Subtropical Tampa, on the Gulf coast of Florida, is not a world centre for contemporary classical music. It is, in fact, a former fishing village famous for its American football team and as the birthplace of death metal. Undaunted, composer James MacMillan is preparing to conduct a programme of his own work, Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn with the Florida Orchestra. MacMillan, who is 50 this year and has been all over the world to take part in celebratory concerts, is optimistic about the reception he'll get.
"Their conductor, Stefan Sanderling, has done some of my work before. His repertoire is very central European, but he does have a great interest in modern music. Sometimes it goes down well, sometimes it doesn't. We'll see. There is a huge audience over here for classical music."
After Tampa, it is straight to Dublin for a conference, then up to Aberdeen for the Sound festival, of which MacMillan is a flag-waving patron. "It's a big, important thing in Scotland. Since the demise of Musica Nova in the 1990s, there hasn't been a festival-type focus on contemporary music. Then this emerged, phoenix-like, and to the great surprise of the chatterati in the Central Belt, it's not happening in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
"There are a lot of motivated people in Aberdeen who have brought this around. It's a very eclectic and exciting festival every year. They come up with new things all the time. I'm delighted to support them just because they're there, and they're making a little focus on me because of my birthday this year, a weekend of events that is very exciting for me."
MacMillan will have scarcely a spare minute this weekend. He is giving a lecture, preaching a sermon (although he bridles at this description), taking a workshop for new composers, playing the organ at a concert in King's College Chapel and judging a competition. This is interspersed with performances of several of his works, including the UK premiere of Who Are These Angels?
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It's all so cheerful and upbeat and uncontroversial - could it be that middle age has mellowed MacMillan? In the past, he appeared to keep a stick about his person at all times, just in case he passed a hornet's nest in need of stirring up. This came to a head 10 years ago, when he gave a lecture at the Edinburgh Festival entitled Scotland's Shame, naming sectarianism and anti-Catholic prejudice as an all-pervasive negative force in the country. It caused a media firestorm, which he later described as "breathtakingly defensive".
These days he attempts to keep out of trouble - or at least to confine his trouble-making activities to cultural issues. His Aberdeen lecture addresses the subject: Aesthetic plurality and licence in British contemporary music. Is it better here than elsewhere? Not most people's idea of a hot-button subject, although it could still cause shock and awe among earnest young men with musicology degrees.
MacMillian is arguing that "a certain type of sanctioned high modernism, associated with figures like Boulez, has been quite ideologically driven. The British generally don't go in for revolutionary music, so a different kind of modern music has emerged, which is disparaged by the central European vigorous types". He maintains that "the British way, which is much more pluralistic, much more promiscuous about what is important and what can be done in modern music, is just as valid and even more exciting than what has emerged in Europe".
He expects pelters from the central European ideologues. That school has, he says, "very vehement supporters who say the British and Americans are dilettantes and quite old-fashioned and conservative."
This is very different from the opprobrium MacMillan has received in the past, and that's just the way he likes it.
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"I'm publishing the speech in Standpoint [a highbrow politics and culture magazine], so that people can begin to see into the world of new music, to see things they may recognise in the other arts or in philosophy. There are parallels through the arts, but modern music is regarded as the esoteric outsider that nobody understands."
If he sticks to weekly magazines and London-based newspapers, he is, he says, able to join a discussion without it turning into a personal assault. "It's easier to be involved in any debate south of the border and that's where I seek out my engagement now. I can say what I like down there without all this nonsense. Getting involved in internal Catholic debate about the nature of the church is fine" - he recently berated The Tablet for being out of touch with young believers and new technology - "because there is never any serious fallback. You don't get accused of being a national traitor."
Today's MacMillan has, he says, no time to go looking for trouble. "I've put all that to one side," he says when I ask how he thinks the SNP government is getting on. "I've been less involved. I got very busy." Although his daughter Catherine is now 19 and his twins, Aidan and Clare, are 16, the joint demands of composing, conducting and family life have even forced him to give up his season ticket for Parkhead. "It was inevitable - I just couldn't get to the games as much, my life was so divided up into needing to be at home and being away, that something had to give."
He has not even had time to conduct the customary 50th birthday audit of his life and career to date. "It's been one of the busiest years of my life, and a very happy year as well. I've had a great time." Classical music thrives on anniversaries, but MacMillan was unsure as to whether he was old enough for the full treatment. Turns out that he is.
"I have been delighted and slightly surprised," he says of the attention. "I don't feel very old. I still feel as young as I did 20, 30 years ago." It is also, he notes, a heavy year for important birthdays, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Harrison Birtwistle both turning 75. "I thought I might have been too young for this, but a whole array of little events has popped up all over the world, which has astonished me."
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His birthday has coincided with a particularly fertile creative period. Despite the recession, there is no shortage of demand for MacMillan's brand of contemporary sacred music and his diary is already filling up for 2014. To his great delight, his St John Passion, premiered last year by the London Symphony Orchestra, has been performed in Berlin and Amsterdam before going to Boston in January. He will get his first chance to conduct it in Denmark in the spring.
He has just finished writing a violin concerto, also for the LSO, which they will premiere in May and then take on tour. The next time he gets a clear stint at home in Glasgow, he will start work on a piece for the Hebrides Ensemble, "a completion of the St John Gospel, right through the resurrection". After the success of the St John Passion, he has a notion to return to some of the other passions, possibly St Luke's, to write a piece that could be tackled by untrained singers.
MacMillan wrote the St John Passion immediately after The Sacrifice, for Welsh National Opera, which led to some surprising cross-pollination. "It was suffused with a sense of the operatic and a sense of the liturgical as well. I was able to bring about a kind of hybrid world, in musical terms, of these two very opposite ideas or contexts. That made it fun to write."
It also makes it extremely demanding to sing. "The St John Passion is a very complex, complicated and professional work. I want to write at least another passion, but aim it this time at the amateur choir. It would be nice to write a St Luke that's aimed at the Huddersfield Choral Society. I love that world - people who do it for the love of it."
Does being 50, with an impressive body of work, awards, honours (and just a few purple headlines) make it easier to contemplate these ambitious pieces? He is, he says, bristling with ideas and has "a bigger vista on possibilities now". Does that come from confidence? "I suppose so. Being tried and tested as a composer helps you develop that maturity which you build on.
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"I've got a list of very exciting projects over the next few years. Sometimes I just wish there were two of me to write them."