Michael Quinn: Derek Ball, you've returned to Ireland and to music after 30 years in Scotland and working in medicine. Has it felt like a homecoming in both senses to you?

Derek Ball: I think music is something I should never have left, quite seriously. I think I made a little error doing medicine. I enjoyed it, it was a very good career; I probably did a little bit of good while I was there but if I had my life to live over again I would have done music. I would have specialised, I would have done a music degree and I would have spent my whole life in music.

MQ: I'm just curious to know what role music played in your life while you were having another career?

DB: During my time in medicine I never stopped my involvement with music. I was always involved with some aspect of it and I was always composing a little bit but medicine swallows up all your time and all your energy. In terms of time and energy it's very demanding.

MQ: And similar to music?

DB: Well I'd say music was relaxing by comparison. You had to put in a lot of hours in music but it's not a vast effort. It doesn't drain you. I think music is invigorating actually. Other kinds of work take it out of you. Music adds to your life.

MQ: You were busy as a composer [with] a fast emerging profile for most of the 70s. Was it easy to move away from music at that point and is it as easy to move back to it now?

DB: I've never thought about that. Moving away just seemed the necessary, natural thing at the time. So I didn't give it a second thought. I didn't regret it. I wouldn't say I was dragged away to medicine reluctantly. I think that's an impossible question to answer because it's just something that happened. It seemed like just what I had to do and I did it without questioning it.

MQ: Now that you're composing again, do you find that music is at your fingertips more so than before?

DB: There's a sort of feeling as though a lot of stuff has been dammed up and as soon as the dam went it all just gushes out. So at the moment all I have to do is think of a piece and it's written almost just like that. [clicks his fingers.]

MQ: You said you had been writing for a little bit while you were in Scotland and latterly you had been active in the Scottish Society of Composers, but more in an administrative role.

DB: That's right, I was secretary. I did a little bit of writing. For many years before I retired from medicine I was getting performances and I was probably writing a bit more, clawing back a bit of time and energy from medicine even before I left it.

MQ: When you were writing, having made a decision to postpone the compositional career, were you writing to commission? What was prompting the interruption there in the decision not to write?

DB: If you talk in terms of decisions, that isn't the way it works. Things happen to me, I don't decide. I've had very occasional commissions but I'd say most of the time I have written to my enthusiasms. I've written something because I've thought of it and been interested in it, not because somebody wanted me to write.

MQ: In the 70's you were involved in setting up the Association of Young Irish Composers. That was obviously a moment in which there was an expressed need, or a recognition of a need, to do something to promote and to raise the profile of young Irish composers. How much of the landscape has changed in the time that you've been away?

DB: It seems that there are a lot more people involved in it [music] now and probably the opportunities are a bit better, but there's more competition. More opportunities, more competition, so really, in a way, we're no better off!

MQ: You've written prolifically since you've retired from medicine -- almost 100 pieces since 2004.

DB: Have I? That's news to me but it sounds about right.

MQ: Is that the release of something pent up or are you naturally prolific?

DB: People tell me that I probably was always prolific. When I was writing things did tend to come out fairly quick. I think I was inhibited during my career and probably things that I should have written many years ago, I'm catching up on now.

MQ: Are there particular triggers or provocations to particular pieces? Does the urge to write come from the same place all the time?

DB: Very often the trigger is a conversation I have with somebody. Unsuspecting performers will have a little chat with me and then a few weeks later they've got a piece. Just for example, Paul Roe, the clarinettist, a month or two ago he did an interview on the CMC website and almost immediately I wrote him a piece, went up to his house and workshopped it. So it's things like that.

MQ: What was it that he had said that prompted you to do that?

DB: He said something about liking to work with composers. He didn't like the idea of a composer just sitting down writing a piece and then handing it over. He liked the idea of collaborating, helping the composer out with technical aspects. Now I can play the clarinet in a kind of way, so I've got a little head start but if I'm writing a clarinet piece there are things that a professional can tell you, sometimes very obvious things I don't think of because I'm not playing all the time. So that simple fact triggered off something in my mind. The idea itself was a million miles away then but the idea was something that couldn't simply be written down, it had to be helped along by a workshopping process.

