Michael Quinn: We're sitting in the North Down & Ards Institute where you teach music as part of the music technology and performing arts course, and I'm struck by the irony of that given that you didn't have a formal music education yourself.

Greg Caffrey: It's very strange how I got into the formal side of musical education. My primary school -- if I can go back that far! -- was a very creative environment. In fact all we really did was paint and draw and write poetry. I seem to remember that pupils in the class disappeared when it came up to the transfer exam because parents were so concerned that they would not do well from an academic standpoint. But when I transferred to secondary school I found that it was a very different environment indeed. This would have been early- to mid-1970s, an inner-city school in Belfast, which was actually in an area that was like a war zone at that time. There was an army fortress just opposite it. I think that the impression I got, at least in retrospect when I think about this, I think that the teachers' role was more to keep the students off the streets and in a classroom somewhere, as much as it was to deliver any English lesson, maths lesson or, in fact, music lesson. We had no music whatsoever at secondary school. There was a music class but nothing ever happened in it. I don't come from a family that has a formal musical background but they certainly played records. My eldest brother would have listened to progressive rock, Hawkwind and heavy rock like Led Zeppelin and that kind of thing. My other brother was more into David Bowie and Roxy music. So that was going on in the house and my father would play records as well occasionally. So music was always there but just not at a formal level.

MQ: So were you just listening to it? Did you want to be involved?

GC: My aunt had a cheap guitar, which she passed on to me. So I learned to play that and I took a few lessons initially, just to learn a few chords. At the end of the 1970s, when I was getting towards the end of my secondary school education, there was this new wave that was sweeping through and all the prog. rock of my eldest brother, for example, was being swept away and dismissed as unimportant and overindulgent. There were a lot of new, exciting bands coming through. In fact there was a very do-it-yourself ethos in that period as well, where young people were almost encouraged to go out and get themselves an electric guitar somehow, plug it in, that kind of thing.

MQ: At what point did the notion of contemporary music and classical music present itself to you?

GC: I think probably I discovered contemporary music through my guitar teacher much later on. When I started playing rock music in bands and doing gigs and that kind of thing, I suppose there was some point where I felt I would quite like to learn how to play this instrument properly. Which in retrospect seems silly because in some ways I really hark back to those early days where you perform with your friends in a youth club or something like that. You're playing and it's in the middle of January and your hands are blue and the only thing you've got to keep you company is a big bottle of cider and you're all sitting enjoying yourselves. That doesn't really happen very much in my musical life now where you're working with individuals to that sort of intensity. You can't really play the guitar and not come into contact with the contemporary repertoire.

MQ: Can you recall the moment at which you moved from interest in performance to an interest in composing?

GC: Well I wrote some songs very early on when I used to play in bands, just pop songs. Then I got a place in Queen's [University, Belfast], which I was amazed at. I spent the first couple of months at Queens pinching myself, not really believing that I'd been given a place there and that perhaps I didn't belong here [in Queen's]. I remember sitting in the library looking out at the lawns and going, 'This is unbelievable'. But in fact I did belong there because a lot of the students were perhaps A-level students who had elected to do music simply because they'd got a reasonable grade but didn't have any particular interest, as far as I could see. Whereas I was probably the annoying student who held the lecturers back at the end of the their lesson when they wanted to go and have a cup of tea or something.

MQ: So did you have a notion of the kind of composing you wanted to do?

GC: Not really, no. I took composition classes; Piers Hellawell was the composition tutor there at the time (and still is). I also had a dual interest in contemporary classical music and jazz music at that stage. I also still liked performing, so [was] kind of torn between the whole thing of composing and performing, and if I was going to perform was it going to be jazz music or was I going to try and play classical music? I always knew that I had to specialise in something and I guess it was probably not until I embarked on a PhD after graduating that I really started to think that composition was perhaps the way forward.

MQ: Where do you think the centre of gravity of your music is? What's the crux of it for you?

GC: I think right at the centre of my music is, I hope, a strong feeling of fun and enjoyment. I think it's easy to lose that as you go through the formal process -- I've seen that happen in fact. I was talking earlier about playing and practicing with your band in youth clubs when I was very young and very inexperienced but we had a real commitment there that you rarely see. You rarely see classical musicians with that kind of commitment. It does exist, of course, there are plenty of musicians out there who do nothing but exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, perhaps not in a cold youth club with a bottle of cider.

MQ: The jazz element in your music is difficult for some people because it does have the contrariness of being unfixed and flexible and fluid. As a composer do you like the idea there's an element of freedom left to the performers?

GC: Absolutely. Many of the performers that I've worked with will tell you that if they suggest changes in the music that often I'm very keen to implement them. That for me is the process, where the piece of music comes to life. There is a tradition in classical music where a composer writes a score and the score is the thing by which all the value judgements on that piece of music are made; there's a whole history of analysing scores to determine how important that music is. Of course it's just a set of instructions at the end of the day. I feel very strongly that until a player adopts a piece and starts to work with and give a voice to the piece that it can't be called music. So that aspect that you've talked about is very important to me: working with a performer in trying to mould the piece after it's written.

