Review

Attention

Culture

Music

25 November 2024

5 min read

James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord

The composer’s music contends both the secular and sacred.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A conductor leans in toward an unseen orchestra with a raised hand.

MacMillan conducting.

Hans van der Woerd, Intermusica.

Sir James MacMillan is one of today’s most successful composers, as is evidenced by his achievements in 2024. This year alone has seen the premiere of a new work for choir ‘Ordo Virtutum’ (January), the UK premiere of his cantata ‘Fiat Lux’ (March), the premiere of his new version of Robert Burns’ song ‘Composed in August’ (March), the premiere of his ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ (September), and the premiere of his ‘Duet for Horn and Piano’ (November).

Back in March he also became the 26th Fellow of The Ivors Academy, joining a rollcall of extraordinary composers and songwriters, including John Rutter, John Adams, Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, Dame Judith Weir and Sting. While, in September, he accepted the Sky Arts Classical Music Award 2024 on behalf of The Cumnock Tryst, the annual music festival he founded in his hometown, which brings together many local community groups on stage alongside some of the world’s most acclaimed musicians.

His music, which is notable for its energy and emotion, is imbued with influences from his Scottish heritage, Catholic faith, social conscience and close connection with Celtic folk music, blended with influences from Far Eastern, Scandinavian and Eastern European music. Accordingly, Tom Gray, Chair of The Ivors Academy, describes MacMillan as “a titan of music, generous in his creativity and craft” and “a foremost proponent of the power of music to communicate and forge bonds”.

He first became internationally recognised after the extraordinary success of ‘The Confession of Isobel Gowdie’ at the BBC Proms in 1990. Since then, his prolific output has been performed and broadcast around the world with his major works including his most performed work the percussion concerto ‘Veni, Veni, Emmanuel’ (1992), a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich (1996), an opera ‘The Sacrifice’ (2007), the ‘St John Passion’ (2008), and five symphonies. For his services to music, he was awarded a CBE in 2004 and a knighthood in 2015.

“In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away”.

James MacMillan

As will be clear from the titles of works cited thus far, many of his works, such as ‘Ordo Virtutum’, a setting of a sacred music drama by Hildegard of Bingen concerned with the struggle for the human soul in a battle between good and evil, and ‘Fiat Lux’, a celebration of the divine gift of light, directly express his Catholic faith. David Clayton writes that, “Aside from being one of the greatest living composers and conductors of classical music, Sir James is a Catholic whose faith informs all his work”. Clayton also describes him as “a deep thinker who communicates clearly the nature of the creative process when one seeks to create beauty to bring Glory to God”.

MacMillan believes that “Far from being a "spent force", religion has proved to be a vibrant, animating principle in modern music and continues to promise much for the future.” When he speaks about music and the idea of the sacred, as he did most recently at The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in October, he emphasises that music seems to be “the most spiritual of the arts, and composers have always seemed to be on a search for the sacred in their work”. He notes that “In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away”.

In brief, he sees himself as standing in a modernist tradition that includes: Stravinsky, who “was as conservative in his religion as he was revolutionary in his musical imagination”; Schoenberg, “a mystic who reconverted to practising Judaism after the Holocaust”; John Cage, who explored “the spiritual connections between music and silence”; Olivier Messiaen, who “was famously Catholic” with “every note of his unique contribution to music” being “shaped by a deep religious conviction”; Jonathan Harvey, “who has allowed eastern mysticism and his own Anglicanism to adorn his searchingly original scores”; John Tavener, whose conversion to Orthodoxy “had a dramatic impact on his style and aesthetic”; and the “intriguing and disturbing religious shadings of musical modernity” to be found in the post-Shostakovich generation from eastern Europe - Henryk Górecki (Poland), Arvo Pärt (Estonia) Giya Kancheli (Georgia), Galina Ustvolskaya, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina (Russia).

In this 'obedience' of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners.

He argues that while, for a time, a post-War reaction led many modernist composers to opt for a primarily abstract style and eschew the stirring up of emotions through music, in more recent years, composers have increasingly re-embraced emotion and, thereby, also spirituality. He also notes significant connections between the music of antiquity and that the modern world. The influence of plainsong and Gregorian chant on modern music, for example, demonstrates a continuing relationship between faith and the arts.