MQ: Is there a recognisable signature in your music that says 'Derek Ball'?

DB: That's for other people to say. I don't know. I can't hear one.

MQ: You quote Proust on your CMC profile, there's a reference to Maupassant in one of your pieces [Passant de Maupassant de mauvais passant]. Is literature a stimulus for you?

DB: Sometimes literature is a help, words are a help in giving some kind of a shape to something that otherwise would not have a shape. But I think more often there's some sort of vague, abstract idea that shapes music in my case. The Proust and Maupassant, my liking for those writers, is something to do with the musicality of what they do. They're probably more emotional writers than average. They deal in intangible things, like the memories that are triggered by something you can't put your finger on; they're memories that are very hard to grasp as well, they're fleeting, they slip through your fingers.

MQ: What about musical influences for you? Are there touchstones and reference points that you constantly return to?

DB: I've been told that in some of my pieces there's an obvious Stravinsky influence. I can't hear it. Very often when I hear a piece of mind played I can think, 'I didn't realise there was Messiaen or Bartók in there'. So I've no idea what my influences are.

MQ: A piece like XOLOTL clearly has, some might say, a Stravinsky element to it, not least in terms of energy. But it also seems to me that it's quite an elemental piece and it has an almost Brucknerian density to it. Tell me how that work came about, because it's a very striking piece altogether.

DB: Xolotl, which has Gabriel Rosenstock, the poet, reciting this poem to a sort of wind background, came about when Gabriel recited the poem for me and I recorded him reciting the whole poem, which takes about a quarter of an hour. Then I suddenly thought, in an afternoon, I could make a nice background. I got my French horn out and I multi-tracked that and I added on a few other bits and pieces and that's the result and it took about an hour or something like that to do. It was throwaway. There is nothing Bruknerian about that.

MQ: But in terms of scale and density; that sense of something other than the surface of the music...

DB: But isn't that just like it? If I was working at something and saying, 'I must write something with scale and density' I'd probably fail miserably, but I wasn't trying.

MQ: We should explain a little bit about that piece because it's available on the CMC website. Its background is rooted in South America, in Aztec and Inca mythology, but it's also part of a larger piece that you're still working on.

DB: Yes. This is one of my little interests at the moment. One of many half-finished projects. The interest in ancient Mexican culture, Aztec culture, came from Gabriel Rosenstock. He enthused me about it. We're working on a big project that will have singing, dancing, costume, mask, a bit of a everything. It will be a totally unified art form, nothing will be left out. It's a new poem about an Aztec god called Xolotl. It's all rather bizarre, dream-like and probably tequila influenced!

MQ: Do you always need a motivational thing to power the piece along?

DB: I suppose there must always be some sort of trigger in your mind but I think very often it's not. Very often it's just something that has occurred to me, some idea that somebody has put in my mind and sometimes you don't know where it came from. No, I don't always need literature.

MQ: What is it that you want to do with your music? The Proust quote suggests that you regard the composer as an unnoticed observer, standing and watching and reflecting and trying to get at the heart of something rather than just describing the thing in front of him.

DB: Yes, that's an interesting point isn't it? The unnoticed observer. I think quite often composers feel like they're unnoticed; their music isn't played and they're unnoticed. I think most of us would probably write for ourselves, even if we were told, 'You'll never have another piece of music played, we hate your music, we're not going to play it'. You'd keep writing it and yet you're writing for an audience as well, you hope. It's an interesting dual activity. I think that's one of these mysterious things to which there's no sensible answer.

MQ: I'm curious to know whether your experience in psychiatry informs the process of writing?

DB: No, I don't think it informs the process at all. I think it's influenced the material sometimes. Several of my operas have psychiatric subjects, either directly or indirectly. Madness and certain types of psychiatric treatment occur in these operas. So the material yes, the process probably not. I think the psychiatry can help to treat illness but for normal life it doesn't have much to offer.

MQ: When you're trying to work through those issues in your music, is that because you think that music can unlock something that science can't?

DB: I don't know what music does and I don't know what I intend music to do. It's something that happens to me and I think I'm a passive observer of the process rather than an active decision maker.