MQ: How do you build that into a piece? In the process of writing are you conscious of doing certain things that create that space?

GC: I have written pieces that have improvised elements. The best example of that would be the Child's Play pieces, but of course they were performed by my own group, so it's a slightly different thing. But I think that rather than write that kind of thing in at the score level, the best thing we can do is to strike up a proper relationship with the people who are going to be performing your music. Like, for example, the relationship that I would have with Gerard McChrystal [saxophonist] or Aisling Agnew [flautist] and Matthew McAllister [guitarist], where we have spent some time rehearsing pieces and actually invested in the music to the extent where they played not once or twice but quite a few times so that the music has time to develop. They have input.

MQ: The relationship with Gerard McChrystal seems fruitful. Recently there's been both live and recorded performances of Pluck Blow (and there's been a sequel to that [Pluck Blow II]). And Honk, of course, which is on the new CMC disc, Contemporary Music From Ireland, Volume 7. You describe that piece as "playfully aggressive". Tell me a little bit more about that and how it came about.

GC: Well first of all Gerard is a prime example of the kind of performer that I'm talking about, [one] who invests heavily in any composer whose music he decides to perform. In fact he just rang me up one day and he'd been given some of my music by Craig Ogden, who I'd met in the Contemporary Music Centre. He seemed tremendously enthusiastic on the phone, but often people are tremendously enthusiastic on the phone but when I met Gerard I realised that he was someone who genuinely wanted to invest in my music. And he's continued to do that: he had plans to record the album that he's just released with Meridian Records, which is actually called Pluck Blow.

MQ: With Craig Ogden?

GC: Yes. I have some studio equipment in the house and I suggested that they come down there, stay for the weekend and that we get an engineer in and do a demo. So that's what we did and we were able to work on not just my material but he was able to perform some other material that he was interested in and we had a great weekend eating, with some nice wine and beer, and lots of nice music. I'm pretty sure it was during that weekend that Gerard said to me that he would really like a piece and so Honk materialised perhaps a year, a year and a half after that. It's just one of those suggestions where he mentioned it and it stuck in the back of my mind and I always knew that I would write something. It turned out to be a piece for soprano saxophone and piano, although I have a feeling that initially he asked me for a solo soprano saxophone piece. I'm not quite sure how the piano part developed.

MQ: Was Gerard's interest a typical trigger for you to write?

GC: The trigger could be lots of things. The trigger might be a performer just simply registering some interest in a piece. It may not be a formal commission as such, for me it could come from anywhere. I swim a lot at the minute and I could write a piece this year about swimming, for example. It doesn't have to be [a] high-brow subject for me. For example, I wrote a chamber orchestra piece [Spike], quite a large piece, that lasts about 40 minutes and it's based on the nonsense poetry of Spike Milligan. I've another set of piano miniatures [Six Illustrations musicales du Petit Nicolas] that's based on a French children's book called Le Petit Nicolas, which is a hilarious book that French kids would read, up to about 12 or 13 years old. So inspiration can come from anywhere. It might come from some lofty subject but it's more likely to come from some, dare I say it, lower-brow subject matter.

MQ: It's interesting in Child's Play and in the Spike series the way in which you use the voice, it's literally narration.

GC: That's right, yes.

MQ: In 'Reciting Spike' the voice becomes an instrument, it's not just something around which you build, a useable frame.

GC: The voice in Spike was notated, the rhythm was notated. I'm not sure that really worked terribly well. The recording that exists for that was cobbled together by me. (This is another story but it's another aspect of the DIY nature of what I do.) I mean I needed to have a recording of that piece and so I got lots of friends together and people from the Ulster Orchestra gave up their time and we recorded it. If I was working with an orchestra tomorrow with that piece I might suggest that the narrator just ad lib as much as possible and this comes back to what we were talking about earlier: there's space in every piece of music to bend things around at the end.

MQ: You've recently had two new and very different works on very different scales performed. One with the Ulster Orchestra, Theophilus in Space, and one for the Smith Quartet, Lapse, which they'll be touring in April. Tell me about the Ulster Orchestra piece because that was quite a specific commission, it had to relate to Mozart.

