MacMillan’s St Luke Passion was generated in part through a process that entailed the composer working with a group of theologians from Duke and Cambridge Universities. This, in addition to the fact it sets a biblical text, makes it an eminently suitable work to consider from a distinctively theological point of view. This chapter will focuses on a number of unusual features of the score: for example, the way in which Luke’s passion narrative is set in the wider context of the Annunciation and the Ascension; the assignment of the part of Jesus to a girls’ choir; the manner in which the work invites a strongly gendered (‘feminine’) reading when set in contrast to MacMillan’s (arguably more ‘masculine’) St John Passion; the extensive use of rich tonal material within the narrative sections; and the relatively modest orchestral and choral forces MacMillan deploys in ‘dramatic’ works. Attention will be paid to the extent to which these factors are associated with the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the Lucan text itself, and the extent to which they derive from non-Scriptural factors.

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.

Seven Last Words from the Cross is a landmark work in MacMillan’s career. Contextualized within MacMillan’s own oeuvre and the historical genre, this chapter analyses Seven Last Words both musically and theologically, demonstrating that rather than merely being a setting of the traditional text, MacMillan has provided a sophisticated exegesis of the seven last words uttered by Jesus. This is achieved through textual and musical means that demonstrate MacMillan’s modernist approach to tradition. Although the work is powerful and effective as an occasion-specific Christian work, MacMillan has managed to transcend time and place, and make the historicized narrative into a psychological melodrama. MacMillan’s exposition speaks to a traditional understanding of the seven last words representing respectively forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress, triumph and reunion. Through a series of connected musical episodes MacMillan has utilized an array of musical techniques that serve to underscore the dramatic narrative. By analysing key structural moments and deconstructing the sophisticated and multi-layered theology, this chapter demonstrates that MacMillan has, in the words of George Mackay Brown, found ‘an old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows’. Ultimately, MacMillan leaves his listeners with a legend that is ultimately human and unfailingly optimistic.

In 2014, James MacMillan established a music festival in his hometown of Cumnock, calling it The Cumnock Tryst.MacMillan has explained that the festival’s title was inspired by a simple love song he wrote in 1984 called ‘The Tryst’, setting a poem by William Soutar. So brief is this song that it might have fallen into obscurity. Yet its melody has infused no fewer than twelve works in MacMillan’s oeuvre, spanning over a quarter of a century. The scope of genres in which it appears is striking: from a folk song to an early orchestral tone poem; from a large-scale setting of the Christian passion to a congregational mass setting. Although MacMillan has reused musical material from numerous works, The Tryst is unarguably the most important and fruitful of these reincarnations, revealing the most significant degree of his self-retrospection. The broad variety of musical contexts in which the song features demands a range of interpretations to understand the various ‘meetings’ MacMillan proposes with each use of the melody, from the erotic, to the sacred, to the communitarian. By examining these ‘Trystian’ works, we may come to appreciate the extent to which this love song has permeated his career to date.

James MacMillan contends music should awaken the senses to the possibility of beauty. To do this, he crafted his own form of ‘modernist lament’ (David Metzer), thus creating a form of beauty capable of embracing the dark elements of human experience without descending into nihilistic despair. MacMillan’s lament compositions fit into three themes: (1) the death of Jesus, (2) the life and death of particular historical persons, and (3) memorial works that either lament particular persons or commemorate communal tragedy. This chapter will focuses on the third classification through MacMillan’s Violin Concerto (2009), written in memoriam of his mother, Ellen MacMillan. The first section will adumbrates the category of late modernist lament. The next section will examines a number of themes from MacMillan’s memorial works, which often pull from the traditions of Gaelic keening and heterophonic psalm singing. The final section will applies these ideas to the Violin Concerto. The concerto does not prioritize grief but, instead, moves between mourning and celebration. The dance between the violin’s virtuosity and the orchestra’s vibrant tapestry of color takes the listener on a journey through a whirl of emotions: the sweet, the nostalgic, the festive, and the anguish of memory and loss.

An analysis of MacMillan’s The World’s Ransoming presents an underlying conflict between modernity and tradition, observed on three levels, and focused to form the chapter’s main issue: how to configure MacMillan’s relationship with modernism, particularly given his characteristic stylistic mixture of modernist and traditional elements. Dominic Wells’s label for MacMillan (‘retrospective modernism’) highlights two questions: do the modernist and traditional co-exist as comfortably as this suggests? Can modernism be ‘retrospective’ so easily? I propose ‘conflicting modernities and a modernity of conflict’ as a better description. ‘Conflicting modernities’ highlights the centrifugal aspects of MacMillan’s style in three ways: the conflict between modernist and traditional elements, categorising them as examples of conflict first, before they are rapprochements with modernity; the inclusion of traditional elements stems from a modernist impulse, evidenced in MacMillan’s essay ‘Music and Modernity’; and the multiplicity of modernist influences in MacMillan’s style. ‘Modernity of conflict’ suggests a conclusion that conflict in MacMillan must be defined overall as modernist, explored through two strands of Adorno: meaning as contradiction; and Adorno’s aim to expose totalitarian tendencies, restrictions, and blindspots. In MacMillan this takes the form of a desire to turn modernity’s critique onto itself, exposing its atheistic elements and nihilistic worldview.

