In 2014, James MacMillan established a music festival in his hometown of Cumnock, calling it The Cumnock Tryst.MacMillan has explained that the festival’s title was inspired by a simple love song he wrote in 1984 called ‘The Tryst’, setting a poem by William Soutar. So brief is this song that it might have fallen into obscurity. Yet its melody has infused no fewer than twelve works in MacMillan’s oeuvre, spanning over a quarter of a century. The scope of genres in which it appears is striking: from a folk song to an early orchestral tone poem; from a large-scale setting of the Christian passion to a congregational mass setting. Although MacMillan has reused musical material from numerous works, The Tryst is unarguably the most important and fruitful of these reincarnations, revealing the most significant degree of his self-retrospection. The broad variety of musical contexts in which the song features demands a range of interpretations to understand the various ‘meetings’ MacMillan proposes with each use of the melody, from the erotic, to the sacred, to the communitarian. By examining these ‘Trystian’ works, we may come to appreciate the extent to which this love song has permeated his career to date.

MacMillan has never lost the direct connection with his homeland. While his link with his cultural identity is not refracted through nostalgia for the lost immediacy of the cultural environment, there is a nostalgia present in MacMillan’s work for what has been ‘lost’ to Scottish culture through the Reformation. MacMillan sees as part of his compositional ‘mission’ to engage in ‘acts of remembrance’, restoring what has been lost. This encompasses a wide spectrum of ideas, from the purely musical, to the connection of music to the spiritual, from a response to the local, to an engagement with the national. Two related works which embody these dialectics are the St John and St Luke Passions. The Passion narrative pervades both MacMillan’s religious works and some of his most abstract compositions. His two completed Passions are determinedly international in their reach and yet reflect a personal commitment to the meaning and significance of the religious narrative. These facets are reflected in the choices MacMillan makes in his approach to the setting: the works draw upon the established traditions of this chapter will explores some of the paradoxes that this creates.