Sir James MacMillan

Speaker 40:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:04

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book, and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:17

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Presenter0:50

My castaway this week is the composer and conductor, Sir James MacMillan, an artist of great renown. His works are performed world wide, and reflect his abiding belief in the powerful connection between music and the sacred. Whilst for many of us picking up the recorder as a child is confirmation of our musical limitations, for him

Presenter1:09

It was a moment of epiphany. He declared to his parents there and then that he would become a composer, and it didn't take him long to start. By his mid teens he was busy working on his own arrangements. We have, in large part, his grandfather to thank. A coal miner who played euphonium in the colliery band, he imbued his grandson with an early and significant love of music.

Presenter1:32

And as part of what my Castaway describes as the Irish working-class diaspora, the music at Mass played a critical part, too. He says.

Presenter1:41

I do believe that music is the most spiritual of the arts. It forges this connection with the hidden crevices between the relationship of the divine and the human.

Presenter1:51

It gets into those cracks and seems to speak directly to our dark secret selves. We don't know exactly what it's saying, but we know it's relating something about our humanity. So Sir James Macmillan, welcome. This summer saw the European Premier at the BBC proms of your European Requiem.

Speaker 42:05

Thank you.

Presenter2:10

I wonder what sort of emotions do you go through as a composer just before a performance like that?

Sir James MacMillan2:17

It's always a great thrill seeing and hearing a work come to fruition like that in a public performance, perhaps something that has just lain, I suppose, silent in one's mind as a composer.

Presenter2:28

It's a unique position, isn't it, as an orchestral composer, then, of course, because if you compose solely for, say, piano or violin, then you yourself would be able to create what you have just composed. But for an orchestral composer it is only that moment when a full orchestra is there.

Presenter2:43

A relatively rare moment, a special moment, when actually it truly comes to fruition.

Sir James MacMillan2:49

That's right, and I suppose uh every composer has to train his inner ear to imagine those sounds, to imagine the orchestra that isn't there in the room with you, or the choir that will eventually sing your music. And um that's why, you know, having a piano in your room to check chords and so on is is helpful only to an extent, but it gives a very wrong impression. If you're writing an orchestral piece or a choral piece, the last thing you want in your mind is the sound of a piano, or indeed nowadays with the young ones, uh th these computer generated sounds. So you have to work at that. It's like a a little muscle in your brain, in in your soul somewhere, that hears things, it imagines sounds and and you make it work.

Presenter3:28

Tell me about your first piece of music, then, Sir James MacWillam. What are we going to hear this morning?

Sir James MacMillan3:32

This is a piece of Gregorian chant. I love Gregorian chant. I think it's the most perfect kind of music. Composers have a love affair with Gregorian chant, and always have through the centuries. They've used it in their own music, even up until the present day. I use it. Even atheist composer friends of mine, like Sir Peter Maxwell Davis, always had a Liber Uso Alis in his desk looking at ancient chants. And this is one of the most beautiful Gregorian chants. It's a hymn Salve Festa Dies. It's one of the great Easter hymns for Easter Sunday morning.

Speaker 44:22

Some fares are the serve.

Speaker 44:35

For there was him forever moved in on heaven.

Sir James MacMillan4:40

Did they have some

Speaker 44:46

Nankatium Thani Mosiji Athadi Shu.

Speaker 44:55

Only had one another.

Presenter5:05

Salve Festendia, sung by the Benedictine monks of San Domingo Silas Abbey. So tell me, Sir James Macmillan, you are um a prolific composer so far in your career. Uh do you have set times to compose? Are you very disciplined in your thinking and approach?

Sir James MacMillan5:21

I'm not disciplined in the sense I get up early in the morning or work through the night. I it takes me a little while after a few coffees to get going in the morning and my best time is the morning and early afternoon. I kind of slump a bit after that.

Presenter5:33

And once you have written that final double bar, you have finished the piece, what's the sensation?

Sir James MacMillan5:40

It's like being in a dream for weeks, months, and it really is like waking up and and the dream dissipates, the dream disappears from your mind, literally, and it's on to the next dream, if you like. As a composer who has to conduct a lot of my own music, I have to relearn these scores from scratch as if I'm another person. It's like seeing the music from a performer's point of view and I literally forget it. There's a feeling of disintegration, evaporation of the music overnight as soon as that double bar goes on.

Presenter6:12

And when you go back and you re-find the thing that was initially your creation.