In his 2015 interview with John Palmer, James MacMillan makes a distinction between ‘conviction composers’, and ‘others, like me’ who ‘sometimes struggle with conviction’. It is understandable that giving convincing musical expression to strong religious beliefs might be harder in textless concert works than in liturgical settings, and MacMillan seems to have relished the possible contrasts between concert works that are associated with religious topics and those where any engagement with extra-musical themes is less explicit. Two of the three numbered string quartets have titles, and the second has religious connotations that deal with the ‘drama’ of the Jewish Seder Night rituals. The first quartet can also be interpreted as dramatic, and it could well have been an impatience with this aspect that led MacMillan, in a reference to his third quartet, to declare that he was conscious of ‘leaving the extra-musical starting points behind’, writing music that ‘was just the notes and nothing but the notes’. My analysis of all three quartets explores the possibilities of narrative and characterisation in the light of stylistic and expressive qualities that seem to resist any aspirations to pure abstraction, even when direct connections with MacMillan’s more ‘mainstream’ texted compositions are less obvious.

It may seem slightly incongruous to look specifically at the liturgical music of James MacMillan, a composer for whom the liturgy has had such bearing on his entire compositional ethos and personal philosophy. For the liturgy has provided the impulse for both MacMillan’s large corpus of sacred choral pieces, and the bulk of his instrumental works. However, this over-riding influence of the liturgy makes an in-depth look at the purely liturgical works all the more relevant: here we find the composer stripped of the myriad of allusions that characterise other works and find him working in a specifically explicit manner. The chapter looks at MacMillan’s extant Mass settings, though will focus mainly on the setting from 2000 as the most succinct appraisal of his assimilating of the vernacular. It will also look at his Magnificat (1999), Nunc Dimittis (2000), Jubilate Deo (2009) and Te Deum settings, showing some of the composer’s current pre-occupations with the borrowing and recycling of material and ideas relating to form and through-composition.

On 13 October 2017, James MacMillan’s 29-minute cantata The Sun Danced received its first performance in the Sanctuary of Fatima in Portugal. This was the 100th anniversary of what is claimed by the Catholic Church to have been the last in a cycle of apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children in the Cova da Iria where, according to historical documentation, at least 50,000 people witnessed dramatic solar phenomena that to date remain unexplained. This chapter focuses primarily on the theological background to MacMillan’s compositional process, with particular reference to his choice of texts. These are highly unusual to the extent of being attributed by the children to a supernatural origin (the Virgin and the Angel of Portugal). The chapter will seek to explore how the work relates to the composer’s larger artistic and spiritual trajectory, to assess MacMillan’s purpose behind the writing of The Sun Danced, and to contextualize it with reference to other attempts by contemporary composers to take up the challenge of engaging with themes, positing the existence of an invisible spiritual realm and its interaction with human history and assessing the ‘mystical’ elements of the work in comparison to the musical mysticism of Olivier Messiaen.

MacMillan has never lost the direct connection with his homeland. While his link with his cultural identity is not refracted through nostalgia for the lost immediacy of the cultural environment, there is a nostalgia present in MacMillan’s work for what has been ‘lost’ to Scottish culture through the Reformation. MacMillan sees as part of his compositional ‘mission’ to engage in ‘acts of remembrance’, restoring what has been lost. This encompasses a wide spectrum of ideas, from the purely musical, to the connection of music to the spiritual, from a response to the local, to an engagement with the national. Two related works which embody these dialectics are the St John and St Luke Passions. The Passion narrative pervades both MacMillan’s religious works and some of his most abstract compositions. His two completed Passions are determinedly international in their reach and yet reflect a personal commitment to the meaning and significance of the religious narrative. These facets are reflected in the choices MacMillan makes in his approach to the setting: the works draw upon the established traditions of this chapter will explores some of the paradoxes that this creates.

From at least the tenth century, key parts of the Christian liturgy were performed with particularly dramatic rituals, especially on high-ranking feast days in the Church calendar. One of the most ubiquitous texts of this type was the Quem quaeritis dialogue, so-named on account of its text, which sets the Angels’ question ‘Whom do you seek?’ and the Three Marys’s answer ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. This liturgical scenario embodies many aspects that modern audiences would associate with theatrical display. Visitatio Sepulchri, MacMillan’s chamber-scale opera (1992–1993) takes the Quem quaeritis narrative and places it within a larger structure that connects it to the Crucifixion and to the Resurrection. The composer uses several medieval chants (the fourteenth-century Parisian liturgy for Easter Day, the Easter sequence Victimae Paschali laudes, and the Te Deum) as well as drawing inspiration from broader aspects of medievalism. This chapter examines the placement, function, and effect of pre-existent chant and other material in Visitatio Sepulchri. It assesses the way in which both musical borrowing and the idea of medieval drama impact upon the creation of the work, on its performance, and on its expressive potential as sacred opera.