Page 164 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

13 August 2019

Can classical music capture the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit appears as a dove in Velázquez’s Coronation of the Virgin CREDIT: ALAMY

Ivan Hewett, CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC

James MacMillan, Scotland’s most famous living composer, is about to make musical history. He
has written an entire piece inspired by the Holy Spirit, the first person ever to do so.

It’s his fifth symphony, entitled Le Grand Inconnu (The Great Unknown), which will be performed
at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s generous
celebrations to mark the composer’s 60th birthday.

It may seem surprising to find a contemporary composer being inspired by such an abstrusely
theological topic, but MacMillan doesn’t see it as odd. “Actually I’m surprised that composers and
artists generally and especially in our own time haven’t explored this area, where ideas of creativity
and spirituality overlap.”

MacMillan feels it’s the right moment to tackle it, given that we are now living in a post-secular age
with a renewed hunger for the spiritual aspect of life. “Music is described as the most spiritual of
the arts, even by non-religious music lovers. So there is a genuinely universal understanding that
music has a reach into the human soul. People are realising that dogmatic secularism doesn’t have
all the answers to life’s big questions. There’s a great upsurge in spiritual music and in music as a
gateway to the divine, so I think it’s a timely moment to try something like this.”

Of course, MacMillan’s symphony is unique only in modern times; it doesn’t mark the first ever
mention of the Holy Spirit in classical music. Amid the thousands of motets, masses, anthems and
hymns, stretching from the earliest days of unaccompanied plainchant to the dazzling coloured
polyrhythms of Olivier Messiaen and other religiously minded moderns, the Holy Spirit is
regularly named and praised. For example, there are quite a few settings of the Nicene Creed, one
of the principle liturgical texts of the Western Church, which is chanted in tens of thousands of
churches every day.

163