Page 166 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

James MacMillan, the first person to play a piano on St Kilda, Britain’s most westerly
point CREDIT: JAMES GLOSSOP

He’s probably Britain’s best-known living classical composer, who has become famous – some
would say notorious – for putting his Catholic faith at the centre of his musical creativity. The
religious part of his output runs all the way from tenderly intimate choral miniatures, many of
them written for his local church choir, to big-scale choral-and-orchestral Passions (recounting of
the story of Christ’s trial and Crucifixion).

More recently he’s been outspoken on religious sectarianism, which he still feels disfigures his
native country, and also what he feels to be the small-minded xenophobic populism of the Scottish
government’s cultural policy. But these days he has retreated from the political fray, preferring to
concentrate on his family, composing and being the artistic director of the Cumnock Tryst, a music
festival rooted in the deprived Ayrshire town of Cumnock where MacMillan’s coalminer
grandfather lived, and where he himself grew up.

Now comes the new symphony, which like MacMillan’s recent Stabat Mater – performed last year
in the Sistine Chapel and live-streamed to an audience of millions – has been commissioned by the
Genesis Foundation, set up by philanthropist John Studzinski. Once again the performers will be
that wonderful chamber choir The Sixteen, joined for this piece by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra
and Genesis Sixteen, the young choir that was created and funded by the foundation to act as a
training school for aspiring young choral singers.

Wisely, MacMillan has chosen to steer clear of the theological minefields around the Trinity. “I
learned about the Trinity while at school,” he says, “but only in a very basic way, I found it all very
baffling. Christ mentions God the Father and the Holy Spirit a bit, so clearly these things meant
something to him. One of the passages of Scripture I set in Latin in my new symphony is the one
where Christ talks about knowing the Holy Spirit exists because it wells up within you. The only
reason we’re still talking about these things is because He talked about them.”

As with any abstract notion, the Trinity can be captured in music only through metaphors, and in
finding the appropriate ones MacMillan was much helped by the contemporary Belgian/Swedish
theologian Wilfried Stinissen. “It was through him that I got the idea of the three physical elements
associated with the three parts of the Trinity – wind, water and fire. This gave me something
tangible in the physical world I could grasp on to.”

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