James MacMillan, in his Own Words
James MacMillan relates his music to Silence, Mysticism, and the Icon
The recorded version of this talk, along with Benedictine’s choir performing MacMillan’s “New Song,” “Radian Dawn,” and “HB to MB,” can be found here. The extended version of MacMillan’s magnificent speech is below:
I would like to thank President Minnis and all here at Benedictine College for this award. It is greatly appreciated and a source of pride for me. And I would specifically like to thank Jason Baxter for setting the whole thing in motion and for inviting me here. Jason has also been of immense help in directing my thoughts for this short lecture. As a living composer (or at least I was the last time I checked) I can never be too sure what the world outside my enclosed existence in music makes of what a composer does, especially in this day and age. Classical music—isn’t that just music from the past? Are not all the composers of art music now dead? What motivates a composer now in modernity to create new music? These are all valid questions and I suppose all living composers are haunted a bit by them.
So maybe, to begin with, I should say a little bit about myself. I have lived a life of music ever since I fell in love with it as a little boy. My mother and my maternal grandfather introduced me to some of the great composers from the past—Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn. I was also quickly alerted to the fact that classical or art music was not just a museum culture but a living thing too. I became intrigued by the fact that there were people alive in our own time doing similar things to the great composers, and some of them lived just a few hundred miles away from me. And the one I became obsessed with was Benjamin Britten, who was still alive when I was a boy and died in 1976.
And as you can hear, I’m from Scotland, and that was to play a part in my musical education too. My aforementioned grandfather was a coal miner, and like many men who worked under the Scottish, English, and Welsh grounds in the twentieth century, he loved music and sought out the beauty of it in any way he could, as his world of hacking coal in the dark was bereft of that beauty. So he sang in his church choir and played the euphonium in various colliery bands, the British Brass Band tradition being based solidly in the nation’s industrial heartlands. He got me my first cornet and took me to my first band practices.
And like him I am also a Catholic. And I learned fairly quickly that the divine praises of our ecclesial tradition have an umbilical connection with music, in particular with the western classical tradition. Composers have been midwives of our faith since the Middle Ages. All the great composers dating back to St Hildegard of Bingen have composed music for the liturgy. After her, Leonin and Perotin, Machaut, Josquin des Prez, Palestrina, Victoria, Byrd; and after the Reformation, Bach and Handel; and after the Counter Reformation, Monteverdi; and later Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Bruckner; and into the twentieth century with Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, Messiaen, Benjamin Britten; and on it goes into our own century.
Many of these composers were commissioned and some even employed by the church or churches to write music for the divine liturgies. This master-servant relationship obviously broke down as history evolved, especially from the nineteenth century onwards, but the search for the sacred in the minds of composers never went away. Perhaps there is something about this mysterious art form, even and perhaps especially outside music which is specifically sacred, which opens doors onto the numinous.
For example, today many lovers of music, religious and nonreligious alike, will refer to it as “the most spiritual of the arts.” The search for the sacred did not end with modernity in music and, if anything, it has grown and become more complex. The story of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century music is of a complicated and sometimes bewildering re-engagement of composers with metaphysical, spiritual, and downright religious insights. Roger Scruton, in his Death Devoted Heart, makes the claim that this has a lot to do with Wagner, and in particular Tristan and Isolde. But music, even if it can be at times the most abstract, as well as the most spiritual, art form, does not come about in a vacuum. The other arts, and specifically poetry, offer parallel lines of engagement.
Poets have very interesting things to say on these and related matters, and their wider implications. I have collaborated especially closely with the poet Michael Symmons Roberts. He highlights Seamus Heaney’s reference to “the big lightening, the emptying out” of our religious language, and David Jones’s vision of the English language “littered with dying signs and symbols, specifically the signs and symbols associated with our Judaeo-Christian past.” Symmons Roberts suggests that “the resultant impoverishment hasn’t just affected poets, but readers too, and this has been borne out by the now common struggles of English teachers in schools and universities to provide the biblical and historical literacy necessary to make sense of Milton, Donne, Herbert, T. S. Eliot, and others.”
