THE cassette recording of my conversation with Edgar Deale is punctuated with loud laughter -- mine -- brought about in part by my subject's amusing anecdotes and observations, but exaggerated by the whiskeys he is plying me with, despite my protestations that I am working. In truth, some of the laughter is caused not by mirth but by the dizzy amazement I experience when I realise just how much of this century Edgar Deale has experienced at first hand.

Born in 1902, he was sixteen when Debussy died. As a young man during the Troubles he was accosted at gunpoint by Black and Tans in Rathmines ('One was a gentleman: I had four half-crowns and he only took three of them'). His daily journals have been housed by Trinity College Dublin 'to be published twenty years after I've disappeared'. At ninety-four he is witty and bright, quite obviously still consumed with curiosity about the world around him, and can derive considerable satisfaction from contemplating all that he has achieved and seen in his long life to date.

Although it had to wait nearly half a century before it was manifest in a creative sense, music was an integral part of Edgar Deale's life from an early age. His father, Edwin Deale, was organist for fifty years at the Methodist Centenary Church in Dublin's St Stephen's Green. Here the central importance of singing in worship and the enthusiastic participation of choir and congregation left a lasting impression on young Edgar. When he was seven or eight, he became a chorister in Christ Church Cathedral and a pupil in the Choir School. His time in Christ Church coincided in part with the four years (1913-17) spent there by the famous didactic harmonist Charles Kitson. Among his other teachers was one W. W. Dungan (my grandfather), Precentor of Christ Church and much favoured by the boys for his gentility: the headmaster was 'fond of flogging'.

Deale remembers vividly a Dublin music scene devoid of orchestras. Anything that wasn't church music was solely for voices or instruments (mostly violin) with piano accompaniment. So it created a profound impression when Kitson put together an orchestra to accompany the choir in the first Irish performance of Brahms' German Requiem. 'I was the latest boy in the choir -- decani -- and I was situated beside a gentleman from Edinburgh who had brought over his silver timpani for the occasion.' He laughs: 'I was more interested in the drumming than the singing! Anyway, they didn't expect new boys to sing very much. But you know, the Cathedral walls were lined with people, all the way round. The place was packed: they were standing shoulder to shoulder. And there was a huge crowd at the entrance. It was a splendid performance and it created a sensation.'

Space constraints meant that the orchestra was very small, but it was enough to whet Deale's symphonic appetite and at sixteen he went to London to attend a Promenade concert. It was 1918 and the Proms were still held in the Queen's Hall. There Deale heard his first fully orchestral work, the overture to Tannhäuser. 'As it began I felt quite disappointed', he recalls. 'I heard the Pilgrims' Chorus on the brass and wind and thought: oh-oh, sounds like the cathedral. Then the strings came in with those marvellous triplets -- well, I nearly fell over.'

Despite his background in music and his deepening love for it, it was another twenty-odd years before he made his first attempts at composition. In the meantime he founded and ran the Irish branch of Zurich Insurance, remaining one of Ireland's leading insurance managers until his retirement. Although his chosen career was demanding, he became very active in the setting up of numerous voluntary organisations of which, he recalls, there were few at the time, apart from the St Vincent de Paul. Quite a number of Deale's organisations and enterprises turned out, later, to be the prototype for a government agency. The Safety First Association of Ireland, for example, which he set up in the mid-1930s to combat the fatalities and injuries caused by growing automobile traffic, eventually came under state control and became the National Safety Council. Individuals associated with his organisations also moved on to positions of major importance. In the case of the Irish Association of Civil Liberty of which he was a founder, Deale himself refused office but accepted the responsibility of appointing the president. Every president selected by him went on to become a High Court judge. This ability to see what was needed and then find the people fulfull the vision was also used to the benefit of music world in Ireland.

Deale experienced his own musical renaissance as he began to find himself increasingly frustrated by a lack of answers to his musical questions. As a result, he took up the study of music on his own and began to compose. He produced his first work in 1940: Three Christmas Songs for choir. 'I'm not an important composer', he warns, 'but I did find composing exciting. I worked in creative spasms, writing music at night. And I was particularly moved by poetry. I loved being able to get a poem to work as music. Yeats -- he was quite easy because he was such a lyricist. And Padraig Colum -- I used his words for the Four Facets suite of 1967.'

His opus consists of some forty original compositions: orchestral and choral works, chamber music and pieces for instrumental solo. He has also composed numerous arrangements of Irish traditional folksongs for choir and solo voices. In the early days of RTÉ, then 2RN, he arranged a great deal of music for the weekly Children's Hour programme and performed it with his quartet, the Quirestors, which consisted of Deale himself on bass (he can still sing a bottom B flat) and three vicars choral from the cathedrals. His music has been performed by the RTÉ orchestras and the RTÉ Singers, the Dublin Orchestral Players and the Culwick Choral Society, and published by Oxford University Press, Elkin and Roberton, among others. His scores and manuscripts are now housed in the library of Trinity College Dublin.

