THE local postman in Sligo has noticed. What began in the 1980s as a competition for composers has grown into a fully-fledged festival of new music in a town in Ireland's north-west. 'We have about twenty enquiries from countries in the former Soviet Union', says Una McCarthy, director of Sligo's newly refurbished Model Arts Centre to which the November festival returns this year. 'Really exciting. Making connections. Sligo's on the map. The postman gets a real kick out of it. He sees these extraordinary stamps and says to us, "God, you really are coming on".'

The postman and the stamps are perhaps symbolic of McCarthy's motto as she plans her various programmes across the art forms. 'Making the local international and the international local. There is a continuum there, and that's my motivation. I'm just interested in using a form -- in this instance it happens to be music -- to see if we can reach people and, through that, celebrate its particular importance and its place. That's what drives me. And it could be an exhibition, it could be film. They all have their place as far as I'm concerned. That's my motivating factor: to see what is there and hopefully then see that that enriches somebody's life.'

The Sligo Contemporary Music Festival which takes place over the weekend of November 24-26 is only in its fourth year. Cork-born McCarthy spent thirteen years working in England and the North of Ireland before her appointment to the Model Arts Centre in July 1999. By then the main preparations for the 1999 festival were already well in place, allowing her to attend with something like observer status. Greatly impressed, she says part of the buzz came from inviting people who were 'petrified' just to stay until the interval. And then they would stay for the whole thing. 'It is about giving people in Sligo the opportunity to hear music that perhaps they wouldn't hear in a live context. It's about instilling in people an excitement but also a confidence in saying either, "Great!" or, "So what?" It is about bringing that music here.'

Someone else in attendance in 1999 was the man whom McCarthy would invite to return in 2000 as artistic director: composer Frank Corcoran. Born in Tipperary in 1944 but living and working in Germany since 1980, Corcoran had made the long trek to Sligo to hear a performance of his Quasi una missa. As well, the Black Box recording company had chosen the Sligo festival for the launch of its new Irish Composers series, whose first releases included a disc of Corcoran's chamber works (Mad Sweeney). For McCarthy, Corcoran's ongoing creative engagement with the ancient history and physical features of the west of Ireland made him perfect for a contemporary music festival in Sligo.

'It was really the result of a number of conversations', recalls McCarthy. 'I thought, here is somebody whose tonal resonances are so at one with the landscape. It was uncanny. Here is the home of all of that stuff. Either the resting place or the birth place, whichever way you want to look at it. And his music just resonates. I was truly taken with his imagination.'

The imagination was sparked at once. 'I found the whole idea wonderful', says Corcoran. 'Small little town, way out. One of the most westerly towns in Europe. I said I'd do it this year. The idea of the festival is to put music on the map there: art music, new music, new Irish music.'

Corcoran has pieced together a mixed programme combining his own work with music by other Irish (John Buckley, Donnacha Dennehy, Benjamin Dwyer and Ian Wilson) and non-Irish composers (Wolfgang Rihm, Gyôrgy Ligeti, André Jolivet, Lou Harrison, Stravinsky and Beethoven). Of his own works which he has included in the programme, all but one will be receiving their Irish premieres. The performance of his new Wind Quintet, commissioned with Arts Council funding, will be a world premiere.

'I get my deepest kicks, I must say, from very old Ireland. And a lot of my recent works, and what's going to be played in Sligo, they get their energies out of early medieval Ireland, or out of much earlier Ireland - megalithic or Iron Age or Bronze Age Ireland - as seen, of course, through my spectacles.'

A case in point is the series of works inspired by Sweeney, a minor seventh-century king who went mad in battle and lived out his life as a fugitive. Corcoran's Mad Sweeney for chamber orchestra and speaker uses Séamus Heaney's translation from a thirteenth-century Middle Irish account of Sweeney's wanderings. 'He was a kind of bird man, living in trees, fleeing to the loneliest parts of Ireland and Britain', says Corcoran. The electro-acoustic Sweeney's Vision (not programmed for Sligo) won first prize in the Thematic Music category at last year's Bourges Festival of Electro-acoustic Music in France. Other Sweeney-inspired pieces include Quasi una missa, performed last year, the new Wind Quintet, subtitled Sweeney's Prismed Light, and Sweeney's Smithereens, to be premiered by the Crash Ensemble at Expo 2000 in Hanover in October. 'I came to see this little figure from the early seventh century as focal. It gave me energies. It's an imaginative thing.'

Although he speaks of 'leaping over my Tipperary shadow', Corcoran agrees that the inspiration he finds in Ireland and its history stems partly from living abroad. 'I think the loneliness of an exile and the cunning and the Joycean distancing and so on are very good. They force a lot of new kind of "leaps" from the mind. And I certainly do then want to get into early megalithic stuff. If I'd stayed at home, I don't know. It's very hard to say. Because there is an autonomy of the mind, too, no matter where one is, that will try and map out its own territory.'

His map includes residual influences from time he spent in Berlin: 'a great Mecca of all kinds of styles, of all kinds of musics from all the world. And of course typical Germans -- kind of marketing managers very early on - loved to bring in a tribe of Outer Mongolian camel-bone players. The more exotic the better. Now in fact the whole thing didn't mix. It was like water off the back of a duck for many, many people. But it was great for me to pick up on all these different sources and influences. Well, not direct influences, but everything flows into the mix. So it was terrific.'