Presenter6:17

Are you surprised by what you've created? Do you think, Gosh, imagine that I did that?

Sir James MacMillan6:23

In a sense, yes. Of course you recognise the themes and the colours and the contours and so on. But there's something wonderful I think that speaks for every composer when you hear a work coming into being. The analogy I like to use is of an old black and white negative print. That's the kind of image that you have of the music in your mind and then when you hear it at first rehearsal it takes on its full technicolour scope.

Presenter6:46

Is it true that when you've finished a large piece you uh y you celebrate with a goodweed ram?

Sir James MacMillan6:51

Yeah.

Sir James MacMillan6:53

Yes, and n and not just when I uh finish the piece.

Presenter6:57

Well, I'm glad to hear that. Tell me about your next piece of music, Ben. What are we going to hear?

Sir James MacMillan7:02

Well, I grew up in Ayrshire. As you said earlier, my grandfather was a coal miner who loved music. He introduced me to music. He was a euphonium player. He worked all those years under the ground, but his dream was to be involved in music. So when I came along, he was delighted and he took me to my first band practices. He got me my first cornet. The brass band world, the silver band world was a big thing in Ayrshire. It usually is in Colliery places, north of England, West Lothian, and so on. So that whole Colliery brass band world was my grandfather's culture and it became mine as well. And I grew to love the brass band and I still do. And this is a hymn, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. It was sung at our wedding, so I've got a couple of different reasons for loving this music.

Presenter8:42

Repton, uh, known more commonly as the hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind played there by the Kettering Citadel Band of the Salvation Army.

Presenter8:51

So, Sir James Macmillan, you were describing your grandfather there played the euphonium in the Colliery Band. You were born in Cumnock, in Eyrshirnham, a mining area of Scotland. You were the eldest of three children and born in nineteen fifty nine. Tell me a bit more about your grandfather as a person, then.

Sir James MacMillan9:08

He lived for music. He was always listening to music, talking about music. If there were films about music on the television, he would always tell me to watch it. He was proof to me that in communities like those in South Ayrshire, East Ayrshire, and working class communities where men were minors, the love of music is there nevertheless. Some people don't imagine that a love of serious music of various kinds can exist amongst ordinary people, but my grandfather and his friends and colleagues are proof that that is certainly the case and their inspiration worked on me.

Presenter9:40

And what music were you hearing at home? What were your mum and dad playing?

Sir James MacMillan9:43

My mum loved classical music and it was my mum who uh talked to me uh initially about composers she loved and got me my first uh records and books and scores and things. But I do remember very early memories of her playing some chopin in the piano, which was wonderful. My dad plays the the piano by ear, but some of my earliest memories are of my dad waking me up on a Saturday morning playing old hymns and folk songs and so on.

Presenter10:09

He was a carpenter.

Sir James MacMillan10:10

Yes, made everything for us from tables, chairs, but toys as well, what we call little bogies. Oh, yes, with wheels on either end, with wheels, and all my friends love playing in my dad's creations.

Presenter10:17

Oh yes, with wheels on either end, yeah.

Presenter10:23

Am I right enough that one of the first instruments then that you picked up was a recorder?

Sir James MacMillan10:27

Yes, little plastic recorders were brought into school as they were, and maybe still are in many schools up and down the country. It's not a significant event for many people, but it certainly was for me. A little light went on, and I remember as I started getting my fingers round the the notes of the instrument, I began to realize that I could make my own melodies, make my own tunes. I knew I wanted to create for it. I didn't know what it would mean in later years to be a composer, but the idea of being a composer and playing an instrument was a simultaneous start for me.

Presenter10:57

That's

Sir James MacMillan10:57

Uh

Presenter10:58

More music, Sir James MacMillan, tell me about this next one.

Sir James MacMillan11:01

The great contrapuntal figures from the past, whether it be Palestrina or Bird or Lassis, have always given great lessons to composers throughout the ages. Not in the sense that we want to imitate them, but that we want to handle complexity like they did. And there's nothing more complex than this NYX piece. It's a wonderful motet, known by many people as a work of genius, Spem in Allium by Thomas Talis. Most people who sing in choirs sing in four-part choirs, that's soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. But this piece is written in forty parts, and that is the work's genius.

Presenter12:34

Spermanalium by Thomas Tallis, sung there by The Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers. Tell me, Sir James MacWillen, what sort of a teenager were you?