He has suggested that God's power “is presence as absence; absence as presence” and that this is also “precisely what music is”. So, “The umbilical cord between silence and music is the umbilical cord between heaven and earth”. As a result, “the war against silence is a war against ourselves and against our interior life”. He is in agreement with the Scottish Jesuit John McDade, who wrote that "Music may be the closest human analogue to the mystery of the direct and effective communication of grace". MacMillan suggests, therefore, “that music is a phenomenon connected to the work of God in the way it touches something deep in our souls and releases a divine force”.

In similar vein, he also quotes Rowan Williams who, in a sermon some years ago for the Three Choirs Festival, said: "To listen seriously to music and to perform it are among our most potent ways of learning what it is to live with and before God, learning a service that is a perfect freedom... In this 'obedience' of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners. The time we have renounced, given up, is given back to us as a time in which we have become more human, more real, even when we can't say what we have learned, only that we have changed."

Being stretched and deepened in this way is certainly our experience as listeners of MacMillan’s works. Michael Capps suggests that MacMillan knows that “music dealing openly and honestly with the Christian tradition will not always be pleasing, safe, or tame”. His music “contends” in that it “produces arguments and embodies alternatives, not only to its many secular substitutes, but also to allegedly Christian options that lack the tang and piquancy of Christian particularity.” As a result, “MacMillan’s music also reveals: it shows us a world of both tranquility and discord that we readily recognize, and allows us to better appreciate that world’s fleeting harmonies”.

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Article

Character

Culture

Leading

Virtues

19 September 2024

6 min read

What is Putin thinking? And how would you know?

The self-centeredness of modern culture is antithetical to strategic thinking.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Preisdent Putin stands behind a lectern with a gold door and Russian flag behind him.

What is Putin thinking?

In a world of Google Maps when walking on city streets, or of Waze when driving, it is difficult to ever become lost.

The AI algorithm provides us with the shortest route to our destination, adjusting whenever we make the wrong turn. We do not need to think for ourselves, technology instead showing the way forward.

But there are times where it is possible to get lost. This happens less in a city with its clearly set-out streets, and more so when taking the wrong turn in open expanses: hiking in the mountains, traversing farmers’ fields or while navigating at sea. In each of these situations, a miscalculation may lead to peril.

It is in these situations that we must carefully think through our steps, determining how to proceed, or whether to turn back. Often, these situations are ambiguous, the right way forward unclear.

Much of life – perhaps more than we wish to acknowledge – is like this, more akin to a walk across an open field with multiple possible routes forward, than a technology-enabled walk through a city.

When making important decisions, our grasp of a given situation, of others’ intentions and motives, and the networks facilitating and constraining action, are less evident than we may initially think.

This acknowledgement of uncertainty is no reason for delay, but rather a basis for careful deliberation in determining what to do, and how to proceed. It is necessary if we are to pursue what we believe is right, in a manner that may produce positive results.

In a recent interview with the BBC Newscast podcast, University of Durham Chancellor Dr Fiona Hill – who previously served as White House National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs, and currently as Co-Lead of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review – provides listeners with a powerful reminder on how to proceed within ambiguous situations, especially in navigating the choppy seas, or rocky terrains, of human relationships.

Strategic empathy requires self-restraint when natural impulses urge a person to make rapid conclusions about the reality of a given situation – the default human tendency.

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Dr Hill uses the term “strategic empathy” to consider how the political West might proceed in its relationship with Russia, and specifically with Vladimir Putin.

Strategic empathy is a serious commitment to understanding how another person thinks, considering their worldview, their key sources of information (in other words, their main three or four advisors, who have a person’s ear), and other emotional considerations that underpin decision-making.

It is much more than just putting oneself in other’s shoes, as is often said about empathy. The approach is one of realism, suspending judgment based on self-protective or self-aggrandising illusions, in favour of what is actually the case.

In the case of Putin, Dr Hill helpfully reminds listeners that his worldview is drastically different than that of Westerners, and that significant intellectual effort (and specifically, intellectual humility in setting aside one’s own default frames of reference) is necessary to consider decisions from Putin’s perspective, and so make the right decisions from ours.

