‘I wanted to write my own music’

Write on cue

When audiences returned to the Proms last year, one of the first works they heard was a specially commissioned piece by Sir JAMES MacMILLAN, celebrating the return of live music. Ahead of a concert featuring two of his choral works at this year’s Proms, the composer talks about ‘this beautiful, powerful thing called music’

Interview by Philip Halcrow

‘EVEN just weeks before, the BBC didn’t know what they would be allowed to do. No one knew how

many people would be allowed on stage, what size the orchestra could be. It was very late on in the day before they came to me with a suggestion of a work that would mark the First Night of the Proms – the post-Covid Proms – in a celebration of music returning.’

Composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan is remembering the run-up to the opening of last year’s BBC Proms.

A year further back, amid 2020’s national and local lockdowns and restrictions on gatherings, the annual festival of music had been broken down to BBC broadcasts of concerts from the archives and – for the final fortnight – of new performances that took place in the Royal Albert Hall but behind closed doors. Proms director David Pickard described them as the Proms ‘not as we know them, but the Proms as we need them’.

Then, last year, the Proms began to sound a bit more normal. The season was shorter than usual, but the fact that

there was live music being played to audiences again was celebrated in the opening concert, first by a performance of Vaughan Williams’s ‘Serenade to Music’ and then by a new work, Concert life seemed to have specially commissioned by the BBC and the charity Help Musicians. been abandoned ‘I had to write it very quickly,’ says James of ‘When Soft Voices Die’, a choral work, based on two poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which reflects on the themes of memory, loss and the importance of virtue, love and music.

Every year crowds pack out the Royal Albert Hall for Proms concerts – but not in 2020

‘It was May or June when they got in touch, and the First Night of the Proms was in July. It wasn’t a big piece, but I worked with great energy on it.

‘It was a great moment to mark – people coming together after being closed down. Even the churches had been closed. Certainly, concert life seemed to have been abandoned and there was a great sense of desolation among many of us who loved the arts, and music in particular. We wondered whether we’d ever get our musical lives back again.

‘Everyone had their own way of coping with lockdowns. My wife, my eldest daughter, who is living with us, and I relied on each other as a little unit, but not to have human contact with the rest of the family or friends or the general public was a catastrophic loss for everyone.

‘I was even more turned in on myself than usual, but in a sense it was not that unusual, because I require solitude to do what I do. In some ways, that’s what music is about – confrontation of the silence. Maybe it was as a composing person or a praying person, but I was given resilience to cope.’

The mention of prayer is not accidental. Faith and music have always been intertwined, even in James’s musical memories from when he was growing up in Ayrshire.

‘We used to go to visit relatives in Edinburgh, and I have very early memories of being taken to St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral by my parents when I was about five years old.

‘I have this abiding and quite strange memory of being struck by the music – it would have been something by Palestrina or plainsong. I remember looking up as a little child, straining to see over the heads of the adults in front of me and seeing these robed figures in the distance. Although I didn’t really understand it, I realised that the music and the ritual were connected in some way, that the music was facilitating and accompanying the rituals that were taking place.

‘I look back on those moments – even before I started my musical training – as seminal.’

James’s training in music-making

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Composer Sir James MacMillan

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began when he was ‘given a little plastic recorder at school – the kind of experience that many British schoolchildren had at that age in the ’60s and ’70s’. He says: ‘It was like a light going on. I moved quickly to trumpet and cornet and piano.’

Immediately he wanted to do more than play.

‘I wanted to make my own music,’ he says. ‘Aged nine, I didn’t know what that meant. I had no knowledge of who composers were, but when I started writing down the names of notes and finding my way round the piano, my mother, who had studied the piano when she was younger, started telling me things about music. I also absorbed information from my grandfather, who was a coal miner who had played in colliery bands and sung in church choirs when he was younger.