Sir James MacMillan12:44

I think I was mild mannered and uh didn't get involved in trouble very much. But I was interested in radical ideas at the time, uh some of which I'd completely disown now. I've lost all my youthful certainties. But I had long hair and uh the only time in my life when I I listened to pop music, rock music w was then

Presenter13:03

In a band?

Sir James MacMillan13:04

Yes, we formed a little a pop band that played uh covers of The Rolling Stones and Cream and that sort of thing.

Presenter13:10

What did you do?

Sir James MacMillan13:11

I was the keyboard player.

Presenter13:13

You joined the Young Communist League.

Sir James MacMillan13:15

Mm.

Presenter13:15

So that was about ideas.

Sir James MacMillan13:17

I suppose so, yes, and uh

Presenter13:19

And would you go and debate? Yes.

Sir James MacMillan13:20

Yes, yes. And I suppose I learned a lot. My family were all very quite political, although it was the Labour Party they were involved with, and as coming from a Catholic family, it wasn't regarded as a sensible thing to do. I got a lot of opposition from my beloved grandfather and who had fought against the Communists in the forties and fifties in National Union of Mine Workers and so on. But I I was bullshit at the time, I I didn't care.

Presenter13:44

And this idea of being part of the great Irish Catholic diaspora in the west of Scotland, how important was your Catholicism? And as a teenager, was it important to you?

Sir James MacMillan13:55

I suppose at this time I was expected to say no, it wasn't, and I gave it up, but I didn't. I got more and more interested in it. It wasn't to say that I was over pious. I used to debate with these Stalinists that I was now mixing with about the rights and wrongs of religion. I remember going to a young Communist League conference in Edinburgh when I was about 16 and leaving the Sunday morning session to go to Mass. That didn't go down very well. So I was always interested in the parallels between the secular and the sacred, the political and the religious, and that's not gone. Sir James Macmillan, tell me about your next choice. As a teenage boy, I used to go and see the bands of the time. What I liked about pop music at that time, the rock music of the time, was not the lyrics. I never actually listened to the lyrics. Suppose being musical, the words just went over my head. It was the sound of this electronic noise. It was truly rooted in the earth. That's where electricity comes from. And there's a rootedness and an excitement about rock music. And I remember going to see bands like Hawkwind at that age and being very, very excited, blown away by the noise, deafened by the noise. To be honest, I don't really know if I liked it. I just liked the sound of it, as it were, and the sheer kind of visceral energy of it. So this reminds me of my teenage years. This is Hawkwind and Silver Machine.

Presenter15:48

That was Hawkwind and Silver Machine, chosen, Sir James Macmillan, as a reminder of your teenage self and how much you enjoyed going to all of those gigs. I'm sure you're asked often, given the position you're in.

Presenter16:01

By young musicians, how do you begin to learn composition? Where does one start? What do you tell those eager young people?

Sir James MacMillan16:09

It's a very good question, and there are many composers, even composing teachers, who say that composition can't be taught and that you just have to cajole them through the difficult stages and make them believe in themselves. I think you're either a composer or you're not. Eventually, you discover what the situation is. But there are ways you can train these muscles that I mentioned earlier, the hearing muscles. One can study the repertoire, one can study the great contrapuntal figures of the past. I think that's a vital lesson. My greatest teachers were the likes of Thomas Talis and Palestrina and J.S. Bach.

Presenter16:45

Do you have to be inspired to sit down to compose?

Sir James MacMillan16:49

I think so, yes. I mean, I've never and could never be in a position of having to write music I didn't want to write. I I'd find it physically p impossible to do that.

Presenter16:58

What's been your most unusual font of inspiration where you've thought, goodness me, that's taken me there?

Sir James MacMillan17:05

I suppose the most unusual pieces that I've written are the works inspired by Glasgow Celtic Football Club. There's a piece of mine called The Berserking, which was inspired by a Celtic partisan Belgrade European qualifier in 1989, and it's all about wasted energy. I mean, we're sitting here today, Celtic have just been thrashed five-nil by Paris Saint-Germain the night before. I might go and write a dirge about that sometime. But certainly the Berserking is it's probably, I'm proud to say, the only piano concerto in the history of music that is inspired by the away goals rule in football.

Presenter17:40

And you wrote a piece for a player, a Celtic player?

Sir James MacMillan17:43

Yes, I dedicated a work to Neil Lennon, who was their player and manager for many years, quite a controversial figure in Scotland, but a man I liked very much. But you know, composers through the twentieth century have been fascinated by football, and even it's not just me that have written works. There's a a piece by Mark Antony Turnage, a colleague of mine, called Momentum, which is based on the chants of the Arsenal fans. Shostakovich was a Leningrad Zenith supporter, and some of his happiest times were watching his team at home in Leningrad.

