Page 165 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

Aiming high: celebrated Scottish composer James MacMillan at the podium

But for obvious reasons composers have favoured the Father and the Son over the Holy Spirit as
topics for musical settings. They perform stupendous deeds: creating the universe, performing
miracles, ascending from the dead. These things can be rendered in line and colour, and have been
a million times over in religious art. The persons who performed these things can also be pictured.
God the Father is often a grey-bearded patriarch, God the Son a willowy, bearded young man with
a sorrowful look. Music cannot literally picture these things, but it can catch something of them
metaphorically.

The shaking of the earth at the death of Christ, the ascent to heaven, the descent to hell; all these
things have been depicted in music. The story of creation has been told musically many times,
notably in Haydn’s Creation, and Christ’s nativity, trial and execution have received numerous
musical settings, most famously in Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Passions.

Here and there the conjoining of Father, Son and Holy Spirit has been conjured by music that
makes a show of being in three clear parts, for example in Monteverdi’s Vespers. But the Holy
Spirit itself resists being pictured, because its essence is so mysterious. It performs no acts and yet
it’s active all the time, as the interface between God and humanity. Representing such a thing has
proved a challenge for artists. Traditionally in the West, it has been imagined as a dove, fluttering
between Father and Son, though occasionally you find it embedded within the trinity as a three-
faced person (an image later condemned as heretical), or even a geometrical symbol like a triangle.

It is not surprising that something so nebulous as the Holy Spirit has received no attention from
religious composers of more recent times who have written principally for the concert hall. And yet
if any composer alive could tackle the subject effectively, it’s James MacMillan.

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