I sneak back to Irishness.
For the very last time.
– I´d often cursed our lack of a socially bolstered faith in the cultural instutions which composed music (
i.e. my own music ) might seem to need.
We a peasant people? Our lack of giant shoulders onto which I´d glide and clamber as a young whetter of sound-skill and-shenannigans? ) ?
Yes.
It is a great lack, because we Irish ( still ) have no ” culturally internalized” need for or any perception of “composed music “, of ” ceol cumtha – ealaíonta”.
And yet There was one exception, a literary giant. Musicologists , nota bene: James Joyce was the greatest Irish composer. He penned the wash of sound. Joyce HEARD music and polyphonic flow and heroic courage and the composer´s cheer,
that cheer which I got as my 1997 WDR commission, ” BALTHAZAR´S DREAM”
was awarded the Bourges Festival 1999 Premier Prix.
It helped, of course, these wilting Irish shoulders. Joyce had felt the flow of phonemes and synonyms and syllabic form.
Danger lurked. I didn´t know enough European art-history. How invent the ( musical ) wheel? The sonata as a bicycle? Innocence can breed disaster, lonely, lovely.
Again Hubble´s universe, in a garden-hut near Stuttgart I composed SONATA FOR STRING ORCHESTRA ; I ” wrote ” its stringiness. – I had to. I learned to invent sound forms. I had to.
My American
MUSIC FOR THE BOOK OF KELLS calls for vast percussion.
It is an Early Irish Iron Age window. I had to do it. Nobody showed me how.
I cut pre-digital BALTHAZAR´S DREAM with bleeding fingers at the Berlin Technical University in heady 1980. I had to.
Then, years later, I composed my QUASI UN LAMENTO for a very odd orchestra of three saxophones, wind, percussion, piano and strings.
Was this my scream at the violent death of Rory ( in Hamburg 1987 ) ?
And yet.Beware seeing musical composition as biography´s breakfast, the unmediated andthe raw.
Cook, ye composers !
Yet Horace´s polished art is right: I construct MY sheen, my musical art,
holier than bronze, transmuted amputations and child-cauterizations and orphaned child-emotions;
ghosts and ghosts’ dreams and -terrors.
Too simple? Certainly. And yet….