Presenter18:15

Let's have some more music, Sir James MacMillan. Tell me about the next one. This is going to be your uh fifth of the morning.

Sir James MacMillan18:21

Well, I remember sitting with my grandfather watching the Benny Goodman story on television. It's a wonderful old film about the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman. And you know, I was interested in all kinds of music at that age, and so was my grandfather. But then, when I heard that and saw in the film that he was also a classical player and could switch from the jazz world to the classics, it showed me just how fluid musical styles can be and how open musicians should be, I think, to various styles. So, one of the very first records that my mum and dad bought me was Benny Goodman's recording of the Mozart clarinet concerto and quintet on either side of the record. And this is the second movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet, the Larghetto.

Presenter20:13

The Largetto from Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, performed there by Benny Goodman, and the Boston Symphony String Quartet. Um you originally wrote the work Veni Veni Emmanuel for the uh renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.

Presenter20:27

How many times now has it been performed?

Sir James MacMillan20:29

I think it's reached over six hundred now, and Evelyn gave many of the initial well, probably the first couple of hundred actually, but it's been taken up by others, including uh another Scottish percussionist, Colin Currie, who's done it a couple of hundred times. What is it about Scots and hitting things? I don't know.

Presenter20:48

We're back to football now, aren't we? I mean, what do you think the success of the piece is? You surely must. I mean, over six hundred times, that's a lot of performances.

Sir James MacMillan20:56

The thing is, there are no nineteenth century concertas for percussion, so there's no repertoire there. So if a percussionist comes to the fore and wants to be a soloist, he or she has to have music written for them, or play the music of the last twenty or thirty years. It's only in that time that music for percussion solos has come to the fore.

Presenter21:14

What was your breakthrough moment? Can you define it to one point in your career where suddenly you became the person nobody really knew, apart from the people who you worked with, to somebody who was known?

Sir James MacMillan21:27

I think it was when The Confession Invisible Gaudi was commissioned by the proms, not just broadcast on Radio 3, but it got a television broadcast. I think it was in BBC One, in fact, way back in 1990. And I was aware then that suddenly there were lots of people who were aware of it, who were hearing my music for the first time, making comment about my music. How did you know that?

Presenter21:49

How d how did you know that?

Sir James MacMillan21:50

Well, the the day after uh the piece was broadcast on the BBC and the television, I went to a Celtic Aberdeen game at Parkhead and was tapped on the shoulder by people who had seen it and they said to me, Was that your premiere that was on the T V last night? and I realized something had changed then.

Presenter22:06

And did they tell you what they thought of it?

Sir James MacMillan22:08

I think they liked it.

Presenter22:10

Tell me about the next piece of music then, Sir James Macmillan. What would you like to hear now?

Sir James MacMillan22:14

This is one of the great and most important operas of the 19th century, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, that had such a huge impact, not just in the generations of composers who came after Wagner, but on culture itself. And I think, you know, my obsession about music is that it is a kind of search for the sacred. And I think Wagner, although he was a very unconventional religious thinker, also thought that. And in his myths put on the stage, we see all these human beings like Tristan, like Isolda, who are being impacted upon by supernatural powers. And this is happening here in this extract from Act 1. People talk about Wagner's Parsifal as his Eucharistic opera, but it's actually a Eucharistic scene unfolding here. Tristan and Isolde, who hate each other, they're from different tribes, fall in love with each other through the intervention of a love drink. They took drink from the chalice and they lose themselves to love.

Presenter24:10

Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, with Fritz Uhl as Tristan and Birgik Nielsson as Isolda, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted there by Sir George Schulte. Sir James MacMillan, I said in the introduction when I was quoting you that this connection was forged with what you call it's a great phrase the hidden crevices between the relationship of the divine and the human.

Presenter24:33

Goodness me, you're setting yourself a task as a composer to try to get there.

Sir James MacMillan24:38

Well, if you listen to people who love music, especially a discursive music which demands a kind of obedience of listening, where you have to put time aside and listen, whether they're conventionally religious or not, they will use this term over and over again, that music is the most spiritual of the arts. And what they mean by that is perhaps very different. But they realise that there is a possibility of being changed and transformed through this great interaction by allowing it into one's ears, into one's soul. Change takes place and it affects our whole way of looking at the world, our relationships, our ideas, our perceptions. It's a very powerful force.

