ON the piano is the manuscript of a work in progress, commissioned for performance by the pianist Hugh Tinney. It is Rahu's Rounds, based on a Hindu myth about eclipses. Rahu is a Hindu demon caught stealing the elixir of life by the sun and moon. They report him to Vishnu who is very angry and decapitates Rahu, although not before he has taken some of the elixir. His head, therefore, has become immortal and he is able to wreak vengeance upon the sun and moon by pursuing them around the heavens and swallowing them when he catches them. 'It's an explosive piece', says Raymond Deane. 'Hugh Tinney has the technical apparatus for it. It's proving to be a big job.'

Big jobs and big events are presently looming in abundance on the horizon for a composer whose biggest draw on public attention recently has been prose, not premieres. Deane's essay 'In praise of begrudgery' for Music Network's Boydell Papers so represents the concept of the truth hurting, that copies were prudently only distributed to guests from the music establishment as they departed from the launch dinner. The rest of 1998, however, has Deane tied up with all the things gratifying to a composer's heart: commissions, premieres and recordings.

As well as the Tinney piece, he is completing a work for the Vanbrugh String Quartet to be premiered at this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry in July. He is also working on an album of children's pieces for flute and piano commissioned by the Contemporary Music Centre. Last month, Deane was in Manchester for a performance of his wind and percussion piece Alembic at the ISCM World Music Days. He is involved in a CD recording of Dekatriad with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and another CD of his chamber works, both on the Black Box label; the Marco Polo disc of his orchestral works is still at the master tape stage. He has also completed an Opera Theatre Company commission which should lead to a performance next year. It's a 'short full-length opera' based on a Chinese ghost story and requiring four singers and seven instruments. 'It's kind of a feel-good piece which for some reason I wanted to write at the time.' Deane is hoping that OTC will tour the opera around Ireland and possibly also abroad.

What with CDs, premieres, new commissions and growing international recognition, Deane has come a long way since his birth on Achill Island in the West of Ireland in 1953. From the age of ten he lived in Dublin and subsequently London, Basel, Cologne, Berlin and Paris. He was educated at the College of Music in Dublin and at University College Dublin. He studied composition with Gerald Bennett, Stockhausen and Isang Yun and his output includes many orchestral, chamber, vocal and choral works, as well as the chamber opera The Poet and his Double.

As our conversation progresses it becomes clear that the composers he admires most are mould-breakers of one kind or another, including some less obvious figures from the margins whom Deane considers alongside famous innovators like Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Stockhausen. These include Charles Ives and John Field, and he describes Gerald Barry as one of the best composers anywhere, not just in Ireland. So it is that, with his great interest in musical pioneering, he is understandably cautious when unraveling his own creative lineage.

'I come from the European serial tradition. That's how I grew up. Literally. I was already passionately devoted to that stuff in my early teens. I went to Darmstadt when I was sixteen. Stockhausen was a huge influence on me, but that doesn't mean that I have written much music in which I have imitated Stockhausen. I have used formal procedures which are kind of gleaned from his work or which are distantly related to procedures which he uses. I have only just started listening to Stockhausen again, generally his earlier pieces. The music is incredible and wonderful, but it doesn't do for me what it used to. So I've kind of drawn away from him. Berio is a great hero of mine, and Xenakis. These are the composers with whom I feel some kind of affinity.'

We arrive at the oft-contended issue of artistic autonomy and whether or not a piece of music can stand on its own or needs to be considered in its historical environment. For someone interested in composers who change the course of music history, there can only be one answer. 'Everything I hear I listen to historically. You can't divorce one from the other. The fact that Ives is such an extraordinary pioneer is something I am very conscious of when I'm listening to a work. If I'm listening to Three Places in New England and someone says, "Oh that was written the year before last", then I wouldn't have the slightest interest in it. But because it was first performed in 1914, I find it absolutely staggering.

'I don't know to what extent things I listen to influence me. Probably everything that I like, and a few that I hate as well. Right at the beginning of my listening days I loved Benjamin Britten. Then I didn't listen to him at all for twenty years. Now in the past couple of years I've started listening to Britten again and realised that he still packs a great punch for me. Only now am I listening to Szymanowski and other people I had just ignored, a whole tonal tradition that continued all the time Schoenberg was at work. I've started re-relating myself to all of that, but I will never become a tonal composer.

'I don't use serial techniques. I am a very ad hoc person when it comes to techniques. I use whatever technique is appropriate to the material I'm working with. Some of my pieces, the Tinney piano piece for example, are definitely derived from serial thinking in some sort of way, but I don't use things like tone rows. It tends to be more harmonic. Or I'll use small cells that I can give vertically and horizontally and in inversions and so on, the way dodecaphonic composers use them. I use lots of other techniques, and I use tonal material in my music: major and minor chords, dominant sevenths. But I don't use a tonal system. And I use atonal material. I use just about any material that comes to hand.'

With such an openness to the intake of ideas, materials, influences and techniques, I wondered was there a corresponding openness in the transmission of his creativity to the public? Or, like a Swiss composer I heard speaking on this topic recently, did he just compose for himself, to satisfy his own creative drive and aptitude, and remain essentially indifferent to public perception of his work?