MQ: And that's your own sense of yourself as a composer?

DB: Yes.

MQ: Is there a notion of isolation or being removed from the world around you?

DB: I wouldn't say so, but I think there's often a feeling of standing back and watching music happen with a feeling of surprise: Did I write that?

MQ: Is that a product of the interrupted career as a composer? I also can hear in your work a kind of duality or dichotomy between the sureness of maturity and the way you handle the material, the way you shape it and move it forward, but also that sheer conviction, passion and vigour of youth, and I wonder if that's trying to short-circuit the space in between to connect where you were 30 years ago with where you are now as a composer?

DB: I didn't realise my music sounded assured! I don't think I feel assured. Probably when I was young I thought about it even less. I think I had a certain facility, I trotted these things out, completely confident that they were masterpieces. I no longer do that. The idea of having facility, of being able to write quickly and easily risks also being facile. I do worry about that a little bit.

MQ: Where, when and how do you write?

DB: Well sometimes I get up at 8am and sit down and wire into it with enthusiasm and work all day, and sometimes I lie in and then I start getting active at midnight and work right through to the sun comes up. I've no pattern. I suppose the only pattern is if I'm enthusiastic about something I'll tend to go at it really hard and not let up and try and get as much done as possible while the enthusiasm lasts.

MQ: Pieces like that, to a degree, write themselves? What about the pieces that don't?

DB: I have occasionally started a piece and then dropped it and just left it and come back to it years later and looked at it and thought, 'Yes, I can see why I dropped it'. But I think for most pieces, even if the energy lapses for a while, when you come back to it more ideas are somehow just there and you continue.

MQ: One of the things you're putting a lot of energy into recently is opera, which you describe yourself as a new convert to.

DB: Yes, just in the last two and a half years, more or less since I retired from medicine. I've become a sudden opera composer.

MQ: And this is without having written particularly much for the voice previously.

DB: Yes that's right. I wrote a few songs, one choral piece and nothing else.

MQ: What was the thing that made you think 'this is a form that I can work in and can say things in'?

DB: There might have been two moments where something happened. One was when I was in the audience at the premiere of Gerald Barry's [The Bitter Tears of] Petra Von Kant and I was thinking to myself 'I'm not an opera composer, I couldn't do anything like that'. Then I had a conversation with the person who became my first librettist and he just made the throwaway comment, 'Wouldn't that be a good operatic subject'. I initially said, 'Well, I don't write operas'.

MQ: Which piece was that?

DB: That's a piece that became Re Your Tears.

MQ: A two-hour piece, a substantial piece.

DB: About two and a half hours in total -- six acts. Only five of the acts are in the [CMC] library probably. It's quite a big piece. It's the first opera I wrote and I just went for it: a full orchestra and eight soloists. The only concession was there's no chorus.

MQ: What was the appeal? Was it working on scale? Was it working with a theatrical dimension?

DB: Pass. It just happened!

MQ: What did you find it was delivering to you as a composer, the process of writing an opera?

DB: I think possibly the idea was to have a vehicle for some material that was in my head that I needed to get rid of. As I said, some of the operas, at least three of them, have psychiatric topics and I think I maybe needed to work out some of the trauma of my psychiatric career. So that's where it went, into these operas.

MQ: A lot of people would say that all opera is psychiatric. Is it a more articulate form to you, not least because it has the voice but also has people interacting?

DB: The problem and the challenge and the strength of opera is the way the story leads the music. It risks shapelessness, musically, all the time because you can't decide where the music goes, you're being dragged by the words and the story -- and I think there are operas like that, just a series of little pieces strung together and you can't see a total structure to them. But of course there's a danger of writing a symphony to which the words are incidental. Both things are terrible pitfalls and if I'm at all conscious of the task of writing an opera it's the task of trying to keep the total structure and yet trying to keep the words and the story always at the forefront.

MQ: So it's a different kind of discipline that appeals to you?

DB: Yes. I like the process of working with a librettist who is writing as the music is being written or just ahead of the music, rather than being presented with a total libretto that you start on from A to Z. Influencing the librettist and constantly talking about it is a lovely process, more rewarding.

