About My Music
My music is not about any doctrine. I have no stance which I have to defend. I am more interested in expressing my reaction to the world as I understand it. It’s me being like a child and saying “Wow! Look at that!”. I hear or read about something, and I think, “Great! what would that sound like as a piece of music? How would I realise that in sound?”, and it goes from there.
Initially in my career as a composer, I was blinded by what I had been taught that music was. It took some classes with Ligeti in spring of 1985 to shake me up and open me to what I could create music to be. (“I don’t like your music so far” he had said to me, “BUT you will write better music, and (he pointed his finger at me) you WILL continue to compose”.) Post-Ligeti-Therapy was provided by Robert Hanson in Devon (thanks to Arts Council Travel Awards), who helped me find my path. “It’s time for something big”, he said after a few lessons, and coincidentally, the RTESO gave me my first symphony orchestra commission and I started work on Samsara.
What feeds the mill? Anything that provokes my curiosity. Layman’s science books; the shape of a graph; a geometrical figure; a line from literature; examples: The Flute concerto draws its source from the appearance of the character of Cassandra in Eurypides’ play “The Women of Troy” - Cassandra Rages, Cassandra Weeps, and Cassandra Dances were considered as titles of the individual movements. Samsara is constructed by joining sections of individual notes into sections of ever-increasing-length-of-cells-of-notes using the golden ratio phi. Kaleidophone is structured in sections which exactly correspond to the events described in Liam O’Flaherty’s tale “The Flood”. Cusp is three movements describing the three different results from the same starting point where the altered starting conditions drive each piece in a different direction and ultimately towards catastrophe (a cusp catastrophe is a model in catastrophe theory). Binn an tSíorsholais (The Peak of Eternal Light) was provoked by reading of a place at the Moon’s pole where the sun never sets. Árd Fhearta is a direct mapping of the structure of the ruins of Ardfert Cathedral into sound - the ruins are a skeleton, and so also is the piece.
In terms of language, I don’t work on the edge of improvisational or notational complexity, and my palette has only rarely embraced microtonality. I have worked mostly within the equally tempered scale with 12 notes to the octave, but there are some pieces on my desk gathering dust, uncompleted, which occupy microtonal areas, and have more graphically-notated scores. These are waiting, for me to understand their direction, perhaps, or I am waiting for them to understand their direction and to tell me, so that together we can find new areas to explore.