James the First

James MacMillan, the Scottish composer, is that rare beast - the musician as polemicist. Aesthetic power is not supposed to confront political power with quite his degree of passionate engagement. Art's greatness, for many, is its power to elevate us to a higher world.

The view of art as a privileged escape route to heaven is a skewed interpretation of something real. Deep aesthetic experiences do change the way we look at the world. Which is why we want to raise the artist's genius to a godlike status.

But that line is enjoyably subverted with the British premiere, earlier this month, of A Scottish Bestiary, MacMillan's piece for organ and orchestra. It is in the tradition of musical portraiture as practised by Elgar, Saint-Saens and Mussorgsky. But a provocative and furious cunning separates MacMillan. In his menagerie we hear a hyena, a bee and a monkey fulfiling their zoological roles of shrieking, droning and howling. This is a richly imagined spectacle of the grotesques of the Edinburgh parliament. And there's a rare delight in the guessing game of identification.

Musicology's separation from ideology is a little more than 200 years old, starting with the Romantics. England's biggest cultural export, Shakespeare, was by then established as "the Bard of Avon" - one who was "not of an age, but for all time". A contemporary, Ben Jonson, supplied the accolade, but later generations of Italian, German, British and French artists persuaded mass taste that it should waft the Bard up to his pedestal and away from Warwickshire.

Literature's anchor in words and ideas, though, has always made it hard to avoid the context of time and place. Whether it's Juvenal's scorn at Roman corruption or Swift's at English stupidity in Ireland, the focus on the particular helps us to understand the greatness.

The satirical and the contemporary are allowed into popular music. Hey Big Spender pokes fun at masculine poses (though not in Shirley Bassey's interpretation). And when Cole Porter tells us that "even educated fleas do it" we enjoy the satire at the expense of love's human conventions. But if this is all "light", "serious" has to mean "heavy", and "classical" music must shun the contemporary.

This is a strange, and fairly recent, prejudice. It was early 19th-century Romanticism that appealed to the new phenomenon of popular taste. And in the process, the composer changed, too. He was no longer a court official, a servant dependent on the local potentate who paid his salary. The shift from Haydn, employed by Prince Esterhazy, to Beethoven, performing at public concerts, is the biggest sociological change in musical history. The rise in status accompanied a veneration of the composer as someone with a direct line to the divine.

As European culture deepened in its secularity, music started to fulfil religion's sacred functions. The composer-conductor was like a priest facing the altar. Both celebrated a communal liturgy - a dramatic narrative that gave meaning to lives.

But the idea of music as universal truth risks a sterile version of the divine. Which may be why so much music criticism is now mere analysis of form, strictly for initiates. But MacMillan is a composer who plays with popular culture. His farmyard sounds build on the Disney noises that echo in all our minds. But he does the alchemical thing, making the original reference his own. This Bestiary is Scotland's first great post-devolution piece: both funny and angry, and rooted in the reality that gives it cultural power.