James MacMillan: Music mediates grace.

The Tablet interview: James MacMillan.

8 January 2005

James MacMillan has never lost the gentle courtesies of his upbringing in rural Ayrshire. He is soft-spoken and earnest; with the words he uses barely hinting at the elemental forces that resonate through his music. Few living composers – he’s 46 this year - are so animated by their religious beliefs. This is one reason why MacMillan’s voice is so distinctive. But while the sacramental dimension of music is all-important to him, he is different from other religiously motivated composers in his embrace of a faith – both religious and artistic - that has solid roots in the world and its struggles. Next weekend (January 14-16) the BBC Symphony Orchestra celebrates MacMillan and his music with Darkness into Light, an unparalleled survey of his compositions, which will be performed at the Barbican Hall (and nearby venues) and broadcast live on Radio 3 and on the digital TV channel BBC Four.

The series of eight concerts will include MacMillan’s massive choral work Quickening, a collaboration with the poet Michael Symmons-Roberts, which celebrates both men’s delight in fatherhood and their love of their children (Friday 14, 7.15 pm). There will also be the trumpet concerto Epiclesis (Saturday 15 1.15pm), in MacMillan’s words, ‘a big and gutsy’ work’ which explores the concept of transubstantiation, while the final concert (Sunday 16, 8.00 pm) will feature his percussion work Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, a dramatic anticipation of the human liberation promised by Christ’s birth.

“Catholicism was as natural to me as breathing”, he says of his upbringing. “My parents were enthused by Vatican II and they felt a sense of hope in their lives that was infectious for young people like me.” Even as a teenager MacMillan had a sense that he wanted to ‘give something back’ in his music making, and he remembers the life and substance the liturgy gave to his growing up.

However benign an adolescent’s experience of religious faith, the transition to university can loosen the ties. This did not happen to MacMillan, who at Edinburgh University became active in the Dominican chaplaincy, where he was helped “to make the transition from the dreamlike state of a Catholic childhood to the harsh reality of being Catholic in a post religious world.” Ever since, Catholicism has been woven into MacMillan’s internal monologue, and when he speaks about his work much of his language is expressly theological.

The BBC weekend’s theme, ‘Darkness into Light’, reflects the journeys which MacMillan travels in his compositions. “There is that sense of the abyss in some works which is redeemed in some of the more theologically motivated pieces. If there is an underlying theological theme in the range of works being presented, that is it.”

Take for instance The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (Barbican and BBC Radio 3, 15 January 8.00 pm). Gowdie was one of many hundreds of women executed for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland. She was tortured into an improbable confession in which she said she had been baptised by the devil and to having journeyed to the centre of the earth to feast with the King and Queen of the fairies. Afterwards she was strangled at the stake and burned in pitch. MacMillan was attracted at first by her story’s dramatic possibilities. But as the work developed, his Catholic sensibilities took over. He composed, in effect, a Requiem, ‘an act of retrospective compassion’, offering to Isobel Gowdie, on behalf of the Scottish people, the mercy and humanity denied her in her final days. The work, twenty-five minutes long, weaves into the violence of the central material strands of Scottish balladry, of Gaelic psalm singing and of Gregorian plainsong, which, though at first a distant voice, finally re-emerges to dominate and to resolve the struggle. In MacMillan’s own words, “It is as if an exorcism is taking place and Isobel Gowdie’s soul is traversing the violent passage of death and being released into an eternal light.”

MacMillan’s artistic motivation is never purely aesthetic. For him music is a quasi-sacramental art form, which works in ways that are analogous to the concept of grace, with the power to disturb and to transform the lives of those who hear it. Some musicians and critics are inherently distrustful of such language. In response, MacMillan claims that some specialists can be ‘very narrow’ about music’s wider social context and unable to engage with music’s theological dimension because contemporary culture does not equip them to do so. “You find them dismissing Messiaen’s Catholicism as a peripheral eccentricity than an absolutely core motivation, the implication being that he would have been a better composer if it had not been for his Catholicism.” That said, MacMillan is adamant that it is not necessary to share his beliefs to appreciate his music.