Presenter25:14

Would it be your contention then, there are plenty people, I'm sure you've spoken to many of them, who say, you know, I'm not religious, but.

Sir James MacMillan25:21

Yeah.

Presenter25:21

When when I hear a choir doing one of these great religious pieces of music, or when I myself stand in a church and end up singing along, something's changed after it. Is your contention there that that is the divine working?

Sir James MacMillan25:36

I think so. Yes. The the the Divine for me is is a reality and people find their different routes to it. Music, and especially a a discursive music like Western classic music, allows us to open a window onto this and we can choose to look in or not.

Presenter25:53

Tell me then about your next piece of music. This is your seventh choice, Sir James Macmillan.

Sir James MacMillan25:57

I love folk music. I used to play in a folk band when I was younger, and this is a beautiful Scottish lullaby, Dream Angus. It was my granddaughter's favourite song, or one of them, and this was my granddaughter's favourite singer, Jackie Oates. My little granddaughter died last year, and every time I hear Jackie's voice, I'm reminded of her.

Speaker 426:20

Do not hush your weeping.

Speaker 426:26

All the bats asleeping.

Speaker 426:32

Birdies are nestling, nestling together Dream unguses hurtling o'er the heather

Speaker 426:46

Dreams to sell Find dreams to sell

Presenter26:52

That was Dream Angus performed by Jackie Oates, and it was chosen by your Sir James Macmillan for your young granddaughter who died last year. I I wonder when a family an entire family

Presenter27:02

suffers a seismic

Presenter27:05

Tragedy like that. Very often if people have faith, it is the time at which their faith can can be tested.

Presenter27:12

With questions like

Presenter27:14

Why have we been put through this? Why has our granddaughter been put through this? How did your faith reply at the time, being a person so clearly a very strong faith?

Sir James MacMillan27:22

I think it kicked in in the right way for us, but you know my daughter especially has had some terrible times as you'd expect and I think you one's faith is challenged by something like this. On the other hand, it's the whole structure of faith, the whole structure of the church in our case that allowed us to have comfort. We were able to bury her according to the beautiful rites of the Requim Mass. Again music had its role in that. Gregorian chant, polyphony. Some of John Taverner's music was sung as well as my own at that. And so music, faith, family, it becomes a kind of concoction that one lives on a daily basis. I have no idea what I'm going to be like about this. It's something you never get over. But sometimes you cope and you have days where life seems pretty straightforward and normal, and other times it kind of hits you rather unexpectedly.

Presenter28:33

And as a creator, then, to your composition, have have you been able to create since?

Sir James MacMillan28:37

I think so. Just aware of in the silence that there's something there. And within weeks of burying Sarah, I was back at the desk and in silence, absorbed in Sarah's memories, thoughts of Sarah. It can't help but to use that phrase again, get into the crevices of the soul. It's there in the music, it's there in ways that one can't fathom, but it'll be a matter of time before one can look back and look at the music of 2016, 2017 that I've written and say, well, that would have been that way, or it would have been different if this had not happened.

Presenter29:22

Do you have pause to look back at the the canon of your work so far, or is that too much an intimidating thing to do?

Presenter29:29

Yeah.

Sir James MacMillan29:30

Well, I hear a lot of my early music. In fact, some of my the music I wrote when I was seventeen is now published. And in listening to this music, it's a bit like coming across old letters that you wrote when you were a teenager and seeing, of course, that you're still the same person, but that things have changed and there's a realization rather wistfully perhaps that you're getting older, getting much older, but that something of the essence of who you are was there and still there, still working away later in life.

Presenter30:01

And when people listen to something that you composed when you were seventeen years old, is it important to you that they understand that you did compose it then, or are you happy for them just to listen to it for the sake of listening?

Sir James MacMillan30:12

I I wouldn't like to make any excuses uh for music that I wrote then. I wouldn't have allowed my publishers to take up take them over and put them out there. So if people think it's a new piece, that's fine. I realised though looking back that there was a a a vital thirst to write music from a very early age. I have little pieces of mine from uh you know age nine and ten, little piano pieces in A minor that I wouldn't let out, but when I find these I realised that it had started then it was something I really wanted to do.

Presenter30:18

Yeah.

Presenter30:42

Composition, of course, is a solitary pursuit, and on this island that you're about to be cast away to, you you'll you'll be all on your own. Probably quite good at that, you coper, you practical?