'I think about the public all the time', Deane replies, 'in that I try to write the best music that I am capable of. I don't think any composer worth his or her salt really modifies what he or she would normally do as a result of thinking that the public would not like it. I think that a composer whose work is totally inaccessible to anybody is just a bad composer. You are writing music for yourself, but you are a human being, basically not that different from anybody else. And in a sense, a composer writing for himself or herself is writing for a human being outside. Because when you listen to your own music -- even while you are writing it -- you become another person. You become the listener. And in that sense the listener is always implicit in what you're doing, regardless of what you think about the public.

'Composers who deliberately write what they think is accessible -- they are writing "for the public", which is to say "the public" that is there at that particular moment. And something that is accessible to that public may be regarded by the public in twenty years as just so much drivel. Whereas the composer who sits down and doesn't think about the public at all and writes the best that he or she is capable of, may well find -- maybe not immediately -- but in twenty years' time that there is a public there that can appreciate it.'

In twenty years' time Ireland's music culture could well be greatly changed from the way it is at present. A recent increase in talk concerning major projects such as a purpose-built conservatoire and a proper opera house is given an optimistic but qualified welcome from the champion of begrudgery.

'A conservatoire is essential as long as it has a faculty of composition, as long as things like orchestration and conducting are taught as courses, as long as performers are obliged to take courses in the performance of contemporary music and as long as these things are linked in with the faculty of composition, as is the case in the institutions which I attended, which really are conservatoires. If you don't have new music fully involved, music is a museum culture, totally dead, not a living culture. I mean, you still have musical life, but evolving around music in the past.

'Of course, the whole process of creating a living, musical culture has to begin right at the beginning: in schools. And the reason why -- apart from British imperialism and the rest of it -- we haven't got real musical life in this country is because music has never played an important part in education and most of the people of the establishment are themselves very badly educated musically.'

His concerns for opera are much the same. 'I attended an Aosdána meeting to discuss whether we should push for the building of a magnificent new opera house. I asked if this opera house would just be devoted to the interests of nineteenth-century Italians and Germans? Someone said (music was not his discipline), "Oh no, we could also have seventeenth-century Italians and Germans." This was said seriously!

'The last time I went to one of Opera Ireland's producctions was in 1979. I just so resent the fact that they turn out the same stuff all the time. I'm afraid I have pretty negative feelings about the Wexford Opera Festival as well. They have put on operas down the years which I wouldn't have minded going to, but I've never gone on principal. I think it's a very irresponsible venture that gets too much public funding. The latest artistic director is recorded as stating that he "will do twentieth-century operas -- not contemporary stuff, of course", reassuring everyone. But I think myself that these people are getting enough public funding that they should be compelled to do something from the host country and stop turning it into a museum.'

Our speculation about Ireland's musical future has drawn us back to the present. It now leads inexorably into the past in an effort to uncover the root causes of a musical condition which Deane describes as 'pretty disastrous.'

'Maybe there is some historical necessity for its being this way for a time. The thing about classical music and composition in this country is that for various reasons we turned our backs on all kinds of revolutions that were taking place early in this century and later on in the middle of the century and they all passed us by. So not alone have we no classical tradition in Ireland, but we have no radical classical tradition. We've had composers writing classical music, but they've tended to be fairly traditional. And I'd say that most of those composers would have been fairly unfamiliar in general with what was going on and couldn't have given a damn either way. Nowadays the situation has changed a bit. That vacuum is still there, but there are more composers -- mobility is greater and travel is easier -- who are perfectly well aware of what is going on.

'But the nature of Irish composers' involvement in what is going on is slightly different from that of German or English composers. I would imagine that there would be a greater sense of distance from it, less of a sense of having to participate in something, even something that you may at the same time perfectly well appreciate. So I'd say that what characterises Irish composers today -- good and bad -- would be that kind of knowledgeable distance from trends.

'Somebody like Gerald Barry: you can't really characterise Barry's music in terms of any of the things that are going on in Europe and the United States. He's very well aware of these things. But he took a great distance from his teachers, he never bothered to do anything that they particularly wanted him to do. And I would say that that's a very successful aspect of what I'm talking about, somebody who has done his own thing. And I think that kind of independent-mindedness is one of the things that characterises him. But I think, for better or for worse, it is very typical of other Irish composers too.

'Irish composers haven't the same compulsion from the past as Germans. Nor have Americans, if you think of Gottschalk, even before Ives. They were fortunate that they didn't have a neighbouring imperial power foisting its stodgy, pseudo-Germanic Victorian music down their throats. Somebody like Ives was completely free to do absolutely anything he wanted; he was in a position that some people are in now in this country.

'Which is why I often wonder what would have happened if John Field hadn't stayed in Russia, if he'd returned to Ireland to set up a piano school? Because I think he was a very interesting composer in a lot of ways. I'm very cautious talking about Irishness, or the "new" Irishness. But I think it may be the kind of free-spiritedness which you can find in Field's work -- this kind of take-it-or-leave-it attitude in terms of conventional forms, even piano concertos -- which may have something to do with him coming geographically from outside that tradition. If he had come back to try and impart something!'

Raymond Deane pulls no punches. His reflections, as Music Network prudently recognised, are not for the dinner table. Yet I find no element of ranting or of bitterness in what he says. He simply refuses to hold back in describing the situation as he sees it. His air may seem indignant but the source is deeper than mere indignation: something more like grief. The extent to which he holds music dear is obvious from the long list of composers whose music he loves. Sharing pride of place alongside his avant-garde teachers in 1960s Germany are Britten and Szymanowski, Puccini and Mahler. It is obvious also from the description I extract from him of the ups and downs which accompany the creative process.