Music, for me, began with a little plastic recorder at primary school in Ayrshire in the 1960s. I began composing almost immediately after that. A light went on. Do you share the anxiety of others about the disappearance of the little plastic recorders and systematic music tuition in primary schools?
Music tuition in schools is in a perilous state. It should be seen as one of the basics instead of a frivolous add-on. Educationalists have been trying to democratise music teaching in the classroom, which is admirable in theory, but there have been some disastrous wrong turnings taken. Recorders in the classroom, like class singing, were good and inexpensive ways to get kids from humbler backgrounds started in music.
It was certainly the beginning of a magical life in music for me. It’s a familiar path for many working-class Scottish kids who got the opportunity of free music lessons and involvement in school orchestras, bands, and choirs, back in the ’60s and ’70s, where our teachers nurtured our talents and enthusiasm into lifelong careers.
This is now under threat in Scotland with the creep of additional fees for hard-pressed parents, as music-education budgets are being slashed by councils around the country. British orchestras are much more populated by musicians from well-off backgrounds nowadays compared with even a generation ago, when miners’ sons made up the brass sections of great orchestras.
Discursive music — complicated, and requiring focus and concentrated skill, like learning to play an instrument or singing — can take a lifetime’s commitment, for listeners and performers, as well as composers. But it’s a lifetime full of rewards, artistically, emotionally, socially, and intellectually. Active engagement with music brings benefits throughout people’s lives.
Very young children’s perceptual development is enhanced by musical engagement, affecting language development, improving literacy and rhythmic co-ordination; and fine motor co-ordination is improved by learning to play an instrument. Participation in music also seems to improve spatial reasoning, related to some of the skills required in mathematics. It also appears to improve self-esteem, self-efficacy, and aspirations, improving young people’s commitment to study and perseverance in other subjects.
Every piece I compose is different in the way its materials and structures emerge, or are suggested. That’s what makes composition so mysterious and so unpredictable.
I grew up with Scottish traditional music: Scottish country dancing to begin with, and then I got into the folk-revival thing when I was in my teens and twenties.
That interest in folk music has always been with me, and it’s coloured my work over the years, one way or another. Another trait in my aesthetic is the ongoing search for the sacred, which is not unusual in musical composition, even in modernity. I can think of many important composers of the 20th and 21st centuries who were, or are still, shaped and inspired by religious considerations. The folk and the sacred — they seem like separate, disparate threads in my work, but they can get tangled up together sometimes.
I’ve always been aware of the umbilical link between music and liturgy through history, but many composers in the past also seemed to be midwives of faith. They wrote their beautiful works in response to biblical stories and the sharing of these in musical community. And I’ve been lucky that the faith of the saints has been handed on to me through family, friends, school, community, clergy, and the nuns who taught me when I was a little boy.
The composers who, I feel, express this search for, or experience of, the sacred to me are Tallis, Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Messiaen.
Michael Tanner once wrote that the two greatest works of sacred music ever composed were Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I presented a couple of series on BBC Radio 4 on faith and music, and did a whole episode on Wagner. He had an unconventional take on religion, but a number of the contributors to my programme pursued the theology of his music. One claimed that there’s a vast theology of Der Ring des Nibelungen. And, in Parsifal, there’s a huge eucharistic scene. Roger Scruton makes the case that Tristan is also a eucharistic opera in his book Death-devoted Heart.
Some say that all music is sacred. I certainly feel that it isn’t only settings of liturgical texts which take us in a Godward direction. Beethoven certainly believed this, and thought there was moral and religious dimension to his symphonies as well as his Masses. The one piece of mine where I feel a very strong connection to the Holy Spirit is my fifth symphony, Le grand Inconnu, which attempts to explore the third Person of the Trinity in music. This is a choral symphony written for two choirs and orchestra.
Le grand Inconnu and my Stabat Mater were written for The Sixteen and orchestra. I’ve established an excellent working relationship with them and their conductor, Harry Christophers. Presently, I am composing another work for them and a small orchestra, about angels.
Music does seem to be the most spiritual of the arts, and composers have always seemed to be on a search for the sacred in their work. In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away.
After Vatican II, there was a re-emphasis on music for the ordinary person in the assembly. How might the musical non-specialist sing his or her prayers now that the liturgy was in the vernacular? That question has haunted the Catholic Church for decades now, and I’ve been sucked in to considering it, too, from time to time.
I’ve certainly written a lot for voices, especially choral music. I love doing that, but I feel equally focused on instrumental music. It’s a delight when I’m able to bring the two together.
It would be a crying shame if the Church abandoned the traditional Latin mass. For strange reasons, there have been attempts to do that since the 1960s. But those old arguments are redundant, especially to young Catholics who have no connection with the old controversies. There were various campaigns decades ago to save the Latin mass. They attracted the support of non-Catholics as well as the faithful, who saw the cultural, aesthetic, and artistic calamity that such a move would be. The Latin mass is effective in opening many people, not all, to God, and so it’s an evangelical advantage for Christendom.
That’s why a new campaign to preserve the Latin mass was necessary and inevitable this summer. And it kickstarted various other petitions around the globe. It seems to have been a success.
The initial letter or petition printed in The Times and sent to Rome was signed by many prominent people of all faiths and none. This happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and each time it totally blindsided and flummoxed the Vatican functionaries and ideologues who’ve been trying to ban the Latin mass in surreptitious and underhand manoeuvres. Then, a larger petition was signed by nearly 20,000 people, and then similar petitions and letters were sent to Rome from the US, South America, and France. It wouldn’t have looked good if these ageing clerics were seen to be moving against a powerful spiritual movement in the Church, and it would have made a mockery of synodality.
I had a happy childhood in Ayrshire. I come from a coal-mining area; my grandfather was a miner and my dad was a carpenter. It was a modest working-class background, and there was not a lot of money around. My daily life now is quiet. I’m back in rural Ayrshire, in a remote place which is conducive to work — but I travel the world extensively when I’m conducting concerts.
I love travelling to other countries to perform. In recent years, after the lockdowns, I’ve been conducting in the US, Holland, Estonia, Scandinavia, and Germany. It’s a joy to share the gift of music with people in other places.
The preparation for my first holy communion was intense and happy. It has left a lasting legacy with me. The eucharist is the most important thing in my life, and it shapes my attitude to everything else.
The new, widespread normalisation of anti-Semitism makes me angry.
Being with my wife, children, and grandchildren is what makes me happiest. I sometimes dedicate new works to my family. They’ve kept me busy in recent years with new grandchildren. I dedicate music to them when they are born. My first grandchild, Sara Maria, died a few years ago, and that experience nearly destroyed me. But the impact of such a tragedy can’t help but rebound in unexpected ways for artists, and soon she was influencing the nature, flow, and evolution of my music from heaven, where she’s now one of God’s saints.
I love the sound of silence. There is an umbilical link between silence and music. Every composer knows that their music begins in the silence of their own hearts.
I would choose to be locked in a church with my granddaughter, Sara Maria, because I miss her so much.
Sir James MacMillan was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
He will be at the Cumnock Festival, which runs until 9 October.
rcs.ac.uk/seasons/cumnock-tryst-2024
