In the late 1940s he decided to devote himself to composition fulltime and settled in Dublin, where he has lived ever since. For many years he was Professor of Composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and he has been a director of the Ennis/IMR0 Composition Summer School for the past nine years. Apart from his teaching, he has made a considerable contribution to the development of music in Ireland through his work on behalf of the Music Association of Ireland, the Association of Irish Composers, the Dublin Twentieth-century Music Festival and the Irish Music Rights Organisation. He is a foundermember of Aosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored body honouring creative artists, which has fifteen composer members.
His compositional style is self confessedly eclectic and his large output, while biased towards vocal, operatic and chamber music rather than large-scale orchestral works, is very varied. His opus numbers are now well past the hundred and his compositions include six operas, two violin concertos, a viola concerto, two symphonies, two string quartets, several song cycles, much choral and chamber music, and a number of excursions into electronics.
Over the years he has developed a special relationship with Danish artists and much of his music has been performed in Denmark. His opera Grinning at the Devil on the life of Karen Blixen, with a libretto by one of Denmark's leading writers, Elsa Gress, received 20 sold-out performances in Copenhagen in 1989. He has also written incidental music for several of Gress's plays. His children's opera, The King of the Golden River, is scheduled for performance there next year and his puppet play The Little Mermaid will be brought to Dublin in October by Jytte Abildstrøm's Theatre, as part of this year's Dublin Theatre Festival.
'I think I always knew I'd got to be a composer; I was composing dreadful stuff at the age of ten. There was no reason in the world why I should ever have started composing; I was musical, but why I should have been I don't know. There was no particular interest in music in the home. When I came to Dublin it was a question of burning my boats. If I was going to give up my job and be a composer I wanted to make a complete break and I'm very glad I did, although it was very difficult. I never wanted to go back to England, not for a minute. Getting away and being on my own has been a great help.
At the moment I'm writing a choral piece, Animalphabet (Op. 131, 1992), for the National Chamber Choir to take around the schools. It's an animal alphabet going through a lot of strange and exotic creatures. I'm trying to write something funny, which is of course dangerous because very few people ever succeed. It's been gestating in the subconscious for some time. That always happens with me; the subconscious mind is sorting things out gradually and you can't hurry it. Sometimes the music comes very quickly and sometimes it's slow, and of course when it does come it's so obvious that you can't imagine why you didn't see it before. Sometimes I work at the piano, but I have tried the experiment of refusing to use the piano. For instance, apart from the vocal section, I wrote my Second Symphony (Op. 64, 1975) sitting at a table and I wouldn't go near a piano. I wanted to see if I could.
I enjoy what I'm writing at the time, whatever it is. While I'm doing it, it's the most enjoyable thing I could be doing. I don't revise much; I find it very difficult. I think I've only done it in a major way twice. For me, in general, once I've finished a work I lose interest in it. It's gone and the next piece is nearly always totally different; I'm dealing with a different set of problems and I'm no longer interested in the problems of the last work. Once a thing has been written you're a different person, another reason why I don't like tinkering with old scores.
I think I get more out of writing the piece than hearing it performed. The most important thing is that the performers should like it. If other people like it, that's a fringe benefit, really, but if the performers like it that means it's properly written. When I've heard a work of mine for the first time I've often thought the performers made the music sound much better than it really is, but I've never been very surprised at what comes out. It does matter whether or not something achieves a performance, though. You don't feel it exists until it's been performed; it's not real, it's just blobs on paper. But you are dependent on the brute fact that somehow has got to pay for the performance.'
'I always have specific performers in mind when I'm writing. I love writing vocal music, and in general it has been written because I've liked a particular singer's voice. Jane Manning was one example; also Dorothy Dorow, whom I met because she was working with the Danish accordionist Mogens Ellegaard, with whom I was also working at the time, and they asked me to write a piece for them. I've written several other things for Dorothy since then. For me, the only way to write for the voice is as though I've never written for it before, going back to square one every time, re-thinking the whole business of how to use the voice. I'm very conditioned by whoever is going to sing the music -- their strengths, how powerful the voice is -- and that makes a big difference to the end product.
There are occasions when I've had an abstract idea which I've wanted to turn into music. One, for instance, is my Second String Quartet (Op. 126, 1991), which is entirely abstract ideas, but it was written with a particular quartet in mind, although it hasn't been performed yet. It came about as I was walking around Killiney Hill. I was thinking about wave patterns and winds and things growing, and it came out of those. I always think about structure from the beginning. It's a very hard piece technically, I think. It's very dense, which surprised me because I don't write very dense music. I don't know why that happened, it just came about that way and I was rather startled, but it was what I wanted to write at the time. Whether I shall like it when I hear it, I don't know.'
'The first opera I wrote was for children, The Hunting of the Snark (Op. 8, 1963). That was a kind of make-or-break thing, because I had been working away, writing music which no-one wanted, and then Lady Dorothy Mayer commissioned this from me, so I thought "I'll make this as good as I know how, and if it doesn't work, I'll give up". But it did work and people liked it. I don't know if I really would have stopped writing. Perhaps I wouldn't have been able to. You don't really have much choice.
