Sir James MacMillan
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 October 2017
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sir James MacMillan is a Scottish composer and conductor. He's one of Britain's most successful living classical composers, with his percussion concerto, Veni Veni Emmanuel, receiving more than 600 performances since its premiere in 1992. He draws inspiration from both the spiritual and the secular: many of his works draw on his Roman Catholic faith, while his passion for Celtic football club provided the initial spark for a piano concerto. James MacMillan grew up in Cumnock, East Ayrshire, traditionally a mining centre. His father was a carpenter, and his grandfather a coal miner. He learned the trumpet and played in brass bands, whilst realising at a very young age that he wanted to make music his life. When he first picked up a recorder at school, and realised that he could change the pitch by putting different fingers over the holes, he says a light went on and he knew that he wanted to write music as well as play it.
Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:04.0 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
| 0:05.6 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, |
| 0:10.8 | the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
| 0:16.8 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
| 0:23.2 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
| 0:30.0 | Music |
| 0:50.0 | My cast away this week is the composer and conductor Sir James McMillan, an artist of great |
| 0:56.0 | renowned, his works are performed worldwide and reflect his abiding belief in the powerful |
| 1:01.4 | connection between music and the sacred. Whilst for many of us picking up the recorder as a child |
| 1:06.5 | as confirmation of our musical limitations for him, it was a moment of epiphany. He declared to |
| 1:12.0 | his parents there and then that he would become a composer and it didn't take him long to start. |
| 1:17.5 | By his mid-teens, he was busy working on his own arrangements. We have, in large parts, |
| 1:22.8 | his grandfather to thank. A coal miner who played euphonium in the colory band, he imbued his |
| 1:28.5 | grandson with an early and significant love of music. And as part of what my cast away describes |
| 1:34.5 | as the Irish working-class diaspora, the music at mass played a critical part too. He says, |
| 1:41.1 | I do believe that music is the most spiritual of the arts. It forges this connection with the hidden |
| 1:47.2 | crevices between the relationship of the divine and the human. It gets into those cracks and seems |
| 1:53.3 | to speak directly to our dark secret selves. We don't know exactly what it's saying but we know |
| 2:00.1 | it's relating something about our humanity. So Sir James McMillan, welcome. Thank you. |
| 2:05.5 | This summer I saw the European premiere at the BBC Proms of European Requiem. I wonder what |
| 2:12.0 | sort of emotions do you go through as a composer just before a performance like that? |
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