James MacMillan is Scotland’s most famous composer. But “over the past five years or so, the steady deterioration in the relationship between the country’s most famous composer and Scottish society at large has progressed gradually and relentlessly, until now, when there is no relationship at all. Systematically, MacMillan has cut himself off from communications with the outside world.
Many of the circumstances of the decline are well-known – notorious, even – though one day there is a large footnote to be written in the history of Scottish contemporary cultural life, in order to document the whole sad, shambolic affair.”