Symmons Roberts argues, convincingly I think, that this “emptying out” of religious language was the unintended, or perhaps intended, result of what might be described as “The Enlightenment project” which, for some of those involved, was “meant to see off religion.” Except, of course, it has not happened. Symmons Roberts notes that “many sociologists argue that it is secularism that’s in retreat. Worldwide, the case is clear-cut. Christianity and Islam are growing very rapidly throughout the developing world, and a recent report placed the numbers of atheists worldwide at 3 per cent and falling.” It is, nonetheless, a powerful and well-heeled 3 percent, almost completely based in the rich West, wielding great clout over matters political, economic, and cultural.
In Post-Secular Philosophy, Phillip Blond argues that “secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be, that what was promised to them—self-liberation through the limitation of the world to human faculties—might after all be a form of self-mutilation.” To which Michael Symmons Roberts adds:
The myth of the uncommitted artist (free-spirited and unshackled from the burdens of political, religious, or personal commitment) was always an empty one. To be alive in the world is to have beliefs and commitments, and these extend at some level to politics and theology. But this myth has left us with a terror of the imagination in thrall to a belief. Surely this could limit the scope of the work, may even reduce it to a thin preconceived outworking of doctrine or argument? Yet this fear was always unfounded. The counter-examples are obvious, including great twentieth-century innovators such as Eliot, Jones, Auden, Moore, Berryman, and Bunting. [...] And there’s an equivalent list in the other arts too (music’s list would include Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Poulenc, Gubaidulina, Schnittke, Penderecki). The relationship between creative freedom and religious belief is far from limiting.
Most of these writers and composers would argue that their religious faith was an imaginative liberation. Some, like David Jones, have said that this withering of religious faith and the resulting negative reduction of imaginative liberation represents a parching of our culture—a parching of truth and meaning, a drying up of historical associations and resonances leading to an inability for our culture to hold up “valid signs.”
The etymology of the Latin word religio is interesting as it implies a kind of binding. Symmons Roberts cites David Jones’s essay “Art and Sacrament”:
The same root is in “ligament,” a binding which supports an organ and assures that organ its freedom of use as part of a body. And it is in this sense that I here use the word “religious.” It refers to a binding, a securing. Like the ligament, it secures a freedom to function. The binding makes possible the freedom. Cut the ligament and there is atrophy—corpse rather than corpus. If this is true, then the word religion makes no sense unless we presuppose a freedom of some sort.
This implies, as Symmons Roberts notes, that the supreme visionary requires religion and theology: “So perhaps to ‘free the waters’ and help slake the thirst of a parched culture, poets and other artists need religion, need a theology. Now there’s an unfashionable idea.” An interesting and challenging idea indeed! How would that go down in today’s fashionable citadels of metropolitan bien pensant culture? But, as Symmons Roberts points out, “if David Jones is right, then that image of the free-spirited artist is, and always has been, an illusion. Freedom is not absence. The binding makes possible the freedom.”
Major modernist composers of the last hundred years were, in different ways, profoundly religious men and women. Stravinsky was as conservative in his religion as he was revolutionary in his musical imagination, with a deep love of his Orthodox roots as well as the Catholicism he encountered in the West. He set the psalms, he set the Mass; he was a man of faith. Schoenberg, that other great polar figure of early-twentieth-century modernism, was a mystic who reconverted to Judaism after he left Germany in the 1930s. His later work is infused with Jewish culture and theology, and he pondered deeply on the spiritual connections between music and silence. It is no surprise that John Cage chose to study with him. Cage found his own route to the sacred through the ideas, and indeed the religions, of the Far East.
The great French innovator and individualist Olivier Messiaen was famously Catholic, and every note of his unique contribution to music was shaped by a deep religious conviction and liturgical practice. There are, in my view, two composers in history who may be described as theologians: one is J. S. Bach, the other is Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen was a powerful influence on Boulez and Stockhausen (major figures of the postwar avant-garde) and therefore can be counted as one of the most impactful composers of modern times. His Catholicism, far from being an impediment to this, was the major—indeed, singular—factor behind it.
