Sir James MacMillan is being awarded an Ivors Academy fellowship, it has been announced.
The 64-year-old Scottish composer and conductor said he is “delighted and extremely proud” to join other musicians who have won the highest honour the music writers’ association bestows.
Previous winners include Sir Elton John, Kate Bush, Joan Armatrading, Genesis star Peter Gabriel, Beatles star Sir Paul McCartney, former The Police frontman Sting and American composer and conductor John Adams.
Sir James, who previously won the Ivors classical music award in 2009, told the PA news agency: “Once I looked to the list of musicians who had been similarly honoured, I was overawed with classical musicians and people in other forms of music, but it’s quite a roll call of some significant figures so I was delighted to be brought into that number.”
He created the oratorio All The Hills And Vales Along to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War in 2018.
He also composed the arrangement Who Shall Separate Us? for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in 2022.
The piece, based on a “text from St John, one of the Queen’s favourite passages from scripture”, was composed in 2011 in preparation for her death.
Sir James admits he wrote the arrangement “quickly” and it was left in a “drawer for the next 11 years and there it remained until the day she died”.
“The music was brought out and the rehearsals began, but at that stage I had not necessarily forgotten about it, but it had so faded from my mind,” he added.
“So it was an interesting experience, hearing the piece that I’d written years earlier, but also the shock of suddenly realising that the music was going to reach a live audience of four billion people worldwide, and that’s never happened to me before and it wouldn’t happen again, I’m sure.”
Sir James also spoke of the current “anxiety” about funding of the arts and music education amid cuts to local Government budgets and inflation pressures on venues.
“One should not be pessimistic, though, about these anxieties,” he said.
“There will always be challenges but, the thing is, there always have been challenges, people have been expecting the end of classical music for at least 100 years.”
He also said there is a “continual problem about a perception that it’s only for a particular strand in society – an elite strand, a privileged strand, an educated strand, educated in a particular way, with a degree of money and parental support – but we’ve got to live with those worries and criticisms”.
Sir James, who describes himself as from a working-class background, was inspired to enter the music industry by his grandfather, who was a coal miner and played the euphonium in colliery bands.
He said: “The arts are for everyone, and they should not just be for a particular strand of society, and classical music, especially, should be brought into the milieu of people who perhaps didn’t have those privileges early in life.”
Sir James, who grew up in Cumnock, created The Cumnock Tryst musical festival in Ayrshire, which he believes is “laying down a kind of exemplar of how classical music can actually work when it comes to big questions like outreach, diversity, equality”.
Coming months bring the European premiere of James MacMillan’s light-filled Fiat Lux in London and first performances of his new Robert Burns setting Composed in August in Scotland and Estonia. Read more 🔽https://t.co/XIMptRE82t pic.twitter.com/RQuRgesXYO
— James MacMillan (@jamesmacm) January 23, 2024
He said he has not yet celebrated his fellowship win, but will wait until he conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on Friday, where a private reception will be held for him afterwards.
The event also marks the first UK performance of his Fiat Lux – which was commissioned for a Californian concert last year and performed with a US conductor and orchestra.
Sir James also disagreed with the perception that “American audiences generally, are much more conservative in their taste”.
“I encountered a very curious and listening audience in California and that’s what a composer needs,” he said.
Sir James said the forthcoming concert in the UK will feel like “putting on some old clothes” because the orchestra has performed his music before.
“I expect the music to be the same, but the sound world to generate its own British colours,” he added.