Another great benefit to composers living in Germany was the strong artistic and financial commitment to contemporary music by the separate radio stations of each federal land, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. But times are different now and there is much less money available in a broadcasting situation which Corcoran describes as going downhill very badly. He is encouraged, on the other hand, by developments here in Ireland, including the proliferation of new Irish music on CD, and events like last June's Lyric FM Gerald Barry Festival.

'I think that if anything good happens to one composer anywhere, it's a good spin-off for other composers. So it's great if somebody gets a platform anywhere. It increases the acceptance of contemporary music, the acceptance of the role of the composer. I'm no expert at all because I'm not in Ireland often enough. But I see great things happening with Lyric FM, and I hope that gets even better.

'There is more money in circulation and we're in touch with the rest of the world and with Europe, and we're part of Europe. But what we want to get at is to see new Irish music - Irish composers, or composers living in Ireland or from Ireland -- making extended sound structures. We want to see them as exactly on a par with Irish poets, film makers, painters, and so on. It's a psychological thing. I mean, it's terrific how people are, deep down, very open. They're liable to genuine shock, genuine surprise, genuine awe, genuine exhilaration. They say: "My God, I didn't know this stuff was around". Which tired old Europe no longer has.'

His comments betray a hesitant optimism for new music in Ireland, an optimism which has somehow won out over a peculiar but deeply-felt view of the position of (for the want of a better word) 'art' music in his native country. 'It's a challenge to our Irish race memory. I think we have a genetic thing against art music. It's part of our sad history that the upright piano was a sign of the "big house". The string quartet was deeply offensive. These things vibrate down in the Irish countryman's soul. Deep down, non-verbally, there is a deep distrust of music as an art form.'

Some would argue that this is a point of view based on outmoded perceptions of Irish life and society. Corcoran admits that he is a bit out of touch, even that he has been in Germany 'far too long'. To be sure, his childhood, which he describes as 'magical', dates from the pre-television era. 'I can still tap in on that early, agricultural childhood: the scream of the pigs. We had 110 pigs. Incredible polyphony from deep bass right up to the top. As a young fellow I wanted to record these and splice this stuff and make a "Pig Symphony". But there was nobody around to help me. There was Gregorian chant, there were local ballads, all that stuff. So that was the good side of Tipperary.

'The other side was that of course we were very far from Dublin. I had no idea at all of European music and what had happened in the nineteenth century or earlier. So I heard an orchestra late and I heard a string quartet very late. I was absolutely bowled over. Very early on I wanted to take things apart, change them, see how this could happen. And it was great, because I had to find just about everything myself. I had to find old sonorities and new sonorities. Now, at the age of 56, I also see the negative sides of it. Very hard, tough work, uphill work, for us to conquer everything that, let's say, Brahms did in the nineteenth century. Form, shapes, structures. We've an awful lot of homework to do. An Irish composer. So you got the good and the bad. The Tipperary shadow.'

After studies in Maynooth and Dublin (he is grateful for the orchestration he learnt from A. J. Potter) Corcoran spent time in Rome and in Berlin where his teacher was Boris Blacher. A succession of fellowships and teaching posts in Germany culminated in his appointment in 1983 as professor of composition and theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Hamburg. He has taught at a number of American universities including Harvard, Boston College, New York University and Indiana University. Those he includes among his foremost mentors are Stravinsky and Schoenberg and, of his own generation, Ligeti and Lutoslawski.

Where his music has its roots in some aspect of Ireland, this is clear to be heard, although not in the overtly folk-style manner of, say, Archie Potter. Technique and style are melded in what he calls 'macro-counterpoint'. 'The idea is very simple: it's not just counterpoint, not just a note on top of a note. But it's a stream on top of a stream, so it's polyrhythmic, polymetric, poly-streams. So I did it with, I think, wonderful effect in my Piano Trio, early on. And then, in my Wind Quintet, you again got these streams of musics on top of each other. Then in the symphonies and in several other works. So with this, for each individual line you get a wonderful plasticity. Now the total, harmonic whole you have to keep in control of all the time, which is very difficult. Old counterpoint, new counterpoint. You've got to have the line. Music lives through time. It's line. If not, it's pretty limited stuff.

Issues of linear and harmonic control will be put temporarily to one side for the festival's opening concert on Friday, November 24. The programme features a collaborative 'collage' between composers Corcoran and John Buckley and a range of local music ensembles led by the Vogler String Quartet (Sligo's quartet-in-residence) and including the Sligo Choral Society, the Sligo Concert Band and various schools. As well as the Voglers, other performers at this year's festival include soprano Judith Mok and players from the National Symphony Orchestra. Between concerts there is a lively programme of masterclasses, workshops and discussions and, as always, a 'reading' of the winning work from the New Music for Sligo/IMRO Composers Competition.

As for the 'collage', it's called Cantata for Sligo and no one yet knows what it will be like. 'We've given it a name and we've given it a title', says Una McCarthy, 'but actually it's an unknown quantity as we speak. It truly is going to metamorphose into something fantastic on the twenty-fourth of November.'