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Few, if any, composers can claim to have had a simultaneous audience of up to 4 billion people for their music. It\u2019s a boast Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan can make \u2013 if he was the boastful type.<\/p>\n
The occasion was Queen Elizabeth\u2019s funeral at Westminster Abbey last year, and the piece, written for eight-part a cappella choir, was entitled Who Shall Separate Us<\/i>.<\/p>\n
MacMillan had been commissioned to write Who Shall Separate Us<\/i> 11 years prior and then sworn to strict secrecy by Buckingham Palace. In the intervening years he had all but forgotten about it.<\/p>\n
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Sir James MacMillan is remarkable for the depth and variety of his musical output.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>James Bellorini<\/cite><\/p>\n \u201cI was called into a meeting and told that this was one of the Queen\u2019s favourite passages from scripture and asked to write it,\u201d he recalls, speaking from his home near Glasgow.<\/p>\n \u201cI wrote it very quickly, way back then, and it was sent to the abbey and it went straight into a drawer and stayed there until, I suppose, the day she died. I\u2019d kind of forgotten about it, to be honest.\u201d<\/p>\n When the choir of Westminster Abbey and the choir of the Chapel Royal performed Who Shall Separate Us<\/em>, MacMillan instantly became one of the best-known contemporary composers in the world, given the estimated broadcast audience.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an incredible thought and it will never happen again,\u201d he says. \u201cI had to pinch myself when I was told that.\u201d<\/p>\n Was it hard to keep a lid on that secret royal commission for more than a decade?<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m quite proud that I didn\u2019t really tell many people,\u201d he says. \u201cI told my wife and my children, but I knew that my children wouldn\u2019t tell anybody because anything I tell the children, even now, goes in one ear and out the other.\u201d<\/p>\n Australian audiences will get the chance to experience MacMillan\u2019s sublime writing for choir when Sydney Philharmonia Choirs stages the Australian premiere of another work, his Stabat Mater<\/i>. Tackled by many composers from the 16th century onwards, it is a setting of a 13th-century text that tells of Mary\u2019s anguish as she stands at the foot of the cross.<\/p>\n In 2018 it became the first work to be streamed live from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Meanwhile, reviewer Marc Rochester, writing in Gramophone<\/i> magazine, concluded that \u201cposterity might well judge this to be a 21st-century masterpiece\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Stabat Mater<\/i> is probably the most famous telling of this story in music,\u201d says MacMillan. \u201cIt becomes a profoundly personal focus on the mother of God and a very human experience of a woman experiencing the torture and death of her son. And that there was a deeply human story to be told. It was focused on a mother\u2019s grief.\u201d<\/p>\n MacMillan\u2019s lifelong fascination with the possibilities of music began when, as a youngster, he was handed a recorder, which felt like \u201ca light going on\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI developed a facility and enjoyment with the instrument and I wanted to play more instruments,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He quickly moved on to the trumpet and cornet, encouraged by his grandfather, a former coal miner steeped in the brass-band tradition, something that has stayed with MacMillan.<\/p>\n \u2018I love writing music. I\u2019m continually excited by and provoked by new challenges.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cI use brass a lot in my orchestral music,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m always looking for ways to imagine the brass choir as an object of delicacy and sometimes serenity. There are ways of using brass that go beyond the archetypal \u2013 it\u2019s not all hunting horns and fanfares.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of MacMillan\u2019s output is deeply spiritual, informed by his Catholicism. He is also remarkable for the sheer depth of his compositional styles. Included in his prodigious catalogue are symphonies, chamber works, works for choirs small and large, operas and even two percussion concertos.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the most exciting things about being a composer is the limitless range of challenges,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are some things I wouldn\u2019t do. I wouldn\u2019t write an operetta, I suppose. I wouldn\u2019t write a musical. But \u2026 I\u2019m still pushing the boat out. I will continue to try many diverse things.\u201d<\/p>\n And, at 64, MacMillan, who was knighted in 2015 for services to music, has no shortage of inspiration for new work.<\/p>\n \u201cI do feel in quite a fluent phase just now at this time of my life, touch wood,\u201d he says. \u201cThe ideas are coming quite freely. There have been times where there have been relative dry periods, I suppose, and they might come up again.<\/p>\n \u201cI love writing music. I\u2019m continually excited by and provoked by new challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n