often reason it out thus: like music, I am a temporal creature , I see seventy years of my life as a string of performances, – performance here being analogous to that of theatre, of certain kinds of conceptual art .
My lived seventy years seem from another angle akin to films seen, or my „ notes written on water „ , akin also to sand-art perhaps , a bit like the snow sculptures of certain North Greenlanders ( – am I making this up? Certainly…. Why not ? ) Yes. My life as a
„sicut fumus „ kind-of-thing.
As many an other rural Irish child of the time I , too, must have been sensitive to the sounds of North Tipperary nature. ( I´ll
do the re-telling of mother´s 100 pigs and my 2. Symphony later. )
I certainly was blown away by Yeats´s line “For the wet winds are blowing / High up on Cloothnabare ” ; my child´s cochlea already knew it. ) . Our saw-mill whined danger, of course, and there was the rhythmic skurting of cows´ whitish milk into a scoured milk-bucket. My childhood was full of immense, loud goings on with sheep and cows and banbhs and sows in our farm-yard.
It is not my intention here to manufacture various Seamus Heaneyesqueries between my early composed music and our farm sound-scape .
Certainly there was that ; but there was more. eg. I sang in our little school , I clapped my hands, I slapped my body around, I produced tones on tin-whistle and box-accordeon. One private thing I was proud of: I surely did patent Frank Corcoran´s Hands And Feet Children´s Composition Plan – I used my right or left fingers ( while pedalling down the country boreens ) to register the just newly learned melody-tones; I had the principle three toes of my left or right foot for the few basic chords I learned ; so fingers melody, left or right foot harmony.
And every Tuesday was Fair day; on Borrisokane´s Main Street our country roarer, Paddy Reddan, ´d roar out his “come all yez ” to vast areas of North Tipperary; mostly pentatonic.
Early enough I wanted to write songs, set poets, compose vocal music (- a Quintet for accordeon and strings of my sixties was a disaster – I couldn´t get the form of the three movements ; my sound experience was pitiful , nor had I any knowledge of musical densities ) ; quite simply, a text was a powerful help . ( To compose one minute of music is hard, but five is much harder )
I loved solo and choral singing, the feel of my own breath
and the choir´s plastic lines and chords, dark, light, densities, slender or thickly matted , high dives and depths, dark/ bright colours, shapes.
DÁN AIMHIRGÍN ( 1971 ) ( – I must have been the first Irish composer ever to use this Early Irish poem, a pantheistic God-litany; quite thrilling its climax ) calls for eight second altos improvising on a low C with the words „ Am „ „ gaoth „, „ gaoth i muir“, ( „ I am the wind on the sea“ , – Celtic God Aimhirgin´s self-definition in Iron Age Ireland ; His final „Am Brí Dána „ / „ I Am This Meaning“ analogous to the Genesis „ Eheye Asher Eheye „ ) , then another eight altos murmuring these magic syllables on the D, eight second sopranoes on the E and then the first sopranoes on F Sharp. A vibrating whole-tone chord. Then , as the high tenors enter on the G above these thirty two women´s voices with their ” Gaoth“ ( “Wind” ), the resultant choral effect was magical .
A simple, fresh idea. But excellent.
Then the 1994 MEDIEVAL IRISH EPIGRAMMES which set short Japanese Haiku-like miniatures from our
Middle Ages , eg. Take : „All are keen to sleep with blond Aideen . All Aideen herself will own / Is that she will not sleep alone…. „ .
Thirty years later , other terse texts were to spark off NINE WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN IRISH POEM BY GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK . Listen !
„ As tobar duaigh spéire / Líonann crainn / A ngoib“ . ( “From the ink-well of the sky / Trees fill / Their bills. ” ) Here I had a solo violin introduce, separate and commingle with my nine choruses.
Simple,yes, but only after you´ve composed it. How later would I set a for large polyphonic choir my 2012 EIGHT HAIKUS ( – and this time the Haikus were my own ) ?
How would I handle texts like :
„ Deep purple twilight / In the bay lie three islands / Asleep like children „ . ?
So vocal music you can hang on the peg of the text, ofthe words.
But what about instrumental music ?