‘I had little Ladybird books about Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and so on, and I was fascinated. Then I realised that it wasn’t just dead men and women who wrote music. There were I realised it still composers around, and one in particular, Benjamin wasn’t just dead men and women Britten, lived just a couple of hundred miles down the road in England.’ who wrote music By the time he was 18, James was studying at Edinburgh University with Kenneth Leighton – ‘a great teacher as well as a great composer, whose music is used a lot in churches today’. From James’s own introduction to music onwards, religion has been a recurring theme. He says: ‘I’m a Catholic, and I was brought up in a strong community where everything was connected with religion – family, school and music-making. As I developed my musical skills, I became useful for my classmates and for the teachers, who pressed me into service to accompany hymns and liturgies at school Masses.

‘Later, I began to recognise that the whole growth of music through the ages was very closely connected with Judaeo-Christian history and Christian culture. Throughout the 14th to the 19th centuries, composers and musicians served the Church as employees. They were commissioned to write Masses and oratorios. The greatest works of musical art, such as Bach’s Passion settings, were written for liturgy.’

James asserts that, even though the connection between the Church and music has changed, ‘in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, there is still the search for the sacred’.

He says: ‘It may not be directly connected with institutionalised religion

The Sixteen, who will be performing works by James at the Proms

in the same way, but some of the most important composers of the 20th and 21st centuries were, and are, deeply religious. Stravinsky, who set the Mass and the Psalms to music, was a believer. Schoenberg, that other great figure of early modernism, reconverted to a practising Judaism after he left Germany, and his music is infused with Jewish theology. Messiaen was profoundly Christian in everything he wrote.

‘And in our own countries, Benjamin Britten wrote music for liturgy all his life. He was quite careful about what he said about religion – as most British composers tend to be – yet he suffused the culture with great church music.’

Fascinated by the subject, James has presented two series of Faith in Music on Radio 4, exploring what composers wrote and said about religion. He says he wanted to challenge the ‘accepted spin’ about composers who are ‘not necessarily associated with the Church or religion and often claimed by modern secularism’, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Richard Wagner and Leonard Bernstein.

‘They are seen as post-religious, but the actual story is much more complicated – and interesting – than that.’

Faith plays a part not only in the content of James’s compositions, which are often settings of texts used in church, but also in his act of writing.

‘I begin every day with prayer,’ he says. ‘It sets me up each day. It plugs me into a way of thinking about what I’m doing. When you write music, there’s some sense of confronting the silence of your own heart. A composer needs that silence and space for contemplation, and that contemplation is closely linked to what we do when we pray – how we try to clear our minds and souls and give space for an engagement with the Divine.’ After his ‘Viola Concerto’ was performed earlier in the season, two of James’s compositions will be performed by chamber choir the Sixteen at the Proms on Wednesday (24 August). Both of them, he says, are ‘settings of religious texts, which were commissioned for secular use’.

His ‘Vidi Aquam’ was commissioned by the Ora Singers to mark the 450th anniversary in 2020 of Thomas Tallis’s ‘Spem in Alium’, a motet that has earned its place in music history partly by having been written for 40 rather than the more common 4 parts – an ambitious feat that James chose to echo in his composition.

But before that, the Sixteen will sing

James’s ‘Miserere’, a setting of Psalm 51 in the Bible. ‘It’s a great penitential text – “Have mercy on me, O God!” Setting the text took me into the heart of penitence and soul-searching,’ he says. It sounds as if ‘searching’ is a key word for James. ‘I’m quite forthright in saying that the purpose of music, my purpose, is to search for the sacred. I’m doing it in my own work as a composer. People can either accept what I say or discard it, but that search is what makes me get up in The purpose of the morning and go to my desk, and it’s the aspiration that has been with me since music is to search I was a little boy. It’s the feeling that this beautiful, powerful thing called music is in for the sacred some way a window on to the Divine or at least a gateway on to the mind of God. ‘I know a lot of people resist that – and they tell me so – but it’s how I account for it, and I make no apology about saying that that is what motivates me to make this music. The music may be a Mass setting, it may be an engagement with the Passion story or it can simply be something apparently more secular – a piece of orchestral music. For me, it has the same function, and I have the same approach in writing it. ‘Everything that I write, and everything I think about music, comes from that spiritual place.’