Messiaen wrote one opera—St Francis of Assisi—but the most important French Catholic opera of the twentieth century was written by Francis Poulenc. His Dialogue des Carmélites appeared in 1956. As Mark Bosco comments, “No other opera combines twentieth-century musical sensibilities with such profound theological themes on Catholic mysticism, martyrdom, and redemption.” There is no comfortable, airy-fairy, pick’n’mix spirituality here. It is based on a true story from the beginnings of modern revolutionary violence—of sixteen Carmelite nuns guillotined in the terror of the French Revolution. It was an act of retrospective defiance on the part of the composer against the secular terror of that time and the secular orthodoxies of our modern world. For a culture that was meant to have put these old things behind it, Dialogue des Carmélites is probably the most successful modern opera of the last sixty years. It is not just another avenue on the search for the sacred but a bold rebuttal of secular arrogances and certainties, and a beautiful proclamation of Catholic truths. Here, as Bosco highlights, “traditional Catholicism becomes[s] intellectually compatible with all that was modern and progressive in French culture in the early part of the twentieth century.” Poulenc’s opera is “at once a Catholic story of heroism and faith and yet speaks to the modern world, an opera for the postwar period of Europe in the 1950s and one resonant with our contemporary struggle with Christian faith and martyrdom.”
The list of composers in recent times radiating a high degree of religious resonance is substantial, covering a whole generation of post-Shostakovich modernists from behind the old Iron Curtain—Gorecki from Poland, Arvo Pärt from Estonia, Kancheli from Georgia, Silvestrov from Ukraine, Schnittke, Gubaidulina and Ustvolskaya, all from Russia—again, courageous figures who stood out and against the prevailing dead-hand orthodoxy of the day, state atheism. And, in the United Kingdom, after Benjamin Britten have come Jonathan Harvey, John Tavener, and many others. 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. It could even be said that any discussion of modernity’s mainstream in music would be incomplete without a serious reflection on the spiritual values, beliefs, and practices at work in composers’ minds.
But before taking this a little further and a little deeper, perhaps I could briefly mention a piece of my own. And in doing so, I want to talk about the analogy between composition and prayer.
The inspiration for my third symphony, subtitled “Silence,” comes from the novel of the same name by one of Japan's greatest twentieth-century writers, Shusaku Endo, who died in 1996. His book (later made into a film by Martin Scorsese) asks profound philosophical questions and resonates with one of the most anguished questions asked two thousand years ago, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” It is a question that has been asked continuously since, right through Auschwitz and into our own time. Endo’s “silence” is the silence of God in the face of terrible events springing from the merciless nature of man: torture, genocide, holocaust. After experiencing one of these events, one of Endo's characters writes: “I cannot bear the monotonous sound of the dark sea gnawing at the shore. Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God… the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish, God remains with folded arms, silent.”
For Endo, though, this silence is not absence but presence. It is the silence of accompaniment rather than “nihil.” (The basis of this is a Christian one—Endo was a convert—that Christ accompanies us in our via doloroso, through the valley of tears, suffering with us as one of us.) But the notion of silence as presence, as mystical or metaphysical substance, is one that has many musical analogies. Music itself grows out of silence. The emptiness and solitude of a composer’s silence is nevertheless pregnant with the promise of possibility and potency. The immateriality of music points to the reality of different types of existence. Music is not a physical reality in the sense that we are, or any other thing is. You cannot see, touch, or taste music, but its powerful presence always makes itself felt.
The Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse said, “Perhaps it’s because silence goes together with wonder, but it also has a kind of majesty to it, yes, like an ocean, or like an endless snowy expanse; and whoever does not stand in wonder at this majesty fears it. And that is most likely why many are afraid of silence.” We fill our worlds with everything that will challenge, contradict, and ultimately kill this precious silence. Music itself has been harnessed and co-opted as a weapon in this elemental war, transformed as it is, into muzak—everywhere. Musicians should not collude with this. The war against silence is also a war against us, and against the interior life, from where spring our inspirations to create.
