Starting June 15: "Sir James MacMillan’s Masterpiece ‘Fiat Lux’ Finally Takes The Stage In California"—and More About Sir James in the US
ReligionUnplugged posted an excerpt from my longer article today. The full article is here.
My article, Sir James MacMillan’s Masterpiece ‘Fiat Lux’ Finally Takes The Stage In California, about the upcoming premiere performances of Fiat Lux, a collaboration between Sir James MacMillan and Dana Gioia, is up at ReligionUnplugged today. The first performance is this coming Friday, so this is just in time. There will be four performances, June 15, 16, 17, and 20th. The first three will be at Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. I'll be attending the concert on the 20th, which will be the only one held at Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, and I’ll be writing about it.
The ReligionUnplugged article is an excerpt from the larger article I originally submitted, which is about the wider topic of Sir James’ visit to the US, including to Virginia at the Sacred Music Project's Composers Institute and in San Francisco to St. Dominic's. The complete article is below.
Scottish Composer Sir James MacMillan in the US in 2023:—Alexandria with the Sacred Music Project’s Composition Institute, May 21-27
—San Francisco with the Dominicans, May 30
—Garden Grove and Costa Mesa with Poet Dana Gioia coming up June 15, 16, 17 and 20
On May 30, Sir James MacMillan was visiting San Francisco at St. Dominic’s Church, where he attended Vespers and Mass and was interviewed at an event co-sponsored by the Benedict XVI Institute.
A few days earlier on May 21-27, 2023 in Alexandria, Virginia, MacMillan was centrally involved with another recent initiative co-sponsored by the Benedict XVI Institute, the Catholic Sacred Music Project’s Composition Institute. Eight selected composers studied with MacMillan during that week.
Above: From Left, Peter Carter, Catholic Sacred Music Institute Director, and Composer Frank La Rocca. Far Right: Maggie Gallagher, B16 Institute Executive Director. Third from Right: Sir James MacMillan
The motets they worked on, in honor of the Church’s reaffirmation of the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, were performed at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America in Washington D.C. in a closing concert on the 27th.
When MacMillan asked the Benedict XVI Institute’s Executive Director, Maggie Gallagher, what else he could do to help support the institute’s work, since the training and nurturing of the next generation of sacred music composers are so important to both the institute and MacMillan, Gallagher invited him to attend the event at St. Dominic’s and to come to a $5,000 a plate fund-raising event that gave a small group of donors the chance to meet with him and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who founded the Benedict XVI Institute, over dinner.
During the Mass at St. Dominic’s, musical settings from MacMillan’s Mass of Saint Anne were sung by a cantor.
In the interview conducted after the Mass by Simon Berry, St. Dominic's director of liturgy and music, Berry told MacMillan how St. Anne's Mass is used at St. Dominic's, and asked, “How did you come to write that?” Sir James MacMillan said, “I wrote it for children back home in Ayrshire in the 1980s. I wrote it for St. Anne’s primary school in Mossblown near Ayr. When I taught it, it became clear that youngsters were keen to sing, and if children can sing melodies like that, then their parents and grandparents could as well, and that’s the way it’s worked. It’s become embedded in many parishes and dioceses back home in the UK. I’m delighted to see that you’re using it here in San Francisco.”
The origins of the Sanctus, as described in the liner notes about St. Anne's Mass that accompany the album "Sir James MacMillan Consecration,” illustrate additional aspects of MacMillan’s approach to sacred music.
"There’s a particular melody in the Sanctus which is both highly memorable and distinctively Scottish, which he originally composed for a song in traditional style, ‘The Tryst’ . . . The English meaning of the word ‘tryst’ is principally romantic but in Scotland it has a broader usage and might indicate any kind of friendly rendezvous. . . . [MacMillan said,] ‘At that time (1997) I was very interested in music for the liturgy and wondering if traditional music could work well as liturgical music.’ The St Anne’s Mass has immense popular appeal today, used not only by Roman Catholics but also by a number of Protestant denominations.”
In 2014, MacMillan founded the annual Cumnock Tryst, a music festival in his childhood town in Scotland.
You can watch a video of the entire event at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco here The Sanctus starts at 32:06 and the interview starts at 1:42:36.
As he also mentioned in the interview, Sir James’ coming to St. Dominic’s—which is staffed by priests from the Dominican order—was an especially good fit. He said, “I’ve been very close to the Dominicans ever since I was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. . . . The English Province of Dominicans was very instrumental in my formation at that stage, and they brought my wife Lynne into the church. The Dominicans married us forty years ago this July, and I’m still very close to them.” He and his wife are third-order Dominicans.
Simon Berry pointed out that there were not only first-order Dominicans (priests) present, but also second-order (religious sisters and brothers), and other third-order (secular members), so he was in good company. Another connection being celebrated at that event was the commissioning by St. Dominic’s Church of a work from MacMillan to celebrate the church’s 150th anniversary, which will premiere next June.
MacMillan also mentioned in the interview that when he was handed a plastic recorder as a schoolchild, it was a seismic event in his life. He realized then that he wanted to write music, and he started composing on paper even before he learned musical notation. His coal miner grandfather played euphonium in a band with other miners and nurtured MacMillan’s musical interest by buying him his first cornet and taking him to band practices and in many other ways.