Sir James MacMillan30:51

In a sense, I wouldn't say I was practical, but emotionally and spiritually I can cope with uh loneliness. Being a composer is a very solitary existence. It's been great having a a lifelong companion, of course, but when one goes into uh the realm of composition one is in a lonely place and it's a necessary solitude.

Presenter31:10

I have no doubt that your faith will sustain you somewhat, but of course you're going to have to eat. You're going to have to survive. Are you a practical person in that way? Could you catch a fish? Could you kill an animal?

Sir James MacMillan31:19

I've never done either, but there's always a first time.

Presenter31:22

It'll need to be. Tell me about your eighth piece of music then.

Sir James MacMillan31:22

Thank you.

Sir James MacMillan31:26

I have a great admiration for my colleague composers, living and dead, and I wouldn't go to the Desert Island without some music by a living composer. And one of the great composers, I think, of our age is Gerald Barry, an Irishman who's very unlike me. His music's nothing like mine, but I have a huge admiration for him. He's able to bring a sense of the absurd and the comical to his operas, especially, which I could never do. And I've conducted his music abroad, and he's a composer that you either get or you don't. You love him, his music, as I do, or in some cases you hate him. And I remember once having a near riot in my hand rehearsing his music with a French orchestra who didn't get what he was coming from. But I stuck with this, and I think this is music of real genius. This is from his opera, The Importance of Being Earnest. You can hear in his music he sometimes references well-known melodies or well-known words. Auld Lang Sein, for example, is all there right through this opera. But there's also one finds the words of Beethoven's Ninth, or at least the text of the Schiller poem. And in this case, we hear Freuder Schooner Goethe Funken, but in a way that we've never heard before.

Speaker 332:41

Yeah Friday Shanakata Funkin Doctor House and Lisa Um Save a Tread and Fire Tunkin Himister and Hallistung, Dineth Haba Binden Vida Vastimodis Franketite, Alla Mens and Veden Brida Vodanza Frigglevite Dina Taba Bin and Vina Vosti Modestite All the Mention Bed and Breeder Board and Satan Freak and Vite All the Mention Bed and Bridge and Bonnets at the Figervite

Presenter32:53

Play the top of it, you get it.

Speaker 433:17

Well, I can see this.

Speaker 333:20

Would this leave a contest by Missy County's and Bunt, would they see a cottage and violence in how teas and wood?

Presenter33:43

Freuder Schoengotten Funken, Joy, Beautiful, Spark of the Gods, from Gerald Barry's opera, The Importance of Being Earnest, with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted there by Thomas Addis. It is time then for me to give you then, Sir James, the books. I'm going to send you away with three books. I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along with them. What's yours going to be?

Sir James MacMillan34:04

My choice is the selected poems of Michael Simmonds Roberts. My literature of choice is poetry. I suppose composers have this love affair with poetry because we set it a lot. And I have this lifelong or so it seems connection with Michael Simmons Roberts, an English poet who writes beautiful, numinous, probing poetry, secular poetry, but again poetry which opens up these windows and doors into something that sees ourselves as something more than the sum of our parts. And I've set his work in oratorio and in song and in opera and his selected poems from the various collections would be a great thing for me to have to reflect on life, to reflect on my loneliness, to reflect on the past and the future, to reflect on God.

Presenter34:55

It's yours. You're allowed a luxury, too. What will that be?

Sir James MacMillan34:59

My luxury would be the old upright piano that I have in my study. My students, when I had some postgraduate students who'd come to the house, used to call it the magic piano. And I think I know what they mean. It's not that it sounds particularly great when I or anyone else plays it, but there's something about the touch of the instrument that makes one feel as if the music is working. And I've had the same experience from the composers who've come and played their music to me. There's something about the touch that seems to allow the music to speak more clearly in a very strange, mystical way. And I'd like to take that as my luxury item to the island.

Presenter35:39

That very piano will be yours then. And finally, and perhaps this is almost impossibly difficult for somebody who is a composer, I am going to force you to pick just one of the eight, which

Sir James MacMillan35:50

Which one will it be? I'd go for the very first one. That's Salve Festa Diaz, the Plain Song. Plain Song has this special place in the mind of the Western composer and always has.

Presenter36:02

It's yours. Sir James Macmillan, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Sir James MacMillan36:07

Thank you.

Presenter36:30

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find more interviews with comedians, artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars and more at bbc.co.uk slash desertisland discs.

Speaker 436:55

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