Descend into silence and you become an extension of it. A composer should feel the silence adhering to him.
The philosopher and boredom theorist Blaise Pascal in the early 1600s wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from a man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Since this is what composers do a lot of the time, in following our vocations as creators, we should ask, and we should be asked, “Why are we different? Are composers’ problems different? Why are we able to sit quietly in a room alone? Are we more fortunate than everyone else? Are we the most fortunate of the fortunate?”
On one level we are, but the descent into silence comes with a price. There is a deep fear of silence. And it is natural for composers to feel it too. This disquiet at being alone, at holding our tongues, at being starved of distraction has been with us, all of us from the beginning—it is our natural state. More so today than ever. So we wage war on it. Silence is almost extinct.
Why do we resist going there? There is clearly a fear of nothingness—the abyss of nonbeing. That is completely natural. We avoid thinking about our own deaths, for example—the deep scandal of being irrelevant to this exciting, throbbing, living world. How dare they imagine going on without me? But what if there is something even more terrifying than nothing at the heart of this silence? What if Endo is right—that this silence is not absence? But presence? If it’s not “nihil” that is there, but “accompaniment”? What are we being accompanied by? When stoics, mystics, saints, and composers dig deep into this silence searching for what is there, what if they meet that which searches in the opposite direction? Something that is searching for us? Coming back at us...
I don't know if that is what John Cage had in mind when he devised his “4’33”” (that is, 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence)—a kind of provocation to our listening sensibilities, or lack of them: a kind of goad to make us hear music and other things better, a kind of challenge, perhaps, to our “Entertain me and entertain me now” culture. It may come as a surprise to some that his original title for this apparently jocular little slice of aesthetic naughtiness was “Silent Prayer.”
Cage had studied with Schoenberg in the 1930s. He worshiped the older Austrian Jewish composer and was attracted by his mysticism. One of the crucial points in Schoenberg’s life involved the tragedies that led to the composition of his second string quartet in 1909. His wife Mathilde had had an affair with their friend and neighbor, the artist Richard Gerstl, who subsequently committed suicide on the discovery of the betrayal. The composer was moved into new artistic territory by these traumas and used a soprano voice in this work. She sings words by the poet Stefan George which includes, “Ich fuehle Luft vom anderen Planeten” (I feel the air from another planet). Other planets do not have air, and are therefore silent. It is worth pondering George’s poem;
Rapture
I feel air from another planet.
I faintly through the darkness see faces
Friendly even now, turning toward me.
And trees and paths that I loved fade
So I can scarcely know them and you bright
Beloved shadow—summoner of my anguish—
Are only extinguished completely in a deep glowing
In the frenzy of the fight
With a pious show of reason.
I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving,
With unfathomable thanks and unnamed praise,
Bereft of desire, I surrender myself to the great breath.
A violent wind passes over me
In the thrill of consecration where ardent cries
In dust flung by women on the ground:
Then I see a filmy mist rising
In a sun-filled, open expanse
That includes only the farthest mountain hatches.
The land looks white and smooth like whey,
I climb over enormous canyons.
I feel as if above the last cloud
Swimming in a sea of crystal radiance—
I am only a spark of the holy fire
I am only a whisper of the holy voice.
Down into the depths of the unrelenting silence went Arnold Schoenberg, searching, and encountered what, searching back at him? In George’s silent sea of crystal radiance he finds a spark of the holy fire, and a silent whisper. How can a whisper be silent? A whisper of the holy voice. And becomes part of both. As I said earlier, “Descend into silence and you become an extension of it. A composer should feel the silence adhering to him.”
This silent “place” is not necessarily a happy or contented “place.” Sometimes the silence is dreadful and terrifying. Deafness, like the “anderen Planeten,” must seem airless too. No wonder Beethoven raged against his dying of the sound. What a frightening place to travel into, for anyone who has ever heard, never to emerge again. What an especially vile place for a musician and composer to go to and never return from. But go he did. A prison from where the condemned man will never exit. And the condemned man was Beethoven. Not just hell on earth, but hell in his own soul.