The sixty-three-year-old composer has risen to eminence in his field from his humble beginnings in a coal mining town in Scotland. He has received many honors, not the least of which was a Knighthood announced in Queen Elizabeth’s Birthday Honours, on June 12, 2015, for “services to music.” (This followed the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) awarded in 2004.) Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, knighted him on December 8, 2015, at an Investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle.
Previously, in 2011, Prince William quietly commissioned MacMillan to prepare a piece of music to be ready for Queen Elizabeth’s eventual funeral, based on a favorite Scripture passage of hers from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans Chapter 8. "Who shall separate us ...neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
On September 19, 2022, MacMillan’s anthem, “Who Shall Separate Us,” was sung by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal.
What’s Next? The Long-delayed Premiere of Fiat Lux
If you live in or near Orange County CA or can be there June 15, 16, 17, or 20, you might want to attend one of the premiere performances of Fiat Lux (Latin for “Let there be light”) by Sir James MacMillan, a work for soprano, baritone, mixed chorus, organ, and orchestra based on a five-part libretto by poet Dana Gioia. The oratorio was commissioned by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson to mark the consecration of Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
As you may know, Christ Cathedral is a reflective glass building formerly named Crystal Cathedral, which was originally constructed for the congregation of television evangelist Robert Schuller and remodeled to be suitable for Catholic worship.
The formal dedication Mass was held on July 17, 2019. The premiere of Fiat Lux was originally scheduled to follow in March 2020, but COVID intervened. As Dana Gioia wrote during an email discussion with me about Fiat Lux several months ago, "The music was ready, but the orchestra and choir could not perform.” Then more recently he also wrote, “Rescheduling the composer, the symphony, and the chorus afterward became a huge problem.”
The long-delayed premiere of Fiat Lux at Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa will be the final work in a concert called "Cathedrals Of Sound,” following Allegri's Miserere, and Strauss' Death And Transfiguration. An encore performance will be held at Christ Cathedral, in part to additionally celebrate the refurbishment of the cathedral’s Hazel Wright Organ, the fifth largest pipe organ in the world.
The world premiere performances and commissioning of Fiat Lux were made possible by a grant from Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Fieldstead and Company, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Concert Info
“Cathedrals of Sound”
Thursday, June 15, 8 PM
Friday, June 16, 8 PM
Saturday, June 17, 8 PM
Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall
615 Town Center Drive. Costa Mesa, CA 92626
For more info and tickets, go here.
For the composer’s notes, go here.
Below KUSC radio personality Alan Chapman introduces the music to be performed at the Segerstrom Concert Hall concerts June 15, 16, and 17: Allegri's "Miserere mei, Deus," Richard Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration," and the world premiere of Sir James MacMillan's "Fiat Lux."
“Pacific Symphony & Pacific Chorale in Concert with Paul Jacobs”
Tuesday, June 20, 8 PM
Christ Cathedral
13280 Chapman Avenue
Garden Grove, CA, 92840
For more info and tickets go here.
More about Christ Cathedral
As you may know, Christ Cathedral, the formerly named Crystal Cathedral, was designed by post-modern architect Philip Johnson as a kind of religious theater to house the televised preaching services led by possibility Gospel preacher Robert H. Schuller. Schuller wanted the church to be open to the "sky and the surrounding world."
Sometime around 2010, the power of possibility thinking failed to bring in enough money to pay the bills, and after a bankruptcy filing, the Crystal Cathedral along with the surrounding complex of buildings designed by other world-famous architects was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in 2011.
It was called a cathedral inaccurately, because cathedrals are the home churches of bishops, and evangelical Protestants don't have bishops. A commentary in National Catholic Register notes “the deep conviction in the diocese that only Providence could explain the highly unusual path that led the bankrupt television ministry to sell its property and buildings to the Catholic diocese.”
"And it is hard to argue. A building called a 'cathedral' when it wasn’t one, and couldn’t be one, now is one." —From "Christ Cathedral's Transformation Is an Act of Providence"
Sir James wrote this about the building in 2020: "In November last year when no one could foresee what was to happen a few months later, Lynne and I visited California for me to begin research on a large-scale oratorio for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra and their Chorus, Fiat Lux. One of the performances of this new piece will take place in Christ Cathedral in Orange County, a strange, huge, and extraordinary building which has a past life as the Chrystal Cathedral!"
Strange, huge, and extraordinary indeed!
More about the Text of Fiat Lux
Dana Gioia’s libretto for Fiat Lux is in five parts:
1. In the Beginning
2. Chorus
3. Litany of Light
4. Light of the World
5. Hymn: Cathedral of Light
The program with the full text of Gioia’s libretto is here.
CATHEDRAL OF LIGHT
(Hymn for the Rededication of the Crystal Cathedral as Christ Cathedral)
Upon this rock,
Our cross and spire
built in a land
of quake and fire.
Fragile as glass,
bright as the air,
the angled walls
folded in prayer.
Under the sun
of western skies,
we re-enact
the sacrifice.
Bread of the earth,
fruit of the vine,
the tortured flesh
revealed divine.
The ancient words
fill this new space,
redeeming us
with unearned grace.
Rededicate
this crystal spire
built in a land
of quake and fire.