SIR JAMES MACMILLAN will have fun his sixty fifth birthday on Tuesday, just three days before the opening of the annual Proms season.
The pre-eminent Scottish composer of his generation, MacMillan first attracted critical acclaim in 1990 along with his celebrated Proms première of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. Since then, his interest in theological and philosophical issues, rooted in a questioning and robust Roman Catholic faith, has informed symphonies, operas, and choral works performed by the world’s best orchestras and choirs.
Two other distinguished composers whose musical creativity owes much to Christianity have also recorded essential anniversaries. Sir Karl Jenkins was 80 in February. The son of a Welsh Methodist father and teacher who played the chapel organ, Jenkins is one in every of the world’s most ceaselessly performed living composers. Crossing cultural and spiritual boundaries, and infrequently using ancient instruments, he draws on the texts and concepts of diverse religious and musical traditions to succeed in those that are usually not religious and yet find solace and purpose in his concert events and recordings.
Across the border, Sir John Tavener (who died in 2013) was born in London to Presbyterian parents 80 years ago, on 28 January 1944. While managing the demands of a family constructing firm, they gave their talented son a spiritual upbringing and nurtured his musical gifts. In the Seventies, Tavener turned for inspiration to the spirituality of the Orthodox Church. Public recognition got here in 1989 with The Protecting Veil, a devotional work for cello and strings which many now regard as his masterpiece. First performed on the BBC Proms that 12 months, it seeks, in Tavener’s words, to capture the sweetness, pathos, and “among the almost cosmic power of the Mother of God”. He was carelessly labelled a “holy minimalist” by his detractors, however the growing appeal of his music defied critical opinion. Global celebrity got here in 1997 when his Song for Athene concluded the funeral service for Diana, Princess of Wales.
In a culture still disposed to seek out speak about God difficult to the purpose of embarrassment, the music of MacMillan, Jenkins, and Tavener constitutes an retro wager on the fact of divine transcendence. Underpinning their work is the unusual assumption of God’s presence, a reaching out towards the ineffable beyond extraordinary speech or images, and a desire for some ultimate source of union, peace, and healing.
Taking metaphysics seriously, the composers engage listeners within the mystery of existence, the need and value of silence, and the challenge of learning again what it’s to be human in a world during which intimations of joy, hope, and heaven exist uneasily alongside suffering and a felt absence of meaning.
LIKE many other esteemed composers, MacMillan believes that music begins in silence. From his personal experience, he has testified that it could possibly also emerge out of grief. In January 2016, his granddaughter, Sara Maria, died shortly before her sixth birthday. Born with a congenital brain condition, she was blind, partially deaf, and immobile.
At the requiem mass in Glasgow, MacMillan delivered a moving eulogy on the inestimable price of each human life, especially of those with special needs. During the service, members of the Cappa Novella choir performed his composition “Think of how God Loves you”:
Think of how God loves you!
He calls you his own children
and that’s what you might be.
You have placed on Christ;
In him you will have been baptised. Alleluia!
MacMillan dedicated this tender choral piece to Sara Maria. For him, she was present within the music: “A really damaged wee girl who brought tremendous joy, and I’d say religious understanding, to her mother, and to the remaining of us, too.” Within weeks of her death, he was back at his desk, composing, aware that something had modified — a change to which his music gave voice. A small, broken child had opened as much as him “the essence of human life” beyond power, money, or influence. Suffering had been given a shape in his music and transformed into something beautiful.
IN HIS recent work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra One World, Jenkins sets out a Utopian vision of a future world restored “under the Kingdom of God”. The early movements acknowledge the world’s current parlous state, humanity’s long seek for a type of happiness and fulfilment beyond dogmas and creeds, and the Hebraic duty of tikkun olam — the duty of “repairing the world” by attending to its hurts and injustices. They reflect Jenkins’s personal creed: a way of seeing the world, traceable partially to the death of his mother when he was five, and the residual Calvinism of his Methodist upbringing, with its dark and juridical prospect of a hereafter.
By a “composer of peace” who’s “essentially Christian”, his music honours the cries of kids and the weeping of moms caught within the blast of war. Beyond the exercise of human compassion, it asks for divine mercy and redemption; a final healing in a universal afterlife more mysterious and capacious than the standard heaven of the chosen and the blessed.
JENKINS’s mysticism finds its counterpart within the later works of Tavener. After a diagnosis of Marfan syndrome (a hereditary condition affecting the connective tissue), and never entirely well after an earlier stroke, Tavener’s musical vision prolonged beyond the confines of the Orthodox faith that had once felt like “a homecoming” to embrace a more universalist philosophy.
His devotion to the Virgin Mary remained constant, but his Requiem in 2008 for cello, soloists, chorus, and orchestra ventured further. Premièred in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, it contained texts from the RC liturgy, Sufi poetry, the Qur’an, and the Upanishads. Explaining their inclusion, Tavener commented that the guts and meaning of the requiem was to be present in the words “Our glory lies where we stop to exist.” In keeping with a few of his earlier works, it was essentially a few journey and becoming “one with God”.
If this didn’t amount to a comprehensive or definitive creed for listeners wanting certainty in matters of belief, it served as a vital reminder of the magical strand in Christianity: the usually hidden and missed stream that has helped to shape its history.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.
