Introducing Letters from James MacMillan...

Letter #1.

Dear friends,

The early shoots of a new musical life are beginning to sprout. Rejoice! All of us who love music will have suffered the sense of cultural bereavement and famine that has come in the wake of the pandemic – no live concerts and no live theatre. There are signs that something is changing, though. In other countries from China, Taiwan to Switzerland concerts are starting up again with various degrees of social distancing and restriction of audience numbers. Also in the UK, more cautiously and tentatively perhaps, a similar slow rebirth can be detected. 

I’ve certainly noticed flurries of discussion concerning my diary over the next few months or so. I have a recording project in London in September and another one in October. Concrete discussions about a January concert in Amsterdam are back on track, and about other public events in the Spring in Estonia and other places. 

And although we have had to cancel this year’s Cumnock Tryst autumn festival  there are exciting things happening. We have begun our ‘Build It Loud!’ composition project with students at the new Robert Burns Academy in Cumnock through Zoom-type technology which enables Jennifer and I to teach their young musicians by being beamed into their classrooms on a screen. And we’ve got our major community project, A Musical Celebration of the Coalfields up and running with our forthcoming series of online workshops on creative process and self-expression through writing, photography, video and sound recording. For these we will be joined by  some of the most famous and renowned exponents in their fields. And local people are being invited to take part.

I thought some of you might be interested in hearing about what the lockdown has been like for a composer! I have actually written a lot of music this year – 2020 might be my most productive year so far. And in some ways life has gone on normally for me - I’m used to the isolation and the working solitude - it’s just been more intense and focused during this period.

I began the year by completing my Christmas Oratorio. This is a big piece which will form a full evening concert, for chorus, orchestra and two soloists. I’ve taken my texts from various sources – poetry, scripture and liturgy. The world premiere was meant to be in London in December but that has been postponed. The January performance in Amsterdam looks to be on, and I will conduct that myself. I’m also booked to give a performance in Melbourne in November 2021. Can we really hope and pray that musical life will be thriving again by then?

In January I settled excitedly into composing a short piece to mark the opening of the new auditorium in the Barony Campus (of new schools in Cumnock). All of us at The Cumnock Tryst are delighted that the new school will have a substantial new performance space which will be wonderful for students and teachers of music and theatre of course, but could have wider cultural implications for the town and East Ayrshire generally. The gala opening of the new hall was meant to take place during this year’s Tryst in October, but the lockdown halted the construction of the new building and the gala event will be later – hopefully in 2021. 

The piece I wrote for this is called ‘Eleven’ and is inspired by my interest in football, an enthusiasm which is widely shared throughout Cumnock and Doon Valley and evident in the extraordinary success of its Junior teams. In fact ‘Eleven’ is dedicated to the supporters of Auchinleck Talbot, Cumnock Juniors, Glenafton Athletic, Lugar Boswell Thistle and Muirkirk Juniors! The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is already booked for the performance.

The only piece of mine written this year to have actually been played and heard so far is a tiny little fragment for solo flute, Remembering commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and played by the principal player of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Charlotte Ashton as part of the network’s Music From Lockdown series.

In November last year, when no one could foresee what was to happen a few months later, Lynne and I visited California for me to begin research on a large-scale oratorio for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra and their Chorus, Fiat Lux. One of the performances of this new piece will take place in Christ Cathedral in Orange County, a strange, huge and extraordinary building which has a past life as the Chrystal Cathedral! It also has one of the largest organs in the world. For this work I teamed up with the great American poet Dana Gioia. I met him on this trip and we spent some important time talking through his inspirational poem and how I could set it to music.

Well that is now done too! The premiere performances were meant to be in March next year but they have also now been postponed – to the Spring of 2022.

I then wrote another work for America, but this one has an Ayrshire connection! The great Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck is the musical director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and has taken me under his wing somewhat in the last few years. The principal flautist of that great orchestra is actually from Largs which is only a few miles away from our home. Lorna McGhee is one of the finest musicians to have come from Ayrshire in recent years, and I remember her when I worked with the Ayrshire Schools Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s. 

Although my piece ‘Her Tears Fell With The Dews At Even’ is not a flute concerto, it nevertheless has a major part written for Lorna. Again, it’s 2021 premiere will be postponed. A branch of my family (the Irish connection) emigrated to Pittsburgh in the 1920s and I was able to find them on one of my recent trips there, and to reconnect. It was magical! My middle name is Loy and there is a sizeable Loy presence in the Pittsburgh area.

As well as these I’ve written choral anthems this year for the choirs of Westminster Abbey, Hereford Cathedral and Eton College. I’ve also made an orchestral arrangement of my Three Scottish Songs (all settings of poems by William Soutar) for Ian Bostridge who was a huge hit at the Tryst a few years ago.

But the biggest piece I’ve written this year is a kind of choral music theatre work for the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk Choir in Leipzig. It’s over an hour long! And it’s a setting of a medieval text by Hildegard of Bingen. ‘Ordo Virtutem’ (Order of the Virtues) is a kind of archaic liturgical drama. It can be performed as a concert work or in a semi-staged way (like a masque or miracle play) or could be fully staged like an opera. We will see what they decide to do with it.

I can’t believe I’ve done all this! It’s barely September and I feel I’m having a little breather of sorts now. I’m certainly weighing up where I stand as a composer, reflecting on what it means to write music in our time, and perhaps gearing up for the next phase. I’m certainly reading a lot, and the lockdown has certainly allowed time and space for existential contemplations! I’m reading a lot by and about Dietrich von Hildebrand, a German Catholic thinker who devoted the full force of his intellect to breaking the deadly spell of Nazism that ensnared so many of his countrymen in the 1930s and 1940s. He had a lot to say for artists and many others who seek the deep spiritual dimension of what we are and what we can be in difficult times.

One final piece of news - I’m making a series of four programmes for BBC Radio 4 which will go out in December. I’m looking at four composers from very different times and cultures, and how religion impacted on their life and work. It’s a fascinating journey and I’m interviewing some amazing people for it. The four composers are Tallis, Wagner, Elgar and Bernstein. 

I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Best wishes 

James