GC: It was a very difficult brief when Simon Taylor from [the] BBC rang me up initially. I thought, 'How could I possibly do this?' I imagine it would be difficult for any composer, being asked to write something that's supposed to relate in some way to a Mozart Violin Concerto in this case. So my response, perhaps predictably given what I've already said in this interview, was light-hearted. I started to think about what would happen... The Voyager space program sent some documents into outer space. I don't know if you know anything about this but they actually had a number of records on there, I think one of them was the Queen of the Night aria by Mozart. So I invented this fantasy about a fire onboard the spacecraft and most of the materials were damaged before the ship's mechanism could extinguish the blaze and then the spacecraft, as it was moving into another solar system or something, some nonsense like that, was intercepted by extraterrestrial space travellers and their musicologists tried to put this together, in the way that we would perhaps try to put fragments of some alien music together if we were to uncover it. Then they beamed it back to Earth and this naïve composer picked it up because a satellite dish had been knocked out of kilter the night before by some gale force winds. Then I registered it as my own intellectual property. So it was this kind of fantasy that I created in order to disguise the fact that I really was never going to be able to write a piece to sit alongside a Mozart concerto. That was the idea, that was the inspiration. Again, not very high-brow but that's the story behind the piece.

MQ: Did you enjoy working on it with a full orchestra?

GC: I absolutely did. So much so that I would love the BBC to lift the phone again and engage me tomorrow for another piece. Who knows, what might happen? I did get an opportunity to work flexibly with the orchestra as well because I had overwritten the piece and during rehearsal was able to take a whole minute out of the middle of the piece. The conductor was quite astounded by this.

MQ: And of course there's Lapse with the Smith Quartet that we mentioned a moment ago. The experience of working on the scale of a chamber-sized piece: does that allow you a greater density of expression or greater intimacy?

GC: I think you can afford to be more playful in your writing. When you do get into the rehearsal situation you're dealing with the players on a one-to-one level, first-name terms and that kind of thing, whereas when you're dealing with an orchestra you're working through a conductor, which is a very different experience and there are many more personalities to negotiate. It's a much less flexible medium obviously. So the quartet medium, or the quintet as it was in this case with Gerard on saxophone, is more flexible in that sense. We didn't spend an awful lot of time working on the piece but the Smiths are such a great group that they can put a piece like that together ridiculously quickly anyway.

MQ: And it's a piece that they're returning to.

GC: Yes. They're playing it four times on the northern leg of their Irish tour, so that's [in] Omagh, Portstewart, Belfast and Downpatrick.

MQ: One of the significant things recently was you spent some time in Paris.

GC: It was in a place called the Cité Internationale des Arts, a massive residency for artists of all disciplines. In fact there are, I think, something like 300 artists in the place at any given time. It's a brilliant place because you can be living next door to someone who makes films and on the other side of you you've got, perhaps, a flute player and beneath you you have someone who does installation work. So there [are] great opportunities for interacting with different disciplines, which is something I'm very interested in. I was able to work with a lot of different artists over there, particularly a Swedish artist called Helena Norell, who was an abstract artist and [also] does some video work. So we were able to work on some video and another large project as well.

The experience of living in Paris for a period of three months was really quite overwhelming from a creative perspective. Returning home from that, there is a bit of a creative space in your life all of a sudden. So before I came home I made a pact with myself that I would try and see as much as I could. You know how it is sometimes, we do have something going on in northern Ireland here, a performance or something in an art gallery or whatever and you choose not to go and I felt that towards the end of my Paris trip that I couldn't afford to say no to anything. Because there's so few opportunities I would have to go to as much as possible. I hope I'm keeping to that.

MQ: The experience of being a composer in the north [of Ireland] is problematic, would you say?

GC: Well it's problematic for the reason that I've mentioned: the absence of opportunities through performance by a professional group, with the exception of the Ulster Orchestra. (There are exceptions: Brian Irvine has his own music group obviously.) That's a difficulty and it's for that very reason that Brian has his own ensemble because he has the same DIY attitude and his philosophy is I won't sit around and wait for people to play my music; in fact if I perform it myself with my own group it will be better anyway. I would go along with that and that was the reason why I put my own group together and that's the reason, undoubtedly, why Ed Bennett has his own group too.

MQ: Are you the composer that you wanted to be?

GC: No, I don't think so. In fact I've only been composing for just over 10 years. I consider myself a young composer. I know I'm not actually very young anymore and in fact if you're over 40 you tend to be excluded from a lot of opportunities as a composer. I guess people feel that you should be fairly developed as a composer by the time you're 40. But I came to things a lot later than most people, as you know. Yes, I've got a long way to go I think. I listen to the CMC disc [Contemporary Music from Ireland, Volume Seven] that's just released and there's a piece on that by Gráinne Mulvey, the orchestral piece [Akanos], which I just think is the most amazing piece. It's one of the most fantastic pieces of orchestral writing that I've heard in ages and I'm so pleased that it's an Irish composer that's done that. So I listen to a piece like that and I think if I could write a piece like that I'll be happy. Undoubtedly when I write a piece like that, then I'll be looking for something else as equally challenging...

Greg Caffrey was interviewed on video by Michael Quinn in SERC, Bangor, Co. Down, on 8 February 2008.

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