Sir James MacMillan celebrates his sixtieth birthday on Tuesday. He will be featured as Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3, and next month the Edinburgh International Festival will celebrate his music by the hosting of five concerts, including the world premiere of his Fifth Symphony.
Tuesday also sees the publication of A Scots Song: A Life of Music (Birlinn), a short, elegant memoir and reflection on the things that have proved vital in his work: “An inescapable search for the sacred, the role of religious practice, tradition and identity, the influence of political motivation, for good or for ill, and the importance of music in the communities I hold dear.”
MacMillan writes with almost unbearable attentiveness of the death of a beloved granddaughter, Sara. There are candid asides on the liberation that has come from the letting go of old certainties and camp loyalties, but there is a cantus firmus, too: a wary scepticism of the “transient fashions and banalities of the cultural mainstream”.
11 July 2019, The Tablet
Word from the Cloisters: Joyful noise as composer Sir James MacMillan turns 60
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