James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord

The composer’s music contends both the secular and sacred.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A conductor leans in toward an unseen orchestra with a raised hand.

MacMillan conducting.

Hans van der Woerd, Intermusica.

Sir James MacMillan is one of today’s most successful composers, as is evidenced by his achievements in 2024. This year alone has seen the premiere of a new work for choir ‘Ordo Virtutum’ (January), the UK premiere of his cantata ‘Fiat Lux’ (March), the premiere of his new version of Robert Burns’ song ‘Composed in August’ (March), the premiere of his ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ (September), and the premiere of his ‘Duet for Horn and Piano’ (November).

Back in March he also became the 26th Fellow of The Ivors Academy, joining a rollcall of extraordinary composers and songwriters, including John Rutter, John Adams, Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, Dame Judith Weir and Sting. While, in September, he accepted the Sky Arts Classical Music Award 2024 on behalf of The Cumnock Tryst, the annual music festival he founded in his hometown, which brings together many local community groups on stage alongside some of the world’s most acclaimed musicians.

His music, which is notable for its energy and emotion, is imbued with influences from his Scottish heritage, Catholic faith, social conscience and close connection with Celtic folk music, blended with influences from Far Eastern, Scandinavian and Eastern European music. Accordingly, Tom Gray, Chair of The Ivors Academy, describes MacMillan as “a titan of music, generous in his creativity and craft” and “a foremost proponent of the power of music to communicate and forge bonds”.

He first became internationally recognised after the extraordinary success of ‘The Confession of Isobel Gowdie’ at the BBC Proms in 1990. Since then, his prolific output has been performed and broadcast around the world with his major works including his most performed work the percussion concerto ‘Veni, Veni, Emmanuel’ (1992), a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich (1996), an opera ‘The Sacrifice’ (2007), the ‘St John Passion’ (2008), and five symphonies. For his services to music, he was awarded a CBE in 2004 and a knighthood in 2015.

“In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away”.

James MacMillan

As will be clear from the titles of works cited thus far, many of his works, such as ‘Ordo Virtutum’, a setting of a sacred music drama by Hildegard of Bingen concerned with the struggle for the human soul in a battle between good and evil, and ‘Fiat Lux’, a celebration of the divine gift of light, directly express his Catholic faith. David Clayton writes that, “Aside from being one of the greatest living composers and conductors of classical music, Sir James is a Catholic whose faith informs all his work”. Clayton also describes him as “a deep thinker who communicates clearly the nature of the creative process when one seeks to create beauty to bring Glory to God”.

MacMillan believes that “Far from being a "spent force", religion has proved to be a vibrant, animating principle in modern music and continues to promise much for the future.” When he speaks about music and the idea of the sacred, as he did most recently at The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in October, he emphasises that music seems to be “the most spiritual of the arts, and composers have always seemed to be on a search for the sacred in their work”. He notes that “In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away”.

In brief, he sees himself as standing in a modernist tradition that includes: Stravinsky, who “was as conservative in his religion as he was revolutionary in his musical imagination”; Schoenberg, “a mystic who reconverted to practising Judaism after the Holocaust”; John Cage, who explored “the spiritual connections between music and silence”; Olivier Messiaen, who “was famously Catholic” with “every note of his unique contribution to music” being “shaped by a deep religious conviction”; Jonathan Harvey, “who has allowed eastern mysticism and his own Anglicanism to adorn his searchingly original scores”; John Tavener, whose conversion to Orthodoxy “had a dramatic impact on his style and aesthetic”; and the “intriguing and disturbing religious shadings of musical modernity” to be found in the post-Shostakovich generation from eastern Europe - Henryk Górecki (Poland), Arvo Pärt (Estonia) Giya Kancheli (Georgia), Galina Ustvolskaya, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina (Russia).

In this 'obedience' of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners.

He argues that while, for a time, a post-War reaction led many modernist composers to opt for a primarily abstract style and eschew the stirring up of emotions through music, in more recent years, composers have increasingly re-embraced emotion and, thereby, also spirituality. He also notes significant connections between the music of antiquity and that the modern world. The influence of plainsong and Gregorian chant on modern music, for example, demonstrates a continuing relationship between faith and the arts.

He has suggested that God's power “is presence as absence; absence as presence” and that this is also “precisely what music is”. So, “The umbilical cord between silence and music is the umbilical cord between heaven and earth”. As a result, “the war against silence is a war against ourselves and against our interior life”. He is in agreement with the Scottish Jesuit John McDade, who wrote that "Music may be the closest human analogue to the mystery of the direct and effective communication of grace". MacMillan suggests, therefore, “that music is a phenomenon connected to the work of God in the way it touches something deep in our souls and releases a divine force”.

In similar vein, he also quotes Rowan Williams who, in a sermon some years ago for the Three Choirs Festival, said: "To listen seriously to music and to perform it are among our most potent ways of learning what it is to live with and before God, learning a service that is a perfect freedom... In this 'obedience' of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners. The time we have renounced, given up, is given back to us as a time in which we have become more human, more real, even when we can't say what we have learned, only that we have changed."

Being stretched and deepened in this way is certainly our experience as listeners of MacMillan’s works. Michael Capps suggests that MacMillan knows that “music dealing openly and honestly with the Christian tradition will not always be pleasing, safe, or tame”. His music “contends” in that it “produces arguments and embodies alternatives, not only to its many secular substitutes, but also to allegedly Christian options that lack the tang and piquancy of Christian particularity.” As a result, “MacMillan’s music also reveals: it shows us a world of both tranquility and discord that we readily recognize, and allows us to better appreciate that world’s fleeting harmonies”.