Technology is here an assistant but not a cure-all. Whereas AI might – based on a gathering of all possible publicly available information written by and about a particular person – help to predict a person’s next move, this prediction is imperfect at best.

There are underlying factors – perhaps a deeply engrained sense of historical grievance and resentment in the case of Putin – that shapes another’s action and that can scarcely be picked up through initial conversation. These factors may not make sense from our perspectives, or be logical, but they exist and must be treated seriously.

This empathy is strategic, because effective strategy is the “How?” of any mission. Whereas a person’s or organisation’s mission, vocation or purpose (all words that can be used relatively interchangeably) is the “Why?” of a pursuit, strategy is the “How?” which itself consists of the questions “Who?” “What?” “When?” and “Where?”

To understand how to act strategically requires a prior effective assessment of reality. This requires going beyond what others say, our initial perception of a situation, any haughty beliefs that we simply know what is happening, or even the assessments of supposedly well-connected and expert contacts.

Dr Hill’s strategic empathy is an appeal to listeners to ask questions – digging as much as possible – to arrive at an assessment that approximates reality to the greatest degree possible. This exercise might be aided by AI, but it is at its heart a human endeavour.

Strategic empathy requires self-restraint when natural impulses urge a person to make rapid conclusions about the reality of a given situation – the default human tendency. The persistent asking of questions is difficult – requiring mental, emotional and intellectual endurance.

There is considerable wisdom in Dr Hill’s reflections on strategic empathy, which extend well beyond the fields of intelligence, geopolitics or defence. The idea of strategic empathy helps show us that in much of modern culture – which glorifies the self, individuals putting their wants, needs and desires before those of others – developing strategy is very difficult.

The key then, when deliberating on potential right courses of action in ambiguous situations, is to not begin believing that the right way is clear. It rarely is.

Why is this the case? When popular culture favours phrases such as “You do you,” the you becomes a barrier to asking questions, with some aloofness to the situation, necessary for understanding how another thinks. People are encouraged to focus on themselves at the expense of others, and so fail to understand others’ worldviews and ways of operating.

Simply put, the self-centeredness of modern culture is antithetical to strategy. It impedes deliberation, which involves patience in the gradual formation of purpose for action. It wages war against the considered politics or statesmanship that many want to see return. In place of this is crisis or catastrophe, in which self-focus leads to clashes with others that could otherwise be avoided or worked through carefully.

The Biblical story of the serpent in the garden is another vantage point for the idea of strategic empathy. Soon after Adam and Eve eat the apple in the garden and become “like gods, knowing good and evil,” God searches for them and asks “Where are you?”

It is right after individuals try to become the judges of good and evil – “like gods,” that Adam and Eve find themselves lost: God’s “Where are you?”

Put differently, when a person is convinced they are right, but without asking questions, they make mistakes, they likely suffer unnecessarily because of this, and then become anchorless – the “Where are you?”

This applies to countries as much as it does to people: the more they moralize, seeking to become the judges of good and evil in a complex geopolitical landscape, the more they drift from their sense of purpose.

The key then, when deliberating on potential right courses of action in ambiguous situations, is to not begin believing that the right way is clear. It rarely is. A belief in evident rightness often leads to error, whereas the ability to suspend such judgment helps reveal – often gradually – the right path forward.

The strategic empathy approach requires both assertiveness – in asking good questions and maintaining persistence in doing so – and self-restraint in the face of believing that the right answer is clear.

The glue between assertiveness on the one hand and restraint on the other is faith, which helps a person to move forward in a trusting manner, but without exerting oneself so much so that they become the centre of the situation.

So, while Google Maps, Waze or other technologies might be at our disposal in our travels, both real and metaphorical, these technologies only get us so far.

The right way forward is seldom initially clear when navigating ambiguous situations, the frequency and stakes of which increase as we embark boldly – with faith – on the adventure of life.

Dr Hill’s strategic empathy – asking questions, listening carefully, suspending a self of sense, seriously considering diverging worldviews, and adjusting as necessary – helps us to achieve the understanding and direction we need.

Indeed, this approach is fundamental to a more effective and resilient political West. It is necessary for sounder deliberation, better strategy and statesmanship, in an increasingly ambiguous world.