Composers who have most inspired him include Debussy (whom he believes to be the true father of modern music), Holst, Brahms and Vaughan Williams. 'But I was afraid to listen to too much music, for fear I'd just copy it. My creative ability is not very great. What I have is a little talent. I was scared stiff that I might unconsciously copy these people.' To acquire the fundamental theory and rules of composition he used the various textbooks of his former schoolteacher Charles Kitson. He found the books useful but couldn't agree with them. 'He imposed a terrible discipline on us all', he says of Kitson, even though he remembers him as kindly and a good sport (on choir outings the boys used to fill his pockets with sand!) 'Of course, I'm strict with myself about parallel fifths and octaves when I write things like hymns and so on. But I disagree with him in a lot of other respects.'

Inevitably we come to other aspects of twentieth-century music. And although, with rare courage, he later pinned his colours to the mast with unshrinking assurance, our initial discussion on the subject of the Second Viennese School seemed to unfold allegorically. 'I remember a chap called Kelly, in charge of the Municipal Gallery in Parnell Square, and he was friendly with Atkinson, head of the School of Art. Kelly just lived for his gallery. He'd bring you into the gallery to ask what you thought of the paintings and then invite you to lunch. Anyway, he said to Atkinson, "What effect is all this modern painting having on your students?" and Atkinson said "Terrible! None of them will do any work. I can't teach them how to draw".' At this point I venture that a kind of brutality was a defining feature of the age and is reflected not only in the painting but in the literature, philosophy and also the music of the time. Deale accepts the point but gradually returns the discussion to what he feels is at its core: technique. 'You can't mix science and art. The one is the seeking after truth, while the other tries to lift you out of yourself, tries to raise your soul, raise your horizon. Both are authentic, but they just don't mix.'

The allegory is unveiled as we come to the pivotal point between painting and music. 'There is a very interesting point: how much will the ear accept as compared with the eye? I think that the ear revolts if you keep on annoying it. Schoenberg and Berg were both geniuses. But when ordinary people imitate them the results are ridiculous. In one hundred years it will all be gone and forgotten, regarded as an interesting period of music history when experiment was everything. Music that lasts is what the cultured public wants. They're not fooled.'

Where Edgar Deale's skills as a negotiator, committee man and initiator came into contact with his great love of music, he again demonstrated an uncanny knack for anticipating the state in its creation of various musical institutions. First of these was the Music Association of Ireland which he founded with Brian Boydell, Frederick May and Olive Smith in 1948. The MAI continues today, but with a somewhat different brief. Originally, it undertook a myriad of activities: helping young performers, organising debut concerts and bringing international performers to audiences outside Dublin and Cork, the kind of work now so efficiently carried out by Music Network. 'We brought over the London String Quartet and sent them to Tralee.' The work of the Contemporary Music Centre was surely foreshadowed by Deale's Catalogue of Contemporary Irish Composers, which he edited for publication by the MAI in 1968 with a second edition in 1973. No such catalogue existed when the MAI was approached by the professors of music in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. Deale is justifiably proud of the volumes, which to this day provide an accurate picture of Irish composers and their music at that time.

Finally, there's the story of Concert and Assembly Hall Limited, a Music Association of Ireland project to draw attention to the urgent need for a major concert hall in Dublin and, it was hoped, to take charge of its construction. A small but well-connected committee, which included the architect Michael Scott, set about drawing up plans and producing a large-scale model of the new concert hall which was to have been located in Beggar's Bush. It included interior lighting which came on at the flick of a switch, adding to the impression it created at the public launch in the Department of Foreign Affairs. 'We prevailed on the government to set up an all-party concert hall group, chaired by the Finance Minister, Dr Ryan. There were one or two meetings but no real interest and eventually the whole thing just died. When a new government came into power we shamed them into reviving the project. They then took over the old UCD premises in Earlsfort Terrace and converted it into a concert hall. It's not bad at all, but altogether smaller than the one we wanted. The main hall was to seat 1800 and the smaller hall 600.'

Music Network, the Contemporary Music Centre and the National Concert Hall: three institutions which now occupy positions of vital importance in the musical life of Ireland. For composers, performers, and audiences alike it is impossible to imagine music in Ireland without them. All three institutions owe much to Edgar Deale -- businessman, activist and composer -- who fostered their forerunners and thereby helped to create the climate which makes their present fruitful existence possible. He celebrates his ninety-fifth birthday on August 2.