Three years ago MacMillan collaborated with the poet Michael Symmons Roberts and Archbishop Rowan Williams on Parthenogenesis (Sunday 16th 5.00, Guildhall School of Music and BBC Radio 3). This is a piece about human cloning, based on ‘an apparently true story’ of a woman living in Hanover who was caught in the blast from an allied bomb. She gave birth nine months later claiming that she had conceived without sex. Doctors and geneticists hypothetised that a dormant cell in her body had been so jarred as to bring about a natural parthinogenesis. MacMillan was fascinated by the story. “It has huge implications for us at a time when we are obsessed with artificial cloning and its implication for our creativity, what it is to create human beings who are not just copies of ourselves but free in our own right.”

Rowan Williams’ participation came about through the organisation ‘Theology through the Arts’. His theologising had a fundamental impact on both the music and the words, which is a conversation between a grown-up cloned child, her mother and an angel. The piece begins:
“I am. I am my mother’s twin,
her spirit-duplicate, her flesh-ghost.”
For Michael Symmons-Roberts the piece is “poetically the shadow side of the incarnation: a virgin birth in opposites with not God but human evil as the 'father' - a sort of negative-print of the nativity.”

A happy sequel was Rowan Williams’ invitation to MacMillan to compose an anthem for his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury. MacMillan subsequently dedicated A Deep but Dazzling Darkness to Rowan Williams (Sunday 16 January, 5.00 pm Guildhall School of Music and BBC Radio 3). When I asked MacMillan whether any one of his works was more revelatory of his musical personality than the others, he was reticent about the answer, but his pride in A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, a violin concerto, was evident. Its title comes from ‘The Night’ by the seventeenth century Welsh metaphysical poet, Harry Vaughan, and the lines:
There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! Where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.”

As with much of MacMillan’s work, the concerto has a tension at its heart. This sense of tension differentiates MacMillan from the ‘holy minimalists’, composers such as Pärt, Tavener and Gorecki. While he admires their music, MacMillan is an unashamed modernist. “The Holy Minimalists claim they are trying to avoid not merely conflict in music, but any sense of dialectic. They are trying to put themselves apart from the violence of a lot of modernism. But they are also putting themselves outside that tradition – people like John Tavener abhor the whole Western canon really from before Beethoven. This is the very canon I embrace.”

MacMillan has spoken in the past of taking his music to extremes and ‘doing battle’, an instinct which extends also to his political beliefs. In his native Scotland he has drawn much anger on his head for claiming that the country’s culture is still characterised in part by a resilient strain of anti-Catholic bigotry. Where once this was religious in origin, it now had a secular face. “There is a very smug left of centre secular liberal establishment that I feel drawn to confront. I have a thrawn cussed nature and I instinctively know and feel I don’t want to be part of this new establishment.” There is a flavour of MacMillan’s scepticism in his recently premiered organ work, A Scotch Bestiary, which was characterised by the Guardian as a “richly imagined spectacle of the grotesques of the Edinburgh parliament. “

What has deepened with the years, along with MacMillan’s sense of musical mission, has been his Catholic commitment. He and his wife Lynn are lay Dominicans, members of the chaplaincy congregation attached to Strathclyde University. He has been writing introits and responsorial psalms, suitable for congregational singing at the chaplaincy’s Sunday Mass.

James MacMillan’s major artistic projects in the coming years include a new commission for Welsh National Opera, again with Michael Symmons-Roberts. He is working with the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon on a score for a three-act ballet. And having already written a choral work for Holy Week, Seven Last Words, MacMillan plans to write a setting of The Passion for the end of the decade.

At the root of all the work is openness and a fearlessness of raw and authentic emotions. MacMillan disdains the abstract modernism, which often characterises contemporary music. His concern instead is with ‘humanity in all its messiness’ and to invest his work with a sacramental ambition, in his words, “to take this God-given art of music - this component of what it means to be human - to the world.”

Concert details at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/symphonyorchestra/news/macmillan.shtml
There is comprehensive live coverage of Darkness into Light on BBC Radio 3. The Saturday evening concert is shown live on BBC Four at 8.00 pm