UNMASKING SCOTLAND’S TARTAN FICTIONS

James MacMillan’s score for Christopher Wheeldon’s new ballet interrogates some of his country’s guiding myths.

The poet Seamus Heaney was careful to distance himself from the political tensions of his native Ulster. Criticised for lack of engagement, he reflected ruefully in one poem, Whatever you say, say nothing, on the impossibility of luring “the tribal shoals to epigram and order”. In Scotland the composer James MacMillan is in some ways a comparable cultural figure to Heaney. But unlike him, MacMillan refuses to “say nothing”: he has persistently claimed that Scottish society has a resilient strain of anti-Catholicism. Last month he repeated the charge in a contribution to a collection of essays by supporters of Glasgow Celtic FC.
Now MacMillan has taken his critique of Scottish society to a new level in the unlikely setting of a ballet by the talented young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, for which he has written the score. Shambards was given its premiere by New York City Ballet on 8 May, with MacMillan himself conducting the orchestra. Its title derives from Scotland 1941 by the Orkney poet Edwin Muir, an excoriating critique of a version of Scottish culture propagated by such figures as Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. Muir harks back to what he sees as the purer Scotland of Wallace and Bruce and to a sense of tribe and family dismembered by John Knox and the Calvinist reformers. Then he twists the knife:

Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere
Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation
And mummied housegods in their musty niches
Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation
And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches
No pride but pride of pelf.”

Muir’s words resonated so much with MacMillan (“a cleansing hard poem for us Scots to take”) that he dedicated Cumnock Fair, his musical fantasy for piano and strings based on eighteenth century dance tunes, to Muir’s memory. Christopher Wheeldon heard Cumnock Fair when he was seeking a score for a ballet at the Royal Opera House in 2002. At twelve minutes, it was too short for his purpose: instead Wheeldon made his ballet to Tryst another of MacMillan’s works.
But Wheeldon continued to believe in the dance possibilities of Cumnock Fair. He persuaded MacMillan to extend it as the basis of a new piano concerto (MacMillan's second), which would be Wheeldon's first specially commissioned score for a ballet. When a choreographer commissions a score, there is always an element of danger. It is a far easier option to make a dance to a well-known symphonic score. With a new work, the choreographer does not know what he will get. In this case, Wheeldon had the advantage of knowing Cumnock Fair, which makes up the first section of the new ballet. But when I talked to him during the early stages of the work, there was little hint that he knew of the political twists that were to come. In the event, MacMillan called the whole work Shambards and its constituent movements, Cumnock Fair and – after Muir - Shambards and Shamnation.

Recently Christopher Wheeldon told the writer Chip Brown that he wished that his choreography had greater social meaning. “I'm in awe of people who can express a strong opinion about life or society or politics. I have strong opinions but I wouldn't know how to express them in dance. In a way ballet is too beautiful to be opinionated. As soon as you go up on pointe, you're going somewhere unreal, invented, artificial. Most choreographers who are trying to express how they feel about the war in Iraq don't do it in the pointe shoe. You can't be real in a pointe shoe.''

Not so. Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (to Stravinsky’s score) makes searing use of pointe to depict the oppression of women in pre-revolutionary Russia, while Kenneth MacMillan would have railed at the suggestion that “ballet is too beautiful to be opinionated.” However Shambards may have given Wheeldon – despite his self-doubt - a new political voice. Ballet was at its most artistically powerful in the hands of the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was insistent that the form was a gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork, comprising not dancing merely, but music and design as well. Ballet’s present creative crisis may owe something to the decline of such cross-collaboration and to its overwhelming use of music written primarily for the concert hall. One consequence can be the creative isolation of the choreographer. For the most part choreographers get little useful advice from artistic directors. But the necessity to clarify one’s thoughts to a creative colleague in the enterprise, in this instance a composer, can lead to a more refined result and can seduce choreographers away from the more self-referential temptations of their craft. James MacMillan may have rendered Wheeldon such a service, while in return Wheeldon may have rendered a service of his own. Ballet can make big politically unmissable points: the danced dimension gives incalculable extra force to MacMillan’s underlying argument.

“Whatever you say, say nothing” is an unpromising prescription for an artwork. Instead, Shambards is a politically opinionated creation - and not merely from the composer’s perspective. Wheeldon not merely - to use his word - ‘painted’ the score, but he has also, in the eyes of several critics, given expression to his own satiric instinct. Robert Johnson of the Star-Ledger characterised both music and dance as “thick with invective”, describing the premiere as a major creative event. According to the veteran critic Clive Barnes of the New York Post, the MacMillan/Wheeldon collaboration was a “great match - a magical mix of artistic originality and a common touch.” Anna Kisselgoff, the New York Times reviewer, was more reserved, finding the work “surefire”, albeit “overstuffed with ideas --- mainly a working experiment.”

Notwithstanding such flaws, Shambards – both music and choreography – may come to be seen as a landmark artistic and political tract about inauthenticity. It bodes well for the developing creative relationship between MacMillan and Wheeldon, who share a deep artistic empathy – and who have further plans for collaboration. Their work also realises a principal aim of New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project - the commissioning of new scores (in contrast to the Royal Ballet, which last commissioned an original score in 1992 – from Brian Elias for Kenneth MacMillan’s The Judas Tree). According to Andrea Quinn, the company’s music director, NYCB is prepared to take risks in the service of new music for dance. The company has a ‘very healthy attitude’, Quinn told me last year. If a score is commissioned and then not choreographed, “it is not the end of the world.” Shambards justified the risk. Sadly, however, there are no early plans for a dance performance of Shambards in the very country to which it might speak with greatest force.

Brendan McCarthy is arts editor of The Tablet