IN January 2002, composer Ronan Guilfoyle will begin three months' leave from his day job as director of the jazz department (which he founded) at Newpark Music Centre in Dublin. During this brief sabbatical he will complete his latest large-scale composition, a piano concerto for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Russian pianist Simon Nabatov, typically starting at 7.30 each morning to work fourteen-hour days as he does during the summer months when Newpark is closed.

It's all a far cry from when, as a twenty-something untrained, illiterate musical novice armed with his first instrument - a bass guitar bought only a few years earlier when he was eighteen -- he began to play in a band with the late Dick Buckley. 'That's how I started playing jazz', says Guilfoyle. 'but I was playing completely by ear, always hoping not to be unmasked for the imposter I was. Because I didn't know anything, I was playing these tunes and this music but I couldn't have explained to you the difference between major and minor.'

Like many Irish people, Guilfoyle received no musical instruction in primary school. Nor was music offered as a Leaving Certificate subject at his secondary school, where 'music appreciation' received a token monthly slot in the timetable. Even when his innate musicality finally compelled him to take up an instrument, Guilfoyle never considered enrolling in the Royal Irish Academy of Music or the (then) Dublin VEC College of Music.

'I would have to have learned a classical instrument for that, and I didn't play one. I didn't have Grade One piano. I played bass guitar. I don't know, but I'd say it's probably still difficult for a bass guitar-player to study at the RIAM. But without a non-classical programme, there's not going to be anybody there to teach you. So there was no way for me to do that. And at whatever age I was -- twenty-two, twenty-three? -- to start on Grade One piano, or Preliminary or something, was not something that was attractive to me. And for the sake of what? To get to Grade Eight in six years or four years?'

In other circumstances, the long dormant God-given talent which the bass guitar finally awakened in him might have seen Guilfoyle become a career gig-player. But his strong creative impulse was only partially satisfied by jazz improvisation. He needed to compose.

'I always had a compulsion to write, even when I couldn't read music or barely write it. I used to bring stuff to rehearsal and try to teach it to the guys. And then eventually I learned how to put my ideas on paper, because I recognised quickly enough that that was the only way I was going to get stuff across.'

For Guilfoyle, learning how to get his ideas across was a matter of making up for lost time. Working for ten years in a Bray delicatessen so he wouldn't have to play commercial music -- 'I refused to play it. I wasn't playing weddings. Or pop music. I just didn't want to do it. I only wanted to play jazz.' -- he set about filling the huge gaps -- 'as wide as a Soviet railway station' -- in his musical knowledge. 'I would talk to musicians, buy books. I was a voracious reader on music. I taught myself to read by buying some Bach scores and putting on the records and playing along reading the left hand. That's how I learned to read the bass clef.

'And I had a few lessons with Fergus Johnston on counterpoint that were very helpful to me. He was teaching at Newpark Music Centre; I went to him and said, "Look, I don't want to do any exams. But I love Bach, and I just want to know how he does contrapuntal things".'

As far as formal training is concerned, Guilfoyle was a late bloomer whose unorthodox formation was piecemeal and autodidactic. Hardly a recipe for success as a performer and composer. But looking back on his childhood, Guilfoyle had an advantage which more than compensated for the musical deprivation which he and most Irish children suffered and continue to suffer at school.

'My father was really a maniac on music. Not that he played. Just that he was really into music. To the extent that he had speakers in the downstairs rooms of the house so that whatever room you went into you could still hear the music.

'He had very specific taste in music, which was essentially classical music from 1880 onwards and jazz from 1945 onwards. So he'd be walking around downstairs and we'd be hearing The Rite of Spring, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, Shostakovich symphonies, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel... And then Charles Mingus, Myles Davis, Bill Evans, Earl Garner. This was the diet of music that we grew up on.

'Hearing something like The Rite of Spring when you're a kid, or the Concerto for Orchestra, it doesn't strike you as being difficult music. It's just music. It's just what you hear. Also, he used to do a lot of games with us like naming the instruments of the orchestra. Could you tell the difference between an oboe and a cor anglais? This would be when you were four. So by the time I was four or five I knew every instrument in the orchestra and I knew who Bartók was and Stravinsky and all those people.' Guilfoyle's brother, Conor, is also a jazz musician playing drums. The brothers often perform and tour together.

Guilfoyle goes back to the teacher in secondary school who gave the monthly 'music appreciation' classes. 'When he played The Planets, I already knew The Planets, from birth. It was old already. And it was pretty tame. So when he was playing classical music, I was probably the only one in the class who knew it all.'

If his father's listening habits were responsible for the young Ronan's early absorption and enjoyment of classical music, they also not only prepared him to appreciate jazz but also to play it. Without any training at all, never trying an instrument until the bass guitar when he was eighteen, Guilfoyle took readily to jazz as though born to it. 'I could do it, just because I had heard it all my life. I learned to play the instrument by ear. To hear was to play. It was the way I learned.'

And herein lie also the roots of Guilfoyle's duality as a composer. Given the steady diet of classical music and jazz which he heard growing up, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of his own music attempts to embrace both traditions and to combine elements of both. He is indifferent to the not always positive term, 'crossover', being less concerned with the blending of jazz and classical than with combining written and improvised music, a central theme in both his output and thinking.

