Coro Allegro interviewed James MacMillan in the Fall of 2002, when Coro Allegro first performed Cantos Sagrados.

Coro Allegro: The members of Coro Allegro are very excited to be performing Cantos.

James MacMillan: Oh yes, yes, that’s marvelous.

CA: Have you been to Boston?

JM: No, I’ve been to the airport. I hope to see Boston soon; perhaps next year I’ll be coming to visit.

CA: What prompted to you to compose Cantos Sagrados back in 1990?

JM: Just before the composition of Cantos Sagrados, I had written another work which had been inspired by the writings of the mothers of the disappeared from Argentina. And the work was a music theatre piece involving actors as well as singers, Busqueda. And it’s an issue and an area that I’m interested in anyway. I was very drawn to the potential for dealing with sacred and secular subject matter simultaneously. And I suppose Cantos Sagrados was a follow-on from that. It allowed me to revisit the same territory but in a different kind of piece. A more conventional setting with the choir and organ. I’ve also made an orchestral arrangement of Cantos as well.

CA: You can almost imagine a group of actors performing Cantos as it is sung, with dramatic, theatrical lighting effects. Were you thinking in those terms when you wrote it?

JM: Perhaps the experience of Busqueda was still fresh in my mind which is a work which can be fully staged in a fully theatrical context. I’ve seen it staged in theatres and opera houses as well as performed simply as a concert piece. Ariel Dorfman (who wrote the poem that the first and third movements of Cantos are largely based on) is a man of the theatre and has written Death and the Maiden for the theatre, which is a work that explores similar territory. I suppose the theatrical instinct is there anyway; it’s something I have explored in other works of mine.

CA: How is it that you combine religious text with the work of a poet (Dorfman) who is, I’m told, agnostic. What did Dorfman think about this?

JM: I don’t know. But indirectly [Dorfman] has approached me to do other things, so I hear that he is very pleased with the setting of Cantos Sagrados. And whether he’s an agnostic or not, I don’t think that matters in the sense that the background/context to the political aspect is a religious culture. And whether you accept it or not it’s nevertheless there. It’s part of the backdrop. And certainly in the setting of Busqueda and in the ‘mothers of the disappeared’ poetry, their work is absolutely resonant of religious iconography and symbolism. It was a very interesting exercise for me to explore those connections and to draw out the strange but fascinating parallels between the timeless and the contemporary, the religious and the secular.

And I’m interested you used the word agnostic rather than atheist because I think that all art in some way reflects the sacred and many artists and especially musicians will talk about the impact of music in their lives as a kind of sacred or almost spiritual force. I think music especially does that. People have said that music is the most spiritual of the arts. And in combination with poetry it is especially so. And regardless of one’s own religious or even political worldview, that’s a feeling that resonates through the world of people who do love music but they know that there is something in music which resonates with a sense of otherness in the world. So my feeling is that people who love music, people who are involved in music, are quite open to spirituality without necessarily accepting one religious worldview or another.

CA: How did you happen to combine the work of two distinct poets—Ariel Dorfman and Anna Maria Mendoza—in composing Cantos?

JM: The Ariel Dorfman poems are very much of our time. They represent and reflect on events that are very fresh in living memory, and in a sense could happen any day in many parts of the world. But the second poem by Mendoza, in a sense, steps back a bit into a kind of archetype that the questions are being asked between religion and politics, between the secular and the sacred--and in the context of Dorfman’s poems—in a sense have always been asked and will be always be asked between the instinct for divine love and the political structures in which we find ourselves, and indeed the political structures that we encounter religion in. There’s always this tension, if you like, between a teaching of love and a political, almost temporal application of the teaching of love. The churches, I suppose, always grapple with that through the ages. More so now than ever. And they reflect on it more humbly and more probingly and with more care now than ever they did.

So I suppose that interested me that here was a poem (Mendoza’s) that looked at the timeless questions of politics and religion but looked back into history but rather than just from the here and now.

CA: How did you relate current political unrest in Latin America to the conquest of and brutality toward the Indians 500 years ago?

JM: I think there is linked between the two centuries and the two experiences a common encounter with the abuse of political power. And the experience of the landless, the experience of the powerless in confrontation with political power. And in each case the questions that are asked by the powerless are indeed political but they look more deeply than that. They ask profound religious questions about structures of evil and society and structures of evil even amongst religious men and women. I think there’s a link there which transcends the centuries.

CA: How would hope that audiences would feel after hearing Cantos?

