” MUSINGS” for MAGYAR RADIO / RADIO BARTÓK ( April 20 2006 ) in connection with its May 17th 2006 Bela Bartók Centenary Concert in Budapest. ) :
Is cumadóir ceoil mé. I am a composer. Pre-industrial, rural Ireland of my childhood in the fifties was in certain ways like the small, agricultural Hungary of Bartók´s youth.
Dublin and Budapest were vital cultural metropoles ( Dublin´s short-comings were enormous; agreed. ) Small nations, both were surrounded by culturally omnivorous neighbours eager to gobble up their identities.
Bartók took his stance, he ploughed the lonely furrow, said ” NO! ” to cultural tyranny. Moral. Artistic. Not that he wanted to marry folk- and art-music. You can´t. But as a collector and 20th. c. composer, forging his own individual voice , he refused to let lazy indifference stifle his own musical courage. Courage, that´s it. Bartók collected his hidden jewels of folk-music. Bartók composed mighty musical structures. His stance was heroic and lonely. He didn´t give in.
My Ireland in my 20th. c. has gone its way. My Irish language dies daily a thousand deaths.We had our Renaissance of folk-music, our explosion of traditional Irish ceol which, by its very over-kill, is currently endangering its own survival.
As a composer within Ireland I had to plough my own lonely furrow. In native Tipperary there was a hostile indifference to our oldest layers of Irish music. Post-colonial Dublin was dependent on second-rate London music-pedagogy. ( Yes, bits of Bartók were misused in our music-curricula, his work paraded lovelessly without any understanding of where he was coming from; as I was studying music at two Dublin universities, we shared British parading of bits of Bartók as “our” apologia for ” our” contemporary music, “our” bulwark against the horrors of , say, Viennese atonality. My ” politically free” Ireland didn´t provide any climate of musical understanding, it did not evolve the respect for musical creativity we would have needed in order to allow a ” Bartók na h- ´Eireann” to emerge.
“QUASI UN BASSO” for Solo Doublebass is my dyptich for a mighty-orchestra-in-one-giant-instrument. ( Think of B´s still fresh and shocking bass pizzicati in orchestral works like his Divertimento for String Orchestra or those extraordinary long lines at the end of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the daring and brilliance of his orchestral imagination. ) Mine are two fragmented pictures from my vanished Ireland.
Art-music today faces the most viciously anti-art globality ever known.But you cannot barter Bartók in the market. Wares are bartered. Music of ” value” can´t be. It is questionable whether the folk-musics of Hungary or Ireland can survive the market´s kiss. It is questionable whether Hungarian or Irish composers will survive the market-place, swollen as it is with the greatest ocean of sonic rubbish mankind has ever known. Where have we composers a place to be heard ? Where is silence ? Out of which music is born?