Composer James MacMillan is outspoken about philistinism, hostility to high art and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bias in Scotland. He talks to Helen Meany.
James MacMillan's Veni Veni Emmanuel is not the kind of Advent music to accompany long baths and scented candles. This concerto - 25 minutes of rampaging percussion - is more like the soundtrack to a revolution.
The most frequently performed work by Scotland's celebrated composer, it was written for percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who dashes around in front of the orchestra, pounding an array of gongs, bells and drums. MacMillan has transformed the refrains of a 15th- century French Advent plainsong into an agitated fanfare, proclaiming the promise of liberation from anguish. Like almost everything he writes, it has a spiritual theme communicated with electrifying emotional force and restless energy.
"Music that requires active listening must be brought back to the core of our understanding," says MacMillan.
Many of his works - O Bone Jesu, Visitatio Sepulchri, Cantos Sagrados, Vigil, Mass - take the gospels, liturgy or other sacred texts as their basis. Of these, Seven Last Words From the Cross (1994), a cantata for choir and strings, is probably the best known. Its text, in Latin and English, synthesises the four gospels, while the complex string harmonies create a meditation on Christ's Passion, in a stark dramatic sequence that moves from silence to silence.
Visitatio Sepulchri, a music theatre piece, blends 14th-century liturgical drama and the Te Deum, while Ninian, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra, is based on the life of St Ninian, an early Christian missionary to Scotland. But while the sources of MacMillan's music extend back to the rich ancient roots of Judeo-Christian culture, its forms are adventurously contemporary, combining rhythmic excitement and structural experimentation. A sense of drama is communicated urgently, whether in The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, a violent lament for the women murdered in Scotland's medieval witch-hunts, or in his aptly titled piano concerto, The Berserking.
Even works that are not overtly religious have broadly spiritual themes, including his full-length opera, Inès de Castro, a passionate drama of the world, the flesh and the devil, set in 14th-century Portugal. The Quickening, a vast choral work for three choirs, soloists and orchestra, with a text by the English poet, Michael Symmons Roberts, takes the creation of life as its starting point and leads the audience on a journey from light to darkness and back to light. The verbal imagery is physical and graphic, echoing the Metaphysical poets John Donne and Henry Vaughan, while the layers of voices and MacMillan's characteristic driving percussion create a sense of celebratory giddiness.
In a break from conducting the final rehearsal for The Quickening's Scottish première in Edinburgh, MacMillan speaks about his attempt to "confront the life force". As he sits over a coffee, his soft-spoken, courteous manner betrays no signs of the pressure of the imminent performance.
"Quickening works on all sorts of levels. It is capturing that first tremor, the baby quickening in the womb," he says. "Both Michael and I are recent parents, and it is partly a response to seeing new life. And the subject of creation appeals to every artist. There is not a lot in the culture generally that celebrates this universal experience. There's a lot of sentimentalising of erotic love in popular culture, but not looking at conception and birth. There's an obsession in arts and culture with mortality; we want to celebrate natality.
"So it's about new life, but it's broader than that. There's also the obscene vigour of the persistence of life, like the poppies growing on the killing fields of the first World War. And there are questions, such as those I explored in my other piece, Parthenogenesis, about human cloning and the genome project, Everyone's thinking about these subjects - it's important that artists make contributions and reflect what's troubling people, what's important to people."
MacMillan's determination to engage with the world has brought him notoriety far beyond the musical sphere. In 1999 he drew public and media attention to the sensitive question of sectarianism in Scotland with his lecture on the subject at the opening night of the Edinburgh International Festival. Living up to his reputation for outspokenness, his most recent public comments on the "hostility towards high art" in Scotland are a response to the current troubles at Scottish Opera. The company, which is £4 million in debt, had its annual grant of £7.5 million frozen this year by the Scottish Executive. Eighty-eight jobs have been lost and there will be no new productions for the 2005-2006 season. On a BBC arts programme last month, MacMillan said: "People outside Scotland are beginning to speculate that Scotland is a philistine country. The high arts - opera, ballet and orchestral music - are regarded here as in some way not really Scottish."
These remarks are a sequel to his criticisms this summer of the "arts jargon and committees" favoured by the new, year-long Scottish Commission for Culture, chaired by James Boyle, formerly of the Scottish Arts Council and BBC Radio. They express a general disappointment in "the brave new Scotland" and its parliament, the opening of which was celebrated by a specially commissioned work by MacMillan.
"I expected much more intelligence," he says. "Parochialism has crept back into Scottish public life. It hasn't opened up to the outside world."
He has returned to the public forum in Scotland after a few years' silence.
"I'm still in two minds about having a voice," he says, "but I wanted to talk about Quickening - that's important to me."
When he perceived that his opinions were being distorted by the Scottish media, he stopped speaking to them, although he gives interviews and lectures on his frequent travels abroad, where he is in demand as a conductor of his own work.
Since he first opened up the subject, MacMillan has written and spoken widely about anti-Catholic and anti-Irish attitudes in Scotland and is a passionate advocate of a pluralist, tolerant, multi-cultural, multi-faith society. He is proud of his Catholic working-class roots in Ayrshire, and of his speech in 1999, which spawned a provocative collection of essays, Scotland's Shame, by a range of Scottish writers and journalists. Most recently he has contributed to a new book on religion, politics, identity and Celtic Football Club, called Celtic Minded.
"There is a false equivalence between affirming Irish identity and sectarianism," he says. "The question is, how do we celebrate the strangers in our midst? How do we negotiate a space and show that there's nothing to be ashamed of in a society that welcomes its immigrants? The Irish experience here is paradigmatic: we can teach the rest of Scotland what it means to be inclusive.
"There is an ongoing division here, and people want to exonerate themselves by saying that there is no sectarianism, or that Catholics are to blame for sectarianism. I was accused, in a puerile way, of being divisive myself - I was the bigot. Calvinists want to exonerate themselves, while those of the secular, so-called liberal mindset do not want religion or faith to be part of the picture at all. There is a tendency to lump all people of faith into the same bracket and describe them as fundamentalists. But they're the real fundamentalists."
He values Catholicism as a rich cultural source, which he connects to "the mystery of music, its metaphysical nature". For him, music has a vital spirituality.
"Artists and those who appreciate art are bound to be the most open to spirituality: we're used to considering metaphor and symbol and metamorphosis," he says. "Like lapsed Catholics, artists know what transubstantiation means: that something can become an intensified version of itself, as in symphonic music. Catholics have been given this great gift - from history and from art."
He is concerned about the displacement of classical music to the margins, educationally and culturally, and is involved in initiatives for the development of young musicians and composers.
"Historically, an appreciation of complex music was central in cultural terms. But something has happened and so many intellectuals currently have nothing informed to say about it. I want to bring it back to the centre of cultural life," he says.
Part of this active advocacy is his collaboration with other artists, including writers, opera directors, performers, and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, whose exhilarating ballet, Tryst, was set to MacMillan's music and staged by the Royal Ballet two years ago.
"Composers can feel very separate, and this has been an amazing way of expanding my horizons. I like to get out of the garret," he says, with a smile that acknowledges the understatement.
Darkness Into Light: the Music of James MacMillan is a BBC weekend festival of MacMillan's major works at the Barbican Centre, London, from January 13th to 16th. Booking: 0044-207-6388891 or www.barbican.org.uk
James MacMillan's recordings are on the Chandos and BMG Catalyst labels
