The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people: the Guardian arts desk, which decided he’d lost his mojo as soon as he turned his back on the left; Kirsty Wark, whose squawking is mimicked in MacMillan’s Scotch Bestiary; the SNP, which he detests; and, most of all, the Nats’ religious front organisation, the Scottish Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
OK, enough point-scoring. MacMillan has been honoured because he turns out glorious music. He’s also rare among living composers in having worked out an answer to the question raised when John Cage pushed sound to the point where nothing short of the soloist defecating on stage could shock audiences: ‘Where do we go from here?’
Lots of composers struggle with this. Minimalism was fun while it lasted, but when its creators tried to go mainstream they ran into trouble. Philip Glass’s Heroes Symphony is just Hollywood gloop with added chugging.
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