JM: Well, although it is politically motivated piece, or at least there is in the inspiration for the piece a reflection in politics, it’s not in any way a polemical piece. I think art fails when it attempts to be polemical, when it attempts to ally itself with a cause. However, the arts have a proven track record of being able to reflect the concerns and experiences of our fellow human beings throughout history. That’s what makes the arts so potent. And that’s what makes them so powerful. And that’s why they speak powerfully to people because they do in many different ways reflect the everyday experiences, the joys as well as the tragedies of our fellow man. In that sense the arts are a great human reflections on everyday realities as well as deep spiritual realities. And therefore I don’t think artists and I especially don’t think musicians and composers should shrink from these questions and from these subjects. I think they’re available potent subjects and material for a composer just as much as they for a poet or a playwright or a filmmaker.

I hope Cantos Sagrados touches a shared humanity in people regardless of political background. I think in that sense the arts transcend political and theological barriers, cultural barriers. And if something in art and music—even though it comes from a specific worldview or a specific experience of life—if it nevertheless touches someone and provokes a common shared sense of humanity and a common sense of grace, then I think an artistic success has been made as well as a spiritual and even ethical success. So beyond the specifics of politics if it touches something deep and common between artist and listener, then that would be important to me.

CA: What musical influences were brought to bear in composing Cantos?

JM: There have been a number of influences over the years, but I suppose in writing Cantos or any other choral piece there is a very specific experience of having sung a lot of choral music myself as a younger man. My great love I think was the music of Bach and the music of Renaissance composers such as Palestrina and Victoria and others, and British composers such as Burt and Gibbons. And I suppose that experience lies deep with any composer of vocal music. And I think it’s especially there in the second movement, that sense of tradition. And possibly in the third movement. In the first movement though, probably something more recent, something from the world of theatre, opera, or even contemporary music theatre. Maybe even Broadway, I’m not sure.

I have a very eclectic sweep in my tastes, and certainly as a younger composer I was quite at ease with the idea of throwing the net wide.

CA: And I’ve read that years ago you performed pop music.

JM: As a teenager really I was involved in a pop/rock band and then in my 20s I was involved in Scottish traditional music. And the absorption of both musical experiences was very useful. I think they’ve both gone underground as it were, under the skin, and sometimes bubble up unexpectedly.

CA: It would seem that for you—more than many of your peers who are composers—more of your work is grounded in politics. If true, where does that come from?

JM: Well certainly the works that we’re talking about from 10-14 years ago were much more directly political. Cantos is a very political piece and so is Busqueda. There are a number of other pieces from that time, including The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, which is about the witch burning times in Scotland. Which was definitely a political piece but which was also what I call a work of retrospective compassion. An attempt to give requiem to this archetypal repressed figure in Scottish history. A requiem that was denied to her in the last days of her life. Therefore again this strange admixture of the religious and the political which has continually fascinated me. I suppose in more recent years I wonder just how specifically political I can be now. Not that I’m scared of doing it but I just wonder if it can give me the best artistic potential. Music, as you’re aware, at the fundamental level is the most abstract of the arts. And amongst musicians in especially amongst composers there is an understandable pride that this thing that we write called music at the fundamental level doesn’t need to make reference to anything else. In a sense it is complete abstractly but also emotionally and technically in itself. And simultaneously with that of course there is this other belief that music is the most spiritual of the arts. So an art form that is abstract and spiritual simultaneously is a very powerful force. And in a sense it transcends mere politics to put that powerful force into action. And the transformation of people’s thoughts and feelings and lives and perspectives and relationships is obviously a spiritual thing but perhaps it is a political thing as well that it can effect change in the individual. And individuals are members of society so perhaps there are little buds of something planted in the individual which does in turn impact on the wider communal experience. So without being specifically political all the time, a knowledge of the spiritual qualities of music is paradoxically also political.

CA: Are you prompted to respond the current political situation—i.e. confrontation with Iraq—in any way as a composer?

JM: I think so. Again, it’s not a case of being specific in the application of that inspiration but I certainly can’t help but be affected by the experience of people ‘round about me and people in the world at this time. And my belief is that the artist, whether he wants to or not, does reflect the deeper concerns and experiences of his fellows in the world. And therefore the turmoil that we’re in now, I feel cannot but impact in some way on someone like myself. Not that it needs to be spelled out specifically, but I think I can see an ongoing concern with these things in the music that I’m writing just now.