'Does "crossover" mean Jan Garbarek playing with the Hilliard Ensemble? I guess it does. It's hard to know. What I do, a lot of the time, is I write music that involves both improvised and written: large-scale written sections. In other words, compared to most jazz musicians, I'm writing music that is much more notated than they would normally write. I then get musicians to improvise within the form and framework of that music. I think that's easier, and easier to do now, simply because the musicians are there who can improvise and play and read, mostly because the jazz education system has changed so much. Most jazz musicians now have a classical education as well as a jazz education. They all read fluently. Technically they all play very well. And they improvise on jazz harmony, which is now adopted lock, stock and barrel. The harmonic language is twentieth century, and they are conversant with that in their improvisational vocabulary. So you can say to them, I want you to do a twelve-bar blues using a twelve-tone row, and you're probably going to be okay.

'So there are more opportunities now for this type of thing than ever before. Principally because the jazz musicians have changed a lot. Classical musicians still have a long way to go before they stop freezing when they're asked to interpret something at will. So that's what I do, and I don't tend to think of it as "crossover". I just think of it as music.'

Guilfoyle says he has never met a church organist but he is aware that improvisation is a traditional element of the instrument. 'I'd love to talk to one about it. My feeling is, if they can do it, why can't everybody do it? I think it should be mandatory in Year One of a classical performance programme. It doesn't mean they ought to become a jazz musician, because that's so specialised. But just learning to do some improvisation of some sort. Because it's so good for you. If you're too wedded to the written note you're like somebody who can't speak unless they have a prepared speech, which is crazy. If you can't take your instrument out and play something by ear, something simple, something to have fun with, something -- just express yourself a little bit. They can say, "Mozart's so great: nothing I'll do can be as good as that". So what? Most of what we speak isn't anything like as good as Shakespeare, but it doesn't stop us from speaking.

'There's a real dichotomy in the minds of people about improvisation and composition. Namely, that composition is, by definition, more important and more profound than improvisation, which I don't buy at all. Some composition is a lot more profound than some improvisation, that's very true. Some improvisation is a lot more profound than some composition.

'Take someone like Thelonius Monk, a classic example. If you hear Thelonius Monk's music, it is the music of urban New York of his period. It's angular, it's jagged, it's humourous, it's everything. And the improvisations he did are all of a piece with the composition. They're just an extension of it. And there is no difference, to my mind, between a composer like Thelonius Monk and any classical composer of the same period who was producing contemporaneous music. I mean, there's also Varèse producing all that urban music. But to my mind, Varèse doesn't produce anything like the reality or the quality of twentieth-century New York that Thelonius Monk did. Monk distilled the Afro-American experience -- and where he lived and where he came from - into a music that is absolutely art music, there's no question about it. It's very difficult to perform, demands years of training.

'So for me it's very difficult to start separating improvisation from composition. I think music is very simple. It's a distillation of human experiences in aural form. That's why I think it's very easy to judge good music and bad music. People say, "how do you know it's bad?" Or, "it's pop music, so it must be bad". The only reason music can be bad is if it's produced for non-musical reasons. You just know it's going to be bad. Because it's not doing that thing that music is supposed to do.

'If you think about music, it's an extraordinary thing. It has always existed. But it is not crucial to survival, unlike procreation, food and drink, and a place to live. Things like that are crucial. But music is not. And yet, it's always been there. Therefore it is an absolutely primal human drive. It's a primal human thing that everybody does. So therefore it is a distillation of experience. And people want to hear it, they want to hear other people do it so that they can join in the experience. In music's most basic form, people sing because they're happy or they sing because they're sad or they sing because they want to dance; they're expressing how they feel. All good music should do that. And all bad music doesn't do that.

'Take boy bands. There's no way that that's anything except bad music. But it will make somebody -- or several people -- a lot of money at the time. Now of course, you could get into an argument with the people who like it, the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are enjoying it, "so how is it bad music?" That's a hard one, and you could get into it for hours. But in essence, I guess that's why I really don't like pop music -- and I like a lot of different music. It's because I just feel that it's dishonest all the time. And it has a lot more to do, especially nowadays, with a lot of extra-musical things than it has to do with music per se.'

Somehow, while composing as much as he can and still gigging at least three or four times a month, Guilfoyle also continues to head up the Newpark jazz department which he founded in 1987. The school now has fifteen jazz teachers and offers three full-time jazz courses to Guildhall School of Music and Drama diploma level. There are currently seventy full-time students on the books. He is acutely aware of the absence of jazz at third level in Ireland, there being no degree programmes in jazz or in any other non-classical music. He refers to Denmark where, he says, sixty per cent of music students at the highest, conservatory level are studying non-classical music. At undergraduate third level in Denmark, students of classical music are actually in a minority.

He refers to his daughter who has just received her Leaving Certificate results. 'She got an A2 in music. But she can't go to third level because she doesn't play a classical instrument, which is ludicrous: that you can reach that number of points on your instrument in second level and be completely endorsed by the state, and then that's it. If you want to take it any further, you have to do classical music. Or leave the state. She plays bass guitar, so she's in the position I was in. She's not going to start piano now, at eighteen or seventeen. But the reality is that the universities and the third level institutions have not grasped the nettle of the twentieth-century curriculum even though we're living in the twenty-first.'

He says his hopes were raised by the prospect -- announced by the Taoiseach and confirmed by ministers of Education and of Arts & Heritage -- of an Irish Academy for the Performing Arts. 'This was the ideal forum in which to redress the situation, because you were not trying to shoe-horn a jazz department into an already extant classical department. You were talking about something that's being built from the ground up.

'So I made representations to the steering committee. And I got a letter from them a year and a half ago saying that they'll get back to me, and I've never heard another word.' The various reports commissioned in connection with the proposals (by Deloitte and Touche and by Peter Renshaw from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London) referred to jazz provision, 'Which is fantastic', Guilfoyle says, 'except that we've no undergraduate jazz programme! So I don't know where you're going to get the students. Are you going to take them all in from outside?'