5 - Exquisite Violence: Imagery, Embodiment and Transformation in MacMillan

Summary

The question of how to make art speak in the modern world is fundamental to MacMillan’s thought. Theologian Olivier Davies describes ‘the reorientation’ of Transformation Theology as like ‘a new tonality in music’, an apposite image for MacMillan’s work. This study begins with an exegesis of two strains of thought. First, like composers such as Messiaen and Pärt, MacMillan creates a topical form of absolute music that sublimates the aesthetics of desire for the absolute. MacMillan’s project also relates to the aesthetics of post-Tridentine violence and realism. Second, with reference to Transformational Theology, MacMillan’s thought configures Christ as present not merely in images but as ‘presently real’. This belief in the ‘real presence of Jesus’ in the world is manifest in images of embodiment in MacMillan’s music that seek to overcome mere representation to function as a form of (en)activism: Jesus - wounded, ascended, glorified - but present and corporeal. The final section draws these ideas together through analysing images of embodiment in MacMillan’s output including in Veni, Veni Emmanuel, the Cello Concerto, and Seven Last Words that profess MacMillan’s resurrection theology, and finding comparison with artists such as Caravaggio.