Telegraph blog (one outburst against the perceived
anti-Englishness of the Scottish National Party prompting a reader to describe
MacMillan as “the self righteous, self appointed spokesman for extreme
Catholicism in Scotland”). But if he
looks to be moving into the ranks of Grumpy Old Men, as a composer MacMillan’s utter
conviction in his firmly-held beliefs only serves to ignite a creative spark
which blazes today with as much energy and self-confidence as it did back in
1990 when he first established himself as a force to be reckoned
with on the British music scene with the première of The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie at that year’s Proms.
MacMillan’s own commentary on The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie reveals his abiding interest in
the church’s often stormy progress through Scottish history, as well as his
desire to tell epic tales through music (it is also evidence of his long-held hatred
of both social injustice and religious bigotry); “Between 1560 and 1707 as many
as 4,500 Scots perished because their contemporaries thought they were witches.
The persecution of witches was a phenomenon known to Catholic and Protestant
Europe at this time but the Reformation in Scotland gave an impetus to the
attack on ‘witches’ which became a popular and powerful crusade”. Musically, this dark episode in Scotland’s
religious past has inspired something both extraordinarily vivid and deeply
moving, which clearly resonated with a non-Scottish audience in 1990 and
continues to do so to this day; as the critic for the Daily Telegraph put it, “MacMillan brilliantly demonstrated in Isobel Gowdie that accessibility need
not necessarily involve compromise... all its various musical elements - be
they Scottish folk tune, Gregorian chant or pure MacMillan - are by no means
merely illustrative but emanate from a powerful, all-embracing and unifying emotional
impulse”.
Those “various musical elements” are certainly
diverse, and reveal MacMillan to be a true catholic in the full sense of the
word - as meaning inclusive and all-embracing.
So confident is he in his own stylistic voice, that while elements which
would seem violently contradictory rub up against each other with almost
disarming directness, his music comes across not just as coherent, but
immediately accessible. That stylistic self-confidence has not come
with age, but was there from the very start .
The Scotsman, reviewing the
première this January of Symphonic Study,
a work written back in 1981 but which (in his own words) the composer “kind
of forgot about”, suggested the young Macmillan had borrowed “mercilessly from
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”. (The review added, however, that the work also revealed “the mystical harmonic
shrouds that, even today, weave a spectral miasma around MacMillan’s centrally
binding melodic threads”.) MacMillan himself
acknowledges influences in his music from a great many 20th century
composers, singling out those who “have been shaped by religious quests in our
time - Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Harvey,
Tavener, Pärt, Górecki”. But he also
recognises influences from much further back; “From antiquity I have been
taught much by the great contrapuntalists from Palestrina and Victoria to Bach.
They inspire modern composers on the need to explore complexity in whatever
music is being created”.
Clearly, a deep-seated Catholic faith is at the
very core of MacMillan’s writing; his sacred music includes a congregational
setting of the Mass (Mass of Blessed John
Henry Newman) composed in 2010
for the visit of Pope Benedict to Britain – although MacMillan has since
declared that “I have
decided to stop writing congregational music for the Catholic Church...
there is too much music
being created, at the same time as the vast repository of tradition is ignored
and willfully forgotten”. It remains to be seen how true he will be to
his word, but he admits that his secular music “can on many occasions be
inspired by some reflection on theology or another aspect of religion. This is
inevitable, I suppose, for a believer and a Catholic. For example I have now
composed two Passion settings; a St John and a St Luke. There are also many
purely instrumental works which hover around similar territory - my piano trio Fourteen
Little Pictures (based on the Stations of the Cross) and the triptych of
orchestral works Triduum (based on the three days before the
Resurrection)”.
However,
the most constant musical influence in his writing is drawn from his Scottish
heritage; “Along with a number of Scottish composers like
Judith Weir, Edward McGuire and others I developed a keen interest in Scottish
traditional music. Some of us have absorbed this experience into our own music
in different ways. Sometimes this is conscious, sometimes sub-conscious. With
me, I think it is there in a certain modality that appears from time to time,
and a degree of ornamentation that can be traced back to bagpipe music like pibrochd,
and other sources. All this has been drawn in to a wider mix, so it is not
always immediately observed in all my pieces, but it is certainly there as a
subliminal ingredient. It has cropped up a lot in my most recent choral music.”
Beyond choral music, MacMillan’s latest works give
a vivid demonstration of the extraordinary range of this amazingly versatile
composer. January saw the première (in
London) of the Viola Concerto, the latest in a series of concertos conceived
along traditional lines which so far have included works for piano, violin and
oboe. Last November an organ piece, St Andrews Suite composed for the 600th
celebrations of the founding of the University of St Andrews, was premièred by Thomas Wilkinson in
the University’s ancient St Salvator’s Chapel, scene of some of Scotland’s more
extreme religious conflicts. July saw
the première in Stuttgart of an orchestral poem, The Death of Oscar, inspired by a monumental Scottish sculpture by
Alexander Stoddardt, while in February 2013 his sixth opera, Clemency, based on the Old Testament
tale of Abraham and Sarah, was staged in the US after its successful première
at the Royal Opera House. And earlier this year MacMillan personally promoted
musical Scotland abroad when he directed the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on
tour in India.
When the referendum votes have been counted and the
sporting medals all been given out, James MacMillan seems set to keep at least
one aspect of Scottish life at the forefront of international consciousness.