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Culture

Politics

Re-enchanting

21 March 2024

6 min read

Re-enchanting councils - and glum councillors

Local government could be a place of humanity and beauty more than lifeless language and procedures.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A marbles staircase rises on four sides of a chamber.

Glasgow City Chambers' staircase.

Michael D Beckwith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the local level in politics, I have found there is a stereotype that persists more than that of the corrupt politician. It is the glum councillor, the pothole poser, or sometimes the councillor looking glum while pointing at potholes. These are the photos that turn up on election leaflets, and in local news, and there are lots of them here in Devon because potholes are numerous and huge.

When I was a district councillor, I tried to push back against this image – I would smile, avoid photos with potholes, share the good stuff found in the community alongside working to improve what wasn’t working. But, looking around the council chamber, it was hard to deny. Sometimes the glumness would slip into sleep; I’ve seen councillors prodded awake ahead of important votes that impact tens of thousands of people. That is not just glum councillor, that is irresponsible, disengaged councillor.

And though the responsibility lies with them, this never surprised me. In my four-year term, I too felt a disillusionment creep in. And I am perennially hopeful; my default is to see possibility. But four years in a context of budget cut after budget cut, endless bureaucracy, lifeless language, and an aversion to trying things differently, even I started to slump in my seat. I never fell asleep, but sometimes my soul did.

Author-farmer Wendell Berry – who speaks with much affection and wisdom about the importance and strength of local community – said that

“unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom.”

I have seen that professional boredom in the language, in the sterile council chamber bare of life, where processes and procedures rule more than humanity; where passionate members of the public would attend meetings only to be told they couldn’t input because they hadn’t pre-registered; where a meeting that finished before the allocated time was seen as successful, regardless of content. I’m sure it should feel more hopeful, more vision-led, more life-giving to be involved in local decision-making – it should be about placemaking more than simply ticking boxes and balancing budgets.

There are, of course, councillors who care deeply, and there are councils where local decision-making is being reclaimed by to serve the local community, economy, identity – like the independent councillors elected onto the town council in Buckfastleigh in South Devon who made it more plain-speaking, more accessible and more engaged; and the Flatpack Democracy movement started in Frome Town Council that has sparked similar local ‘revolutions’. But I think there is something else needed, if local government is to replace lifelessness with hope and vision. Something more upstream of the how.

When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government.

In his essay The Joys of Storytelling, Ben Okri says, “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them...if we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” I would often imagine a story of local government that makes space for enchantment. Former monk Thomas Moore speaks of reenchanting as a reawakening to the depth of soul that embraces us and the world. Councils, like lots of spaces, feel disenchanted. Perhaps much of our current disenchantment is symptomatic of our alienation from ourselves, from each other, and from our shared humanity – and from the belief that this shared state of being is strong enough to take the weight of our world, even as heavy as it feels now. When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government. Everything dulls; we disconnect from our spirit-breathed humanity, we forget that we were pulled from the soil by a gardener God who made us to be with each other, surrounded by beauty and life.

In the book Faith, Hope and Carnage, the musician and writer Nick Cave says that the “luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

Cave’s words echo Dostoevsky who wrote in The Idiot that ‘the world will be saved by beauty’, which in turn, echoes earlier sentiments from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas who taught that God is truth, goodness and beauty. In the Bible, Jesus pointed again and again to these things too – in people, in creation, in God. They feel like good things to point the way now; more timeless and apolitical than any current ‘vision’ in government, more tangible than a distant government, more life-giving than purely balancing budgets as a goal. Of course, local government also needs better and more reliable funding, more efficient processes, passionate people, and lots more – but I think these things are more likely to come, in part, from a re-enchanted local government that draws on the “luminous and shocking beauty” of the everyday, and of local people and places. To start to make space for that re-enchantment, government could experiment with three things (which, more than funding, need people willing to try, to think beyond business-as-usual, to take existing resources and think about how they can be used even slightly differently).

It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness.

First, it could move away from language that is detached from emotion and care and life. The word ‘enchant’ has its root in words – cantare means ‘to sing’ – Councils could aspire to make language beautiful more than bureaucratic, clear instead of obscure. It could invite local people into decision-making using life-giving and locally meaningful words and ideas, rather than excluding them with jargon and lifeless language. For this, we’d need the help of local storytellers, poets, writers, speakers – people who can wake us up with the power of words.

Second, local government could bring that “luminous beauty” into the space, rather than sealing conversations and processes away in characterless buildings. Meetings I’d go to were usually in bland rooms, with beige walls, nylon grey carpets, lukewarm coffee. Letting even some of the beauty of this world in – perhaps with colour, architecture, art; perhaps with stories and creativity and food; perhaps with some meetings outdoors in the beauty of the world – would, I think, breathe life into the space, and into relationships, and so into what becomes possible.

Lastly, re-enchanting local government must include re-humanising it, because humanity at its best is relationship and soul and care; it contains the same possibility that was present in Eden when all this was dreamed up. If, as Christians believe, humanity is made in God’s image, then God is endlessly creative; God is about the detail of our lives as well as world-shaking stories; God is about life – life that is so alive it overcomes death. It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness; it could ask them to show up as themselves, with all their strengths and weaknesses, their ideas and hopes and fears, rather than shut them out because they cannot bend to inflexible meetings and procedures and language. It would not shy away from these things; it would use them to create new life and thriving places.

Re-enchanting local government could, I think, bring us closer to beauty, to the goodness of each other, to the truth of people and places. From there, I think it becomes possible to restore relationships, to imagine what government might be at its best, and to view it as a place-based way of knowing and actually serving people. I think it becomes easier from there to look downstream – to re-think processes, the voting system, and the rules of ‘business as usual’ – and perhaps even to fix potholes and the glumness that goes with them.