MQ: Have you worked with the same librettist on all five operas?

DB: I've worked with three librettists. One on the big opera [XOLOTL], and he's also my librettist for my present fifth opera, which we're in the middle of. I had a different librettist who was a psychiatric colleague, who I worked with on two other operas. The third librettist was myself; I had the interesting process of writing the words and music simultaneously.

MQ: Was that an enjoyable experience?

DB: That was extraordinary. I don't know how it happened. It probably couldn't happen again but the words flowed out in the same way that the music did.

MQ: Why did you make that decision to write your own libretto in that instance?

DB: I can't quite remember but I have a feeling it was probably just a matter of time and opportunity. I didn't have time to look around for somebody who would get the idea. I knew what I wanted and couldn't stop. It's a piece called A Brightness of the Upper Cheek, the one with six Irish songs in Irish. The two characters in it are Tomas Ó Súilleabháin and Seán Ó Riada -- they're the two singers. And Tomas sings his six songs, which he recorded in 1958 on the first Gael Linn LP. So that was an idea that I had known about for several decades and it suddenly struck me, there's a way of treating that.

MQ: The Irish language is important to you because despite its Aztec setting, Xolotl is in Irish.

DB: I think it's a lovely language. I like setting Irish, I like setting French. They're much more beautiful sounding languages than English. English is ugly.

MQ: Are there particular challenges with the Irish language? The vowel sounds, the consonant sounds, don't offer particular problems that you don't find elsewhere?

DB: No, I think they're just much nicer than the ugly vowels and consonants of English.

MQ: And much more emotional?

DB: Yes of course! In my little Irish song opera I've got some sort of a comment about 'if there's an elliptical way of saying something, Irish will find an even more roundabout way of expressing the same idea'.

MQ: Do you like that playfulness or that inscrutability about it?

DB: Yes. I'm not too keen on very direct statements!

MQ: One of the surprising things about your conversion to opera, beyond the fact of it itself, is that none of the five works have been commissioned.

DB: If I waited for commissions then I'd probably be waiting a long time. If somebody does commission me that piece will get written very quickly but equally if I think of something and think, 'I must save that up until a commission comes along', well the piece will not get written.

MQ: What are you working on now? What's next for you?

DB: The most immediate piece is 'number five' opera, which is about the death of Anton Webern. You're probably familiar with the story: 1945, at the end of the war, he was accidentally shot. So this is a poetical treatment of that story and an indirect, non-linear way of telling the story and maybe getting a slightly different angle on it.

MQ: Does it quote Webern's music at all?

DB: It uses some serial techniques of course but no, it doesn't actually quote any. It does use some note rows that are Webernesque but if I was too literal about imitating Webern it would be a very short opera.

MQ: The librettist for this piece?

DB: Is the same as the one for Re Your Tears. He's my serious librettist: David Barry.

MQ: And the piece is called?

DB: The working title at the moment is A Chamber Concerto for Voices.

MQ: And gunshot presumably?

DB: I'm not sure whether there will be a gunshot, it's more poetical than realistic. The title of course echoes Berg, Webern's great friend. There are some similarities with Berg's Chamber Concerto.

MQ: This is due for completion?

DB: Whenever. I think the limiting factor always tends to be my librettists will tend to be slower than I am, so I'm constantly pushing to keep them going.

MQ: Is the Irish opera scene problematic in terms of available companies who can produce or are willing to produce new work?

DB: Probably, in Ireland and the UK, opera companies do their best and new operas do get produced of course. But there's a limited resource. It's a very expensive medium of course. I think if I persuade an opera company to do one of my many operas I'll be very lucky. I keep trying.

MQ: What about recording projects? Any of those in the pipeline?

DB: Nothing official. I do record performance pieces, electro-acoustic pieces and other performance pieces every so often. I'd be over optimistic if I said what I was planning to do, but there are one or two things coming up.

MQ: But we can be confident it's not going to be another 30-year gap?

DB: Oh no!

Derek Ball was interviewed on video by Michael Quinn in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 15 November 2007.

The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily those of the Contemporary Music Centre.