Interview: Sir James MacMillan

Photo by Marc Marnie

Sir James MacMillan CBE is one of today’s most successful living composers, an international conductor, and also founder and artistic director of The Cumnock Tryst (a music festival in East Ayrshire in Scotland, where he lives). He composes regularly for The Sixteen, one of the world's most renowned choirs, and has been described by The Guardian as "...a composer so confident of his own musical language that he makes it instantly communicative to his listeners."

Ahead of two upcoming world premieres, James MacMillan dropped by Alternative Classical HQ for a cup of tea with Hannah Fiddy about the pressure of creating new works, elitism and the class divide in classical music, and the TV he’s been watching during lockdown.

Let’s kick off with a quick-fire round...

Early bird or night owl? Neither. The pandemic has meant the early rises have disappeared, and I'm getting old so there's no late nights anymore for me either.
Introvert or extrovert? Introvert.
Favourite time of day? I've developed a real interest in craft beer during the lockdown, so around 6pm, when I have my one solitary beer before dinner.
Favourite sandwich? Anything fishy - tuna, prawn or salmon.
Do you have any pets? We acquired a yellow Labrador puppy a few months ago.
What have you been watching on TV during lockdown? Fauda on Netflix and Tehran, which is drenched in political tension.
Did you take up any lockdown hobbies? Just the beer.
If you weren’t a composer what would you be? I'm interested in the written word,  especially poetry, and I have one foot in academia at the University of St Andrews, so maybe it would have gone in those directions.
Which fictional world or place would you like to visit? The Shire in The Hobbit seems an idyllic place.

You’ve got a couple of world premieres coming up. When you’ve built up a reputation as a well-established, successful composer I imagine the pressure can mount with the added expectation. Is that something that affects you? 

I try to avoid thinking about it, but you're right that the pressure increases. Over time, you begin to realise that it’s not the outside voices that matter so much as the internal pressure that comes from one’s own assessment. If you think you have achieved something of value, regardless of what others say, the pressure then is self imposed to not just match the worth of that piece but to go beyond it the next time. It’s there all the time now. 

I expect that when many people commission you they may want a piece that is recognisably by James MacMillan. Do you feel the weight of that or are you quite accepting of whatever comes in the moment?

I don't think about style as much now as I used to. Maybe it's a younger composer’s obsession to think about style and aesthetic, and wondering where your voice might fit in. Style comes through age and maturity and it becomes less of a front-brain obsession. It’s always a mistake for commissioners to interfere too much. They have to just leave it up to the composer to write whatever is there, and shouldn’t be too prescriptive.

“Lovers of music have been worrying about the demise of classical music for generations and it hasn't happened”

In a previous interview you said “I think the human soul has to be ready to sacrifice something, sacrifice a certain amount of our time; something of our attention, something of our active listening. Music’s not something that can just wash over us. It needs us to sacrifice something of ourselves to meet it, and it’s very difficult sometimes to do that, especially the whole culture we’re in. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice – certainly sacrificing your time – is not valued anymore.” To me that partly speaks to the classical chillout trend. Are they related?

They might be related because I've always thought it important that musicians and people who love music actually listen consciously and devote their attention to it properly. It’s becoming more and more difficult. Our culture seems to sanction unconscious listening. When people relegate music to the background, it’s saying that music may make me feel good or relaxed, but it's enabling me to do something more important. 

You’re not a fan of background music then?

I find the background noise in restaurants and pubs almost intolerable. My mind completely goes to that music and I therefore appear rude to whoever I'm with because I'm listening to the music and not them. I find that real torture sometimes. When people say that their lives have actually been changed by music, it's not in those encounters where the music has been background. Life-changing moments have come about when you give up everything else and really focus on what the music is saying. 

So when you’re watching a film are you distracted by the soundtrack?

Afraid so. I wouldn't say it distracts me from the storyline completely, but I'm always thinking about how the music’s being made, whether it’s effective and what it's doing. I much prefer films where there’s no music. 

You’ve been a part of the music world for a little while now. What has changed or stayed the same over that time?

Lovers of music have been worrying about the demise of classical music for generations and it hasn't happened, so there has to be some hope there. Adorno was predicting the end of classical music in the 1930s. For him the great culprit was the radio, which of course has turned out to be a great ally of classical music, so he was completely wrong. Radio, LPs and CDs all brought their challenges but in many ways they helped rather than hindered, and perhaps the new ways that we are disseminating classical music will help too.

