Why should I care? Let them be heard ? By whom ? Vanish unheard ? Why exactly would this be a pity ? – They are born, they are long born ( I admit it, a difficult birth in each case, each time the breaking of electro-acoustic waters long before. Still ), they´ve long left this house of liberty and lounge in hope of just what now ?
I tend to group the three tallest ( i.e. my longest ; yes, musical duration, never a mere joke, is and stays a prime mystery of time – what´s five minutes of music ? Sixteen minutes ? Watch how your watch is mocked by formed sound ) of my electronic children together .
” SWEENEY´S VISION” , triggered off , some say, by Early Medieval Irish psychiatry in one sense, in another was just the oldest of compositional problems all over again : how ´ll I spin it out ? How derive it all from Bar One ? I was proud when it won the Premier Prix at the Bourges Festival 1999 . Long and lanky, it has great Shannon ( and Rhine ) head-waters , ” Sweeney” ululations and at one point almost a bit of Mozart´s Clarinet Concerto from a whale-wail . I tend to hear nowadays yet other points of connection to its ( also lanky ) sister of 1999, ” QUASI UNA MISSA” , than anyone has yet admitted .
Here in ” QUASI ” is, as any donkey can hear , a more specific wordiness celebratory, it´s audible scaffolding is more up-front . I´ll have to hear it again on my next birthday.
” TRADURRE = TRADIRE ” ( – but is it really ? Always and ever ? ) is the third of the Three Electric Lanks. Over the top, it
is this special sisters´ polyphony , the mutating texts and morphing choral whispers, screams, groans, snorts, farts and the music of those thirty three pipers at my future funeral. The Irish , English and German translations are treacherously traded , I recycle bits , perhaps it is a strange sonic coinage at this stage of this Irish composer´s cosmic anonymity.
Between the very first two children of my computer-loins there was also that strange ( and shortest ) ” SWEENEY `S FAREWELL ( – I´ll give it its full title in this Blog ) TO THE WOMEN OF IRELAND ” . It´s dense roilings are not even five minutes long ; where is the border between deep physical earth-sounds, human birth-pangs, a composed kingdom of massive sounding beasts of the ocean, monsters of the cosmos?
Seventeen ( they were long ) years before in 1997 I bore ” SWEENEY ´S VISION ” there had been an analogue boy-child ; ” BALTHAZAR´S DREAM ” I called these bleeding, cut and cooked sound-chapters of suffering ; it was, after all, my Berlin in my 1980. I was plucky. No digital magic on any compositional horizon back then . My Borgean vision sufficed. The technology was woeful. And guitar-sounds became siren, became rain ; human suffering became hammer – blows at a cross, Borges´s Spanish Cross. This electrical essay I felt compelled to make. Why ? You feel it . I certainly can. Ritual killing might just be fun if you´re on the right side. My Balthazar was not.
Why now should I care if these , my electro-childer , ever make their way ( they do ) through European Festivals ? Corcoran´s Third Law ( – there is to date no First Law in sight, nor no sign of a Second ) of Transcendental Musical Goodness forbids any connection between an art-work´s quality and its mixed reception anywhere, any time, in any imaginable universe . Let these four and a half brave sons or daughters of my electric loins ( – break down , weeping , my good taste and sense ) ” exist” . Add to them, I daresay, ” JOYCEPEAK – MUSIK ” of 1996 ( – again, a prize followed; – Oh how it mattered ! ) , my yellowing prints of a long faded Musical Dublin where neither I nor my peasant, down-country family had ever felt comfortable in, now my kissing the feet of The Master Of All Irish Composers In Trieste .