The international broadcast of the opening of Scotland’s new parliament in
July 1999 gave the world more to see than just Queen Elizabeth’s much ballyhooed
thistle–inspired frock. It also presented Scottish composer James MacMillan
conducting two of his fanfares as Her Royal Highness led the procession into
Parliament’s temporary quarters. The botanical dress fared somewhat better than
the music, which miscarried—a third of the way through the first fanfare MacMillan
had to stop his musicians and make a fresh start. But no matter. The Scots all
appeared to think it was a grand day, and it was a fine occasion for the world
to see the most performed classical composer of his generation.

Barely forty years old, James MacMillan is something of a phenomenon in the
world of composers. International performances of his works have been greeted
by glowing notices and numerous awards. His percussion concerto for fellow Scot
Evelyn Glennie has become a repertoire piece (receiving to date well over one
hundred performances), and sixteen of his works are commercially available on
six CDs. There are few composers twice his age who are as successful, and none
who quite combine his twin enthusiasms for socialist politics and Catholic piety.

MacMillan studied music at Edinburgh University and did doctoral studies at
Durham University. After lecturing briefly at Manchester University, he returned
to Scotland where he now teaches at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and
Drama and acts as composer–in–residence for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
He came to national attention in Britain in 1990 when his tone poem The Confession
of Isobel Gowdie was included in a London Promenade Concert. The roughly
thirty–minute work created a minor sensation and marked MacMillan as a composer
to be watched; numerous commissions and performances followed, including an
opera commissioned for the 1996 Edinburgh Festival.

What makes him especially interesting, however, is that among his most important
works to date are two large–scale meditations on Christ’s passion. Visitatio
Sepulchri (The Visitation to the Tomb) is a theater piece, first performed
in Glasgow in 1993. MacMillan takes his libretto from the famous tenth–century
dialogue that was added to the Introit of the Easter Mass. (“Whom are you looking
for in the tomb, you followers of Christ?” “Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified,
O dwellers of Heaven.” “He is not here, he has arisen as he himself foretold;
go and make it known that he has arisen.”) To this three–line mini–drama MacMillan
adds settings of the eleventh–century sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes
(Praise the Paschal Victim), and the Te Deum. Scored for a chamber orchestra,
speaker, and six singers (three sopranos and three basses), the work lasts about
forty minutes.

On an even grander scale is Triduum, a set of three pieces commissioned
by the London Symphony and completed in 1996 and 1997. The first piece, “The
World’s Ransoming,” is a twenty–minute concertante for English horn and orchestra
intended as a reflection on Maundy Thursday. The second work of the trilogy
is a three–movement cello concerto associated with Good Friday. The final work,
“Vigil,” is a symphonic meditation on the Easter vigil, again in three movements.
Triduum requires virtuoso soloists (the cello concerto was requested
by Msistislav Rostropovich) and a large orchestra with an expanded—and very
busy—percussion battery. Together the three pieces last nearly two hours.

To anyone hopeful for the redemption of culture by works of high art (especially
religious art), MacMillan is a frustrating composer. He is certainly an artist
of intelligence, craftsmanship, and high purpose—which makes the failure of
his work all the more regrettable. Far too often MacMillan’s music reminds one
of the note that the minister wrote in the margin of his sermon manuscript:
“Argument weak here—yell like hell.” MacMillan apparently believes that bombast
is an adequate substitute for musical argument and theatrics for theological
reflection; his works are filled with compositional miscalculations, clichés,
and bad taste.

Here are a few examples. Hammer chords (fortissimo orchestral chords
that fall like strokes of a hammer) are one of MacMillan’s favorite devices.
But each use (and there are many) reminds the listener of how much more effectively
they were used by Udo Zimmermann in the overture to his opera Die Soldaten,
Messiaen in the stigmata scene from his St. Francis, and of course Beethoven.
Alban Berg used the orchestral unison to riveting effect in his opera Wozzeck;
MacMillan’s reliance on the device is at best referential and usually cloying.
Igor Stravinsky (in the beginning of his ballet Firebird) and Henryk
Górecki (in his Third Symphony) used passages for divided double basses to create
sections of intense gravity. But when MacMillan uses them—and he does so a lot—they
sound like movie music introducing Dracula’s castle: spooky and cheap. Cadences
are supposed to act as summary conclusions to extended musical arguments; MacMillan’s
too often seem to have little to do with the music that precedes them (the cadence
that ends the final movement of the cello concerto is so mismanaged that it
almost sounds comic). And while he is fully able to keep his musicians resolutely
plowing along, one longs for an original melody to justify all their hard work.

But most disappointing is MacMillan’s attitude toward his texts. Certainly
since the Renaissance (and possibly before), the primary purpose of composers
in dealing with texts was to exegete them musically, the music serving as a
kind of midrash upon the words. In the greatest works of liturgical and devotional
music this creates perhaps the most elevated composition of our civilization:
the aesthetic/theological discourse. So, in the chorale that follows Christ’s
death in the St. Matthew Passion, Bach subjects the German word allerbängsten
(roughly translated as “excruciating suffering”) to musical torture, stretching
its harmonic syntax to the point of tearing it apart. The meaning of the word
is both intensified and clarified by Bach’s compositional choices. Des Prez,
Victoria, Schütz, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Britten, and Ives
all do similar things.

But MacMillan typically seems unaware of his text’s importance. The most significant,
indeed shocking, text in Visitatio is the angel’s proclamation to the
women: Non est hic. Surrexit. (“He is not here. He is arisen.”) Yet this
phrase receives no special notice from MacMillan, who instead presents it as
but one more yard of the musical fabric he is weaving. He is even so text–insensitive
as to include the offensively anti–Semitic line from the Victimae Paschali
Laudes, Credendum est magis soli Mariae veraci quam Iudaeorum turbae
fallaci. (“Mary is to be believed more than the lying Jewish mob.”) That
repugnant line is excised when the sequence is used in contemporary liturgies.
That a modern Christian should choose to revive it is inexplicable.

All of this results in music that is overly long, frequently bombastic, and
more than occasionally descends to the level of kitsch. MacMillan ultimately
trivializes the subjects he seeks to honor. He unfortunately is very much part
of what is at least a sub–tradition in Catholic art. Listening to MacMillan
reminds me of those gargantuan canvases of Judith or St. Sebastian or the Blessed
Virgin so popular in Naples in the generations following Caravaggio: bloated,
earnest, convoluted, garish, and—for all their acreage—eclipsed by a square
inch of any canvas by Vermeer. Today, thankfully, they are largely forgotten.

Perhaps that comparison is unfair to MacMillan. Yes, he shares the flatulent
rhetoric of those baroque Neapolitans, but his task today is much harder than
theirs was. They at least were painting as Catholics for Catholics within a
Catholic culture. MacMillan is composing for a culture that is non–Catholic,
and Christian almost only by memory. How can he communicate in Christian terms
with a society that is generally religiously illiterate and often hostile to
Christianity?

Apparently, like the preacher who wrote that sermon note, Macmillan thinks
he can do it by yelling. And to a generation raised on the hyper–decibellic
banalities of rock, perhaps he is succeeding. His CDs are a modest commercial
success and he has impressed enough critics to be awarded some major prizes.
And one can make a case that when dealing with the Word of Life, it’s better
to yell than to say nothing. I just wish he’d yell in better taste.

Michael Linton is head of the Division of Music Theory and Composition at Middle
Tennessee State University.