Twelfth Night (Op. 30,1969), my first full-length opera, was next. That was put on in 1969 at the Wexford Opera Festival. Letters to Theo (Op. 92, 1982) followed, based on the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother. The moment I read the letters -- they are immensely moving -- I had the idea of turning them into an opera. That was performed in the Peppercanister Church (St Stephen's, Mount St Crescent, Dublin) in 1984.
The next one was the Karen Blixen piece, Grinning at the Devil (Op. 101, 1986), and there I had a tremendous asset in that the libretto was written by Elsa Gress, who was probably Denmark's finest writer and who was a personal friend of Blixen, so the auspices were very good for that. I also had very fine singers in it.
Since then I've written another two-act opera intended mainly for children, called The King of the Golden River (Op. 111, 1987); I hope that will be done in Copenhagen next year. I've now got another opera up my sleeve, for which I've written the libretto but as yet no music. It will be a full-length opera called Virata, based on a short story by Stefan Zweig, who wrote the libretti of some of Richard Strauss's operas, among other things. The story is a sort of oriental mysticism thing about a famous general who discovers that war is not a good thing. It was suggested to me by one of my friends in Copenhagen, Jytte Abildstrøm who runs the theatre where I work there. Once I start writing the opera it will take about eight or nine months, to the exclusion of everything else, including writing letters and digging the garden!
I need the libretto first in an opera. Sometimes I've written my own, sometimes somebody else has written it. But I need to know how I'm going to shape the music, because nowadays I don't think you can get away with just a recitative and aria structure, you've got to think the whole piece through. A short story is usually about the right length for an opera; in the average novel there's far too much material. On the stage a story has got to be comparatively simple; if it isn't, no-one's going to know what's going on. This is why I think, if you're looking for a subject, you should choose a story that people already know'.
'My violin concerto Pearl and Unicorn (Op. 120, 1989) came about because I liked Alan Smale's playing so much. He's a very remarkable artist; he never makes an ugly sound. The title is a quotation from a verseplay by the Elizabethan poet George Peel: 'She that in chains of pearl and unicorn bears at her train the ancient golden world'. With something like that I am thinking of a mood rather than a programmatic scheme. Extramusical ideas always feed in; absolutely anything, like the weather, often something I've read, something growing in the garden. I think we all have our individual ways of working and one man's way is probably totally different from somebody else's. But I suppose for a lot of creators, for want of a better word, there is a stimulus from unexpected sources. It's a curious thing, but when something does spark you off, somehow half a dozen other things come along related to it.'
'The standard of the composition students coming up now is extraordinarily high. This year at the Ennis Summer School we had eleven students working on string quartets, a medium none of them had written for before, and they all produced very valid quartet movements which were totally different from one another and very adventurous. The performers (the Degani String Quartet) were delighted and very surprised. The students are bright and we are somehow able to bully them into working incredibly hard. Interest in composition is growing and these people are very serious about it; it isn't just a hobby. When I'm working with students I always say, "I'm not interested in making you write my music, I want to find out the music that you want to write". The whole essence of the school is that we are trying to teach them how music is being written now, not how it was written fifty years ago. It's no good writing strict sonata forms and fugues these days, no professional is interested in playing that kind of music. This awful question that you see in examination papers, "continue these bars in the style of Chopin or Mozart" -- that has nothing at all to do with music.'
'It is incredible that the powers that be -- in Leinster House, for instance - seem to be totally tone deaf. Nobody who has money at their disposal in this country is remotely interested in real music, and that includes RTE. I get fed up to the back teeth with hearing people on RTE staff interviewing pop singers or folk singers and there is never anything about real music. Why doesn't money go to music? I heard a BBC broadcast on Radio 3 when Dublin was cultural capital of Europe, talking about what was happening here. Music wasn't mentioned. Why isn't anybody in authority standing up for new Irish music, which is as good as music being written anywhere? I think it's purely because there are no votes in it. Politicians don't care whether there is any music or not. Why doesn't somebody take the stuff abroad? You hear so much about Irish literature and painting, sculpture and poetry.
I would like a huge sum of money to make CDs of contemporary Irish music; properly done, with very good, beautifully-designed booklets to go with them. Hundreds and hundreds of these things would have to be given away to conductors and performers to show them what is available. Unless you can go abroad armed with a library of CDs which you are prepared to give away, it is very difficult to do much. Even in countries which have no money, they shower you with CDs. Another thing I would do is to send the National Symphony Orchestra abroad with a programme entirely of modern music.
One of the worst things we composers labour under is that if you get a second performance of anything you're very surprised. You've worked for seven or eight months on a big orchestral work and it's given one hearing, quite often not a public performance, just a recording for broadcast. My Viola Concerto (Op. 122, 1989, recorded by Rivka Golani), Pearl and Unicorn (recorded by Alan Smale), neither of those has had a public hearing. Everybody says, "oh yes that was nice. Now what are you going to write?". If you're in, say, Germany the piece would be taken all around the country.
A composer must be prepared to work unbelievably hard for many years with absolutely no reward. I wrote music for fifteen years in Dublin before anybody would look at any of it. You've got to be able to take any number of knocks, which you go on getting all through your life until you die. You get just as big knocks when you're seventy as you do when you're twenty.'
Biographical information, works lists and recordings by James Wilson are available from the Contemporary Music Centre.