Something I didn't foresee was the growing popularity of choral music. When I was a young composer, hardly anyone wrote choral music, because modernism is very much an instrumental aesthetic. But suddenly there were lots of new, brilliant choirs, like The Sixteen, Tenebrae and Polyphony, and choral music became a very important part of what classical music culture is all about. I didn't see it on my horizon as a young composer, so that’s been a pleasant surprise. 

Do you think the popularity of choral music is linked with the classical chillout trend?

There's nothing wrong with the aesthetic of music that is serene and some of the great music that we're talking about - by the likes of Arvo Pärt and so on - they're real masterpieces. As long as people listen to it with antenna bristling, with ears open. The music operates in a very specific mood place, but people need that space. Pärt's music and a lot of choral music will make its deepest impact when people switch on to the music, or instead of switching off for other purposes.

“The musical world have to become activists for musical culture”

What do you see as the most pertinent issues faced by the classical music industry at the moment?

Building a new base for classical music. There has always been this worry that it's an elitist thing, and those arguments have never cut through with me because I'm very much from a working class background. My grandfather was a coal miner, I come from an area of Scotland that has been hit economically, but there was enough of a connection to draw people like my grandfather in to wanting to play the euphonium and listening to lots of different types of music that he didn’t necessarily encounter in his daily life. My worry is that today, with immediate connection to any music you want on the internet, options have closed down. Young people are being encouraged to be less curious about cultural life than even my grandfather was in the 1930/40s. 

I spend a lot of time in schools teaching composition, and trying to get young people to search out new cultural experiences is becoming more of a hurdle. All of musical history is there at the click of a button. So why is it becoming more and more difficult for young people to make those connections?

Do you think that’s partly because there are so many options now? That people pick none of them and stick to what they know?

Possibly, yes. The educational world is quite connected to wider cultural and societal trends, and sometimes you feel as if the educational world is responding to what society is giving them, whereas, a really strong educational principle would be to pursue knowledge and experience regardless of society. Just because society tells you something is important, that shouldn't hamper the educational mind to go out there and discover things that aren’t immediately available. The musical world have to become activists for musical culture and get involved with education, especially at a very early age. 

All of this must also be linked to the music education cuts too.

Because of the pandemic, people are talking in quite dramatic terms of losing a generation, not just in music education but a whole range of education. A devastating thing to consider, but it does mean that we'll have to begin again and take the opportunity to get in with the grassroots, right from the beginning and inculcate an interest in music culture amongst the very young. We mustn't allow music just to become the preserve of the rich and the middle class. Even in my time, I've noticed that the people who make up the British orchestras are changing. Back in my day I noticed a lot of people, especially in brass sections, who were like me, sons and grandsons/daughters of coal miners in places like Ayrshire and Fife. That’s all gone. If you speak to orchestral players, you realise that most of them have had private school backgrounds. That's changed since the 1970s, so that will be devastating if this class divide reasserts itself in our world.

What do you see as the silver linings to come out of this year for the industry? 

A good thing is that orchestras have tried to look wider than the basic repertoire, looking at areas of our musical culture which have been ignored, such as the music by minority ethnic composers in Britain and the US, and music by women. As a composer, I’ve always valued the new and unknown, so I’m very positive about the discovery of unknown pots in our shared cultural history and I hope we can build that and make classical music a place where  people are genuinely curious about things they don't know yet. That’s sometimes not the audience in classical music - you tend to come across a lot of people who know what they like and like what they know - so let’s bring back the curiosity, bring back the hunger to discover the unknown. That might revolutionise our musical culture.

James MacMillan has two upcoming world premieres in Summer 2021: one as part of a free online concert by The Sixteen on Thursday 10th June and When Soft Voices Die on the First Night of the Proms on Friday 30th July.

Hannah Fiddy is a creative entrepreneur based in Bristol, developing new audiences for classical music. She is the Co-Founder of Alternative Classical and the creator of Humans of Classical Music and Concert Roulette. Hannah interviews prominent artists from around the world and writes articles about classical music.

Follow Hannah on Twitter @Hannah_Fiddy.