NEWSWEEK: What problems does new classical music face at the moment?
MACMILLAN: It’s not at the center of our culture. The ubiquity of pop culture of various types has pushed all kinds of reflective, serious art to the periphery.
It needs better marketing?
It’s regarded as remote and old-fashioned. People with good will and a bit of vision need to build classical music back into the fiber of our culture. There is a great need for people to present the joy of an act of listening, which requires a great deal of attention.
Are audiences becoming more receptive to modern classical music?
People are getting disillusioned with the transitory nature of contemporary popular culture. They’re hungry for a deeper engagement with something that increases their knowledge of human life and history. That hunger will grow to the extent that some forms on the periphery right now will be seen as timely, substantive and life-enhancing. In the meantime people like myself must never try to dumb down what we do. Classical music is one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization. The complexity is one of its best things and it is what people will look for in time.
Shouldn’t classical composers pay more mind to their audience, and what they want?
No. I think that’s a kind of cop-out, to be honest. The be-all and end-all is not to play to the gallery or make life easier. In days gone by composers challenged audiences with things that had not been done before. Beethoven and Wagner were controversial figures, rejected by some, appreciated by others.
Who do you have in mind when you write music?
I write for an ideal listener. Someone who is thirsty, curious, as hungry for musical engagement as I am, who comes to it with their mind and heart open, all antennae bristling.
Tell me about your new symphony.
It was inspired by a book called “Silence” by a Japanese writer, Shusaku Endo. The big philosophical question that hovers in his book is: why has God fallen silent? One of his characters asks, why does God stand impassively by while terrible things happen to his people–holocaust, murder, torture? If there is any potency to faith it begins in that abyss. [And] as composers we know that our music begins in silence, in the apparent nothingness from which grows this abundance. Silence is worked into the piece so that statements linger and resonate in the nothingness.
