IT is six years since the Contemporary Music Centre produced the first volume of Contemporary Music from Ireland, a series of promotional CD recordings of works by living Irish composers. Volume Two appeared in 1997, and Volume Three was launched in April of this year, in the presence of the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, at the official opening of the Centre's new Fishamble Street premises. How things have changed since that first CD! The sales pages of the relevant issues of New Music News convey an impression of the rapid, catch-up growth of a recording medium which, despite its profound impact on the classical music industry since it exploded on the scene in the early 1980s, was still almost alien to Irish contemporary music more than ten years later. In the May 1995 issue, which announces the first volume of Contemporary Music from Ireland, the sales pages advertise a mere seven CDs of works by Irish composers. By last issue, February 2001, that number has increased to more than forty and these are only the most recent of the seventy or eighty CDs that the Centre now stocks for sale.

In 1995, the CMC disc was part of the dawning of a new age for Irish contemporary music. 'The compact disc is the medium for music', said Eric Sweeney, one of nine Irish composers represented on the disc, 'and I think the money that the Arts Council invested in this project is better spent even than money devoted to festivals. It was long overdue.'

'Isn't it extraordinary,' asked John Kinsella, also represented, 'that the release of a CD should be such a major issue? It's great now that it's happened, but it should have happened a long time ago.'

The disc was widely distributed to radio stations, international media, music publishers, record companies and concert promoters around the world. It was described as a 'calling card' and it has clearly served its purpose. John Kinsella was among the first to benefit, happening by chance to catch a broadcast on BBC Radio 3 of his Nocturne from the disc. 'Even though he pronounced my name Kin-SELLa, I was delighted that he played the piece.'

The release of Volume Two in 1997 was to have major implications for Roger Doyle, represented on the disc by an extract from his 1995 work, Under the Green Time. In exact fulfillment of the disc's intended role, Volume Two ended up in the hands of Johan Dorrestein, managing director of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. 'We gather as much as we can from all parts of the world to make our programmes. We are a group that programmes classical and contemporary music, and try to create all sorts of crossovers as well. So we try to inform ourselves as broadly as possible.

'We had never worked with an electro-acoustic composer, but we gave him a call out of the blue anyway. He was thrilled by this idea, but stated straight away that perhaps he was not the person we were looking for because he had a sort of love-hate relationship with his roots. But that made it all the more interesting for us.

'So we commissioned a new work, and programmed it, and he introduced us to the uilleann pipe player, Brian Ó huigínn. This happened in the autumn of 1999 when we had just embarked on the adventure of creating our own record label, and the live recording of our concert was the first release. It was very well reviewed in the Dutch press, even though it was an unusual record to start a label with. In fact, it was very much appreciated for that.

'We have become very interested in Ireland, and we are eager for any more information, particularly these sample CDs. They are a wonderful idea.'

No doubt a copy of Volume Three is already on its way to Amsterdam. As it happens, the opening track features the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, this time not with Roger Doyle but in a piece by the Irish-South African Kevin Volans, his This is how it is which the NWE recorded for Chandos in 1997. On a CD which presents a considerable diversity of style and personality, Volans would be among the handful of more established, fiftyish composers whose closest contemporaries can already be heard on the earlier volumes. Apart from Ian Wilson on Volume Two, composers born in the 1960s and 1970s make their series debuts with Volume Three.

Among these is Siobhán Cleary who was born in 1970. She is part of a generation which, during those formative years as the interest in composing began to take hold, had access to little or no contemporary Irish music on CD. Whatever there was, she acquired and listened to avidly. She mentions the Frederick May String Quartet performed by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet on an early disc (1995) in the Marco Polo Irish Composers Series. There was very little else at that time.

'But I probably went to more concerts as a result', she ventures, hastily adding, however, that she would not turn back the clock if given the chance. Cleary, presently completing a work for orchestra and live electronics which was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra for performance in January 2002, remains attached to Deuce, the violin duo which represents her on the new CMC CD. It's six years old, and she believes that she has moved on since then, but she thinks it remains representative. 'It's one of my first mature pieces', she says, 'and I quite like it. There are things in it that I began to do at that point (i.e. in 1995) that I'm still doing now.'

