A LIVE ZOOM EVENT WITH COMPOSER SIR JAMES MACMILLAN & ARCHBISHOP SALVATORE CORDILEONE
Join us on Saturday May 29th at Noon (PDT) for an exciting webinar hosted by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone as he welcomes world-renowned Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan.
The Topic: “Music and some wider implications: a Catholic composer’s perspective”
Who or what is a religious composer today? Does a religious composer only write music for the liturgy? Or can a sense of the numinous be found in all music, as some argue, including secular forms and purely instrumental concert music? The questions prompt much speculation and I spend a lot of time talking about it. I will attempt to go beyond these questions to others too.
I also spend a lot of time listening to what many different kinds of people have to say about what I do. I find a lot of it fascinating and of immense help, stimulation and encouragement. Who are these people? Well, some are musicologists and critics of course, but some of them are theologians – attempting to interrogate the world of the arts, imagination and specifically music to see if light can be shone on deeper religious considerations. Some of them are social scientists, political minds who see important points of interface between the world of culture and the way that society can grow, develop and gain from the insights of artists and musicians. Music has always had a social role, and sometimes that role can intersect with religious concerns. Sometimes music and the other arts can even intersect with questions of ethics and morality as well as aesthetics.
I also have a keen interest in the living world and how the sacred and the secular commingle and interact in it, and how this impacts on composers and artists especially in our own time. This fascination allows me to reflect on, and search for the role that people like me might have in societies like ours, and leads me to other questions which might be appropriate for our discussion today;
Is there a moral dimension to the act of musical composition? Does the work of a composer ever impact on the desire to sustain civic values?