JAMES MacMillan is rich in paradoxes. As a composer of contemporary music, he has shown himself to have the breadth of popular appeal which composers are often portrayed as having either lost or turned their backs on. He's a member of other minorities, too. As a Briton he's a Scot. As a Scot he's a Catholic. As a Catholic, he joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14. As a man, this composer of vivid, politically, socially and spiritually committed music is reserved, soft spoken, unassuming. Yet his conversation teems with ideas, not so much disclosed as woven together in long, interconnected sentences.
MacMillan has been an outspoken critic of what has been called the "new music ghetto". In polemic mode, he once pictured composers as being "abandoned by their contemporaries as purveyors of the `inconceivable' and salesmen of the unimaginable". As a student composer, he explains, he was in many ways quite happy to feel part of that ghetto. "I think that new music needed its introspection, it needed its period of self evaluation, which the 20th century has afforded it." But things have moved on.
"I feel that the laboratory period has been gone through and that some great sacrifice has been undergone by composers of a certain generation, to reach fundamental and hidden truths about music. I'm glad it wasn't me, I'm glad it wasn't my generation."
He's delighted, he says, "to have absorbed much of the avant garde and modernist experience. But I make no genuflections to the avant garde. I take it as one experience of many, which I've tried to absorb. And perhaps people can see that within my own musical language there is still the flotsam and jetsam of the avant garde, floating about, all smashed tip, with no real root. It's there, but in a different way. I'm trying to absorb it in a way that suits the urgency of communicating."
This communicative urge can be seen clearly - in the titles and associations of MacMillan's work - the self explanatory Sowetan Spring, Busqueda (using poems by the Argentinian Mothers Of The Disappeared), Britannia (a "volatile concoction" which can be read as a riposte to Land Of Hope And Glory), The Confession Of Isobel Gowdie (dealing with the martyrdom of a Scottish Catholic "witch"), as well as the overtly spiritual, the cantata Seven Last Words From The Cross, or Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (a percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie).
You can't listen to MacMillan for very long, either the music or the man, without encountering the connection, or rather the connectedness of the extra musical. "As a young composer, I was very aware that because music was a very, very serious business, there didn't seem to be any room for ... the other aspects of life, to put it bluntly, in the act of composing. That worried me. I looked at colleagues of mine in the other arts, visual artists, or people involved in theatre, writers, film makers, and they reflected the world around them, and all its concerns.
"They were artists because they were reflecting, and absorbing life's experiences. And these were experiences that were almost off bounds to a composer. The rigorous attitude about music and non music was that there was no real connection, that to be a composer one had to grasp the essential self referring nature of music. Music is the most self obsessed of the arts. It is fundamentally complete in itself. But yet, there was something which made me feel very uneasy about this compartmentalisation."
MacMillan is working on a large orchestral work, which after his established practice, has an extra musical stimulus. "The piece I'm writing just now, I suppose it's a symphony. I don't know whether I'll use that title, but it's a large scale orchestral piece in three movements. It's the third work in a triptych of pieces I've been writing for the LSO, which have as their starting point the events or the implications of the days before Easter.
"The World's Ransoming is the Maundy Thursday piece. My Cello Concerto, which I wrote for Rostropovich, and he played last year, is the Good Friday piece. And this piece is, well, not really the blaze of glory Resurrection piece, but I suppose it's a kind of vigil piece, in a sense a going from blackness to light piece, based on the theology of the Easter vigil. All three pieces, theologically have that starting point, liturgically have that starting point and musically have that starting point, in that they are based on plainsongs associated with the three liturgies."
Like a number of Scottish composers before him, MacMillan has engaged with Scottish traditional music. But the composers he currently feels most at home with are far removed from Scotland, "people who came to prominence from behind what was known as the Iron Curtain, people like Schnittke, Gubaidulina and Ustvolskaya from Russia. Them more so than Arvo Part, who has forged his theology in music angle. But I feel more at home with composers where there is still complexity and ambiguity and a line that is bumpier and less predictable than Pirt's music. There is no room for conflict in minimalism. I've never been a minimalist at all, mainly because I've always been looking for pitting extremes against each other. I suppose in any ways I'm a traditionalist, because that's what the whole, Western, Euro centric thing's about, bringing together music of extremes and allowing them to coexist and transform each other, bring about some sort of musical transubstantiation."
For MacMillan, Catholicism is "the most fascinating, spiritual pool for an artist to draw strength from". But however specifically Catholic his inspiration, his works have to remain viable in the concert hall, "a theologically neutral space, where the music encounters people of many faiths and none".
And being a very public Catholic in Scotland, "a non Catholic country, and actually, in many ways an anti Catholic country, goes against the grain of an upbringing which favoured "keeping one's head down, as a self defence mechanism". He explains the older generation's protectiveness by their having grown tip "surrounded by an Orange, working class hostility".
"And it's still there," he says. "A few weeks ago when I was at a Celtic game, people were shouting `Fenian bastard' at me. Grown men! That's what Catholics put up with in the west of Scotland. I think, being a Scottish Catholic prepares you for many things, it gives you a strength and a wilyness about how to deal with adversity." And for Macmillan, the religious and the political are intricately intertwined.
"IN the gospel I see a message of political liberation. I don't regard my liberation theology as a kind of newfangled, left wing alternative to traditional Catholicism. To me, liberation theology is in with the bricks, it started with the words of Jesus. That's my orthodoxy." Liberation and politics may meet soon in a post general election Scotland.
MacMillan describes himself as "not a nationalist". "I'm not really interested in secession. I'm interested in federalism, which is almost a dirty word in England nowadays. No politician can use that word in the present political climate, because it's a real vote loser. I'm interested in a devolved and sovereign parliament in Scotland. But I don't see any need to make cuts in our connections with England. It's a question of broadening our connections with other countries in Europe which is the exciting thing about devolution. I think that with many Scots, though, I could be pushed towards a secessionist position if that mild form of devolution, a sensible rejuvenated form of the Union, doesn't happen. Because the status quo is insufferable. I would have anything rather than what we have just now.
It would be hard to convey accurately the quiet, implacable firmness with which these words are spoken. It's the same sort of firmness which lay behind the description of being humbled by people in tears at the performance of a piece written at the request of the mothers of the victims of the Piper Alpha disaster. Such a response to music, he says, "is a confirmation to me that music has that restorative almost redemptive quality. And if a composer can actually use his gifts as a composer to reflect something of that humanity and spirituality back into society, back to his peers, then new music does have a place in the world. It's not just some sort of esoteric ghettoised activity for the initiates. It can have a real place for ordinary people."