My 1974 THREE PIECES FOR ORCHESTRA ( „Scenes from My Receding Past „ ) I had the chance to re-programme years later in an Dublin orchestral concert of 2000 along with my SECOND SYMPHONY ; I was delighted – after over twenty five years, at my still fresh sounds, my acts of youthful courage in painting my symphonic canvas. Stretch your colour imagination; let the expanding forms create, explode .
And my musical ideas come from all over the place. The PIANO TRIO of 1977 was my break-through with macro-counterpoint ; it too dares new colours, its not quite arch-form
singing and sputtering and blazing and searing and singeing whatever it was that I had wanted to singe . A short time later I got my macro-counterpoint , the wind polyphony which I wanted into the WIND QUINTET.
That´s it. ( About the four symphonies, I´ll writhe later. )
It became clear to me that music was a metaphor, of course, for transience –
so expression and self-expression, fine, but how get rid of the „ I „ in the sound–forgeing which you´re engaged at ?
The computer-painted works were different again . My 1980 BALTHAZAR´S DREAM ( – why didn´t I then call it „ BALTHAZAR´S SCREAM „ ? ), was generated by the terror of Borges´s minor masterpiece , „The Gospel According to St. Mark „ I spliced together at the Electronic Studios of
the West Berlin Technical University.
The Guantanamo scream bursts out again twenty years later – in my TRADURRE TRADIRE
of 2002 for Deutschlandfunk. Its electronic predecessors, both WDR commissions, SWEENEY´S VISION in 1997 and QUASI UNA MISSA in 1999 went on to win , respectively, the Bourges Festival Premier Prix in 1999 and the Swedish E.M.S. Prize in 2002 . Was that important for this composer ? Of course it was!
Mol an óige. Encourage and praise good work . It was desperately needed in them for me bad nineties.
The total isolation.Courage. Head up, progress. Slap it down. Write. ( Brahms to his only ever composition student: „ You must write, write, Every day! Don´t worry about its quality ; slap it all down.And stop worrying about the weak stuff – the fire will look after that….”)
Create. Burst. – All rthese words I´d use in struggling to write about my life-long working with sound. A sound man .
It took me thirty years to discover how I´d often used as a musical motive the melodic motif C D and E . Why ? Because they are the initial „ Requiem“ tones
in the Gregorian Mass for the Dead.
Says it all, does’nt it ? Music as metaphor , as distress and help signal, my call into the tomb. Music as Orpheus’s myth. – All of this , of course, after we ´ve first had it as play, as tone-carpentry , sounding architecture.
Lutoslawski died on Monday 7. February 1994 , just over twenty years ago. What courage – what exemplary musical and human courage was there in his life as a composer. And boy !You´ve got to be tough nowadays .
Myriad temptations beckon; among the most vicious, I’d say, are:
The Genetic Fallacy ( „ Her compositions derive from her life…. „ even if they also do…. )
or „ A Musical Work´s Worth = The Sum Of Its Performance“ ( eg. „ My music is good because it´s played so often…”
And then there’s its sneaky, charming corollary: „ My music is played, therefore it´s good. „ .
Well, is it good? Why? ).
With the recent Concerto for Violin and then the Concerto for Violoncello, maybe I´ve sneaked around the full circle and the new instrumental works want to sing even more.
I´d like to write a Clarinet Concerto, have a shot at an Alto Rhapsody. I´d compose a Fourth String Quartet .
Write music to ravish. The pure line AND the pure drop, the vertical AND the horizontal, sounding densities PLUS then the work’s reeling , sonorous line – which itself might be built out of various sub-lines .
It´s easy to talk than to compose .
Getting harder, too, to avoid self-quotation .
So what´s left to be original about ? Perhaps plenty… I won´t know till I do it.
At the Zagreb Biennale 2013 they did my ancient PIANO TRIO, those splendid young Zagreb Piano Trio musicians , enormous warm sounds from all the three players. My original scaffolding held firm, strong, because I´d built it well in 1977.
So scream and song. Surge, surge and soar. How get the ecstasy into the mix and the wash, I continuously wonder ?
And how make the structure secure, steady, ready .
Composing is better than decomposing ; it seems to defie the second law of thermodynamics.
No bad thing this .