And in that soundless, airless vacuum of nothing, what did the composer meet? We will never know, of course, but we have messages from that deep impact, postcards from the other planet, air from this harrowed, empty place that now fills our planet with sound. His silence was pregnant. His nihil was accompanied. What became present in that ghastly absence of sound were some the greatest masterpieces a human being has ever composed. If you want to know what is there, in that silence, what awaits, searching back at you, have a look and listen again to Beethoven’s late string quartets.
I tell the young composers that I meet that this is the “place” where we must go. Not deafness, not airlessness, not outer space. But silence. It calls us from its depth, deep calling on deep, like a monstrous ocean. It is imperative that we obey its command. It’s as simple as that. Because when all the lessons are over, when you’ve completed your last counterpoint exercise, when you’ve learned all you can about how to orchestrate, when you’ve done modernism, postmodernism, minimalism, neo-complexity, and musica negativa until you can’t think straight, there is only one other place to go. It is perfectly understandable if one chooses to get off the boat now. But for those who have to continue, how should we travel into this unexplored domain?
Have you ever gazed into the eyes of another person for a long time? I suppose husbands, wives, and partners do it. I suppose parents do it with their children. But otherwise it’s weird, uncomfortable, unnatural. Twenty years ago the psychologist Arthur Aron did an experiment. He was able to get complete strangers to fall in love in his laboratory. The participants sit and look into each other’s eyes for four minutes (or maybe four minutes, thirty-three seconds!) without saying a word. Two of the subjects got married six months later.
The New York Times journalist Mandy Len Catron described those four silent minutes of nothing; nothing but eye contact:
I've skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
In this scenario four minutes becomes a very long time—it is as though one is being pulled toward the other. Like staring into an icon perhaps? What actually is staring back at us? What does it see in our eyes, looking in? Gazing silently into the blind eyes on an icon is meant to let us see into the beauty of the divine presence. Icons are very important objects in the Greek and Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition. They are thought of as windows into the soul of God. But God looks back. Silently. Some of the most powerful artistic representations of the nature of heaven depict the Father staring into the eyes of the Son. Forever. Silently.
I’ve come to realize, then, that it is this ongoing encounter with silence that is the necessary state for a composer. Both eyes and ears turn to this empty place in an apparent and paradoxical search for sounds. Sounds which germinate in a place empty of sound. Sounds which are quickened into existence in a state of sonic vacuum—an apparent absence which brings forth presence.
There is obviously a religious dimension to this, but I’m keen to speak of it in ways that people and composers of very different world views and understandings can adapt to their own creative searches. For some, gazing at and listening for beauty is a matter of belief, but the search for the numinous for the composer can take many forms—a deep, attentive looking and listening—can be integrated into our lives as a spiritual practice, or perhaps simply as an imaginative discipline and search for the inner imagination, a search for the interior life.
My analogy with gazing at icons is meant to be helpful to my fellow composers. The composer John Tavener told me that in the Orthodox tradition icons are a form of prayer. He said to me, “Jesus is the image (icon) of the invisible God.” When you look at an icon, it is meant to make you aware that you are in the presence of the Divine. Icons, then, are not just art with a religious theme. Instead, they are sacred art because they bring the viewer into the presence of the holy.
When one fixes one’s undivided attention on these images over a substantial period, the images may come to life and enter into animated dialogue with the practitioner, or so the thinking goes. Painters and creators of icons say that the image being gazed at seems to look at you, coming nearer and nearer, even into your soul. Notice how prominent the eyes are in icons. The understanding is that heaven is looking back at you.
It is said that they are designed to be doors between this world and another world. And my suggestion is that the musical analogy of this, which does not necessarily involve or need a specific image, brings the composer to an ambiguous hybrid place where his or her world comes into contact or communion with another state where the mysterious silent encounter sparks sonic life and compositional possibilities and the new music that we as composers are always seeking, from deep in our creative imaginations and if you like, from deep within our souls.
It is music that emerges when the silent composer descends into a deeper silence, an objective other place or state to which he or she adheres and of which he or she has become an extension.
Silence listening to silence.