‘I write music in the hope that it communicates, but I know that in many cases it won’t.’

Sir James MacMillan has sometimes struck me as a rather contrary figure. Although he claims to have been a late starter in comparison to his bestknown contemporaries, he has had greater ‘popular’ success than any of them, beginning with The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the Proms in 1990 and, two years later, the Percussion Concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – whose five hundred performances at the time of writing make it one of the few contemporary works to have become a ‘repertory piece’.

Also, as is well known, he holds strong views about politics, religion and nationalism – indivisible elements of his worldview which have inevitably made their way into his music. And sometimes his outspokenness on these issues has made him enemies, particularly at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival when he delivered a lecture entitled ‘Scotland's Shame: Anti-Catholicism as a Barrier to Genuine Pluralism’. Nor does he hold back in his music, which is passionate and sometimes confrontational. Yet interviewers agree that in person he's calm, soft-spoken and courteous, and on every occasion that I’ve spoken to him he has been friendly and unassuming.

I first met him in May 2010 while reporting on the premiere of his Violin Concerto in London, and when I told him at that time of my intention to compile this book he agreed readily to contribute to it. But it was four years before the following encounter took place – again in London, on one of his frequent visits from his home in Glasgow, at the hotel in Waterloo where he was staying. He seemed pleased to see me again.

By then I’d come across an archive interview that suggested he would be in sympathy with at least some of the thinking behind the book. ‘Music's not something which can just wash over us’, he told Classic CD magazine in February 1999. ‘It needs us to sacrifice something of ourselves to meet it, and it's very difficult sometimes to do that, especially the whole culture we’re in. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice – certainly sacrificing your time – is not valued anymore.’