But one obvious feature in Deuce which Cleary says is less likely to emerge in her more recent music is the influence of Gerald Barry with whom she had a few lessons and whom she acknowledges as an important figure in her development. 'One of the things he said was, you have the nails and you have the nail polish. You get rid of the polish so you just have the nails. So, I have definitely had elements of Barry's music in my pieces, but I think they're all gone now. I've weeded them out! For example, one thing I stopped doing was the blocks of things, sudden changes of tempo or texture.'

One of the other composers Cleary mentions hearing on CD in the mid-1990s is John Gibson, who took the bull by the horns and began producing CDs on his own. Now Gibson joins Cleary on the new CMC disc with an extract from his 1997 Sliabh Luachra which the Crawford Piano Trio commissioned from him for a recital tour of Japan. What they wanted was something with an Irish traditional flavour, and the piece ended up bringing together the classical piano trio with the Irish wooden flute.

'I was a bit taken aback when they wanted me to write something in the traditional vein, because I hadn't really done it very much before that. I decided I'd do a mixture of twentieth-century art music devices but keep the tune as unaffected as possible, based on slides and polkas from the border area of Cork and Kerry.'

Some of the disc's other tracks similarly reveal composers in new or unfamiliar territory. Unlike Gibson, Michael Holohan has incorporated traditional Irish elements in much of his music. 'O Breath represents a little bit of a change', he says. 'It goes back towards more experimental writing.'

The piece is the second of two for solo bass clarinet which he wrote for a collaborative exhibition between Irish designers and composers at the 2000 Galway Arts Festival. Called Containers, the exhibition involved music played from on top of or inside of various boxes. While the first piece, called Chatterbox, is quick and cheeky, the claustrophobic second piece, O Breath, was intended as an elegy, a purpose which assumed added meaning for Holohan who was still writing it when the news broke of the 58 Chinese illegal immigrants who were found suffocated at the port of Dover in the cargo container in which they were travelling.

'Something from the outside entered into the process,' says Holohan. 'The news came just as we were discussing how awful it would be to be trapped inside the box in the exhibition. It was very strange.'

Another composer who finds herself represented on the new CD by music which explores new territory is Marian Ingoldsby. Her 1999 piece Red Shoes was commissioned by the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition 2000. It is quick and driven, inspired in part by the writing of Germaine Greer, and is what she describes as a 'continuous flow of anger' in contrast to 'a lot of my music to date which has been quite slow moving and not very rhythmic'.

'It's a bit scary to have your entire output represented by one piece', says Ingoldsby, recently returned to take up teaching posts at the Waterford Institute of Technology and University College Cork after completing her DPhil at the University of York. 'But from my point of view I'm delighted because, in terms of structure and so on, I'm really happy with Red Shoes. I got an awful lot said in five minutes. An awful lot of music, of notes written. It's succinct, compressed.'

Michael McGlynn, best known as a composer of choral music and as the founder and director of the chamber choir Anúna, is delighted to be represented on the disc by an instrumental piece. 'I was quite flattered', he says, 'that they didn't choose a choral work, because the opportunities to write instrumental music haven't been made that evident to me. The only instrumental piece I've ever been commissioned to write is the one on this disc! Gerard McChrystal wanted something virtuosic for saxophone but whose language was accessible. The piece contains elements of Irish folk music and elements of Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute. It is in many ways an homage to Debussy.'

And he is all the more delighted if anybody wonders why Michael McGlynn should be represented on this disc by anything other than a choral piece. 'Because that could give rise to useful questions such as, "Where is the CD of contemporary choral music from Ireland? And who's going to make it?"'

Meanwhile, Volume Three of Contemporary Music from Ireland is testimony to how much things have changed, for the series itself has changed. Beginning as a means of overdue international access for composers, with most of the tracks recorded specially by the Contemporary Music Centre, the series has now produced what amounts to a sampler, with all of the tracks drawn from existing CDs or radio recordings. With a new generation of twenty-something Irish composers already waiting in the wings, the prospect of Volume Four is anticipated with relish.