CD cover

Liner note for CMC's promotional CD, Contemporary Music from Ireland, Volume Ten, written by Bernard Clarke.

Copyright ©2011 Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland.

See also

The Map is Not the Territory: Contemporary Irish Music Today

Two of the best definitions of poetry come from Robert Frost: 'It's what gets lost in translation', and, 'Poetry? It's the kind of thing poets write'. Music then, if we play four hands with Robert Frost, is the kind of thing musicians play and composers write. But what is composition? And how do composers write?

Despite their differences, all the works on this disc demolish the widespread notion that music contains some essential meaning, or that music is simply a reflection of the society in which it was produced. Above all, that music has been following some super narrative, some master history that unfolds logically and chronologically: loud fanfares, the curtains sweep back, and as the stage blacks out we hear John Cage laughing his head off...

More and more musicians are choosing to work in not one, but several areas of new music, building bridges between genres and spreading the word.

We are on the knife-edge of sound and word, note and letter, where poetic meter and musical meter do not solely account for a piece's effect. How do these pieces have to be heard in order for the music to cast its spell? What musical mechanisms, musical rituals, have to be in place in order to lure the listener into an audible-only wonderland in which signs and dots, digits and tracks, are brimming with “meaning”? Lost in translation is right.

One could argue that the musical languages here were there before the composers; that they, the composers, grew up surrounded by them; that they, the musical languages, colonised them.

But that suggests a kind of musical disempowerment of the Irish composer, posits the Irish musician as a warped traveling player, one who wears the scars of the disadvantaged. Romantic, no doubt – even existential – but this road quickly leads to shamrocks and leprechauns and a jaunting car forever clip-clopping after courting musicians writing safely under the eye of the clock.

I was at this point when I pressed play and Garret Sholdice's Sonate suddenly entered my world – bliss. It was like this when Ann Cleare broke over the morning demolishing all preconceptions with the sheer force of her piece; it's there, that unease, as I squat inside Amanda Feery's rattling clarinet; or daub myself in Ed Bennett's colours for an invisible cartoon; or bend to fix my ears against Ailís Ní Ríain's sirens; or try to resist the transfiguring ecstasy at the heart of Enda Bates...

Jacques Attali in Noise: The Political Economy of Music writes:

'For twenty five centuries Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing... Now we must learn to judge a society by its noise.'

Well, what do you hear? The digital age demands and technology has provided us with the means to control our aural environment in ways which were unimaginable even a century ago. So why, in an otherwise (mostly) rationalistic age, does music – perhaps the most ephemeral of cultural forms – matter so much?

I don't know, but Prehistoric cave paintings, classical Greek amphitheatres, Gothic cathedrals, the acoustic geography of Irish villages or American cities, modern music reproduction, even classic novels such as Alice in Wonderland are only a click away.

Click here: the digital era facilitates the audio recording of texts. Click here: the digital age has ushered in CMC's online access to Irish composers' scores and recordings. Click here: the whole world is a Podcast and space travel is USB travel.

It is also weightless. Brian Irvine's orchestral sound world and its uncanny hidden affinities whirls here; it is this same ether where Neil O'Connor turns sound inside-out; where Donal Sarsfield waits, listens and records between the cracks; where Adam Melvin can seize the listener's attention in a music that is as physical as it is aural. All the composers here make you wonder if today space has become more important to music than time.

For all that, it is not in the looking glass; it is through the looking glass that this disc can spread a little light in our uncertain world. And for all the clicks and mortar this is the still essence of what we do. Welcome to the world of Contemporary Music from Ireland, Volume 10...

Bernard Clarke is a writer and broadcaster. He presents a weekly contemporary music programme, Nova, on RTÉ lyric fm.

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