SADLY, from the perspective of the interviewer, it was never on the cards for this interview to take place in the little village near Lucerne which is home to the Irish-Swiss composer John Wolf Brennan (b. 1954). Perhaps sensing disappointment, he does something wholly unexpected in the initial stages of our conversation. He is explaining to me over the telephone that his normal day starts early not only because his kids come jumping into the bedroom, but because the church next door rings its bells on the quarter hour.

'Wait a second!' he says with the kind of impetuous enthusiasm which certainly characterises most of our conversation and would seem to be his approach to life and music. He has left the phone and is evidently opening a window. (Twenty minutes later he will say, 'Excuse me, I have to close that window. I'm freezing.') Suddenly my head fills with images of cool, crystalline Swiss air, snow-covered mountain tops and picturesque, alpine village scenes as my ear-piece is flooded with the lively clanging of those bells. 'You see,' he says, 'even though I left Ireland, I didn't leave Catholicism behind. Every fifteen minutes, reminding me: "You're just a poor little sinner!" ' He sounds like he doesn't mind. There seems to be zest for everything.

There is certainly zest for a fiftieth birthday project to produce a CD portrait of his more 'classical', less jazz-influenced output. 'For example,' he says, 'a piece like Epithalamium (1994) based on James Joyce's chamber music is a piece that really needs to be recorded in a professional way, which means talking about a totally different amount of money from if you put myself together with a couple of jazz musicians into a studio. We could come up with a new album in two hours. But if you're talking about classical music, we're talking about a week's work, we're talking about ensemble, and we're talking about 50,000 instead of 5,000. So that was absolutely out of the question so far. With the new award that I just got -- the Prix de la Fondation Suisa 2002 -- the chances are slowly but steadily rising that one or two years from now I would be able to document that side of my output.'

He is referring to the massive imbalance favouring the jazz-related output of his substantial discography (over 35 commercial CDs). It has taken the full twenty-odd years of his professional life for his genre-ambidexterity to acquire aesthetic acceptability in the context of Swiss artistic society which, he maintains, prefers to compartmentalise.

'Twenty years ago, when I was starting out as a composer, there was a major problem to do with a very German (i.e. German-speaking world) tradition -- Hegel, Karl Marx, Nietzsche -- a time-honoured German philosophy, mentality, of putting everything into its proper drawer. So for example, unterhaltungsmusik, which is entertaining; ernstmusik, which is serious.

'This dichotomy was a major problem for me. "How come you play sonatas by John Cage, bass in a rock group doing music by Jimi Hendrix, and you play improvised music in a jazz band? Like a priest, shaking his finger: How dare you? I was in shock. Woody Allen says that the two most important (film) influences on him were Hitchcock and Bergman: how can you put those three in the same drawer?'

Brennan believes things began to improve ten years ago, the credit for which goes to globalisation. 'Conventional wisdom says globalisation is a very bad thing. But there are some positive sides, like the openness and diversity of American culture.'

His own diversity is reflected in the wide variety of people he admires, the music and other art forms he enjoys, and the key figures with whom he comes into contact. A few years ago he was invited to distinguished Swiss conductor Paul Sacher's ninetieth birthday party and was seated at a table beside Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio and Wolfgang Rihm. The conversation was a kind of litany containing the great names of twentieth-century composition: Cage, Messiaen, et al. Then Rihm mentioned Sting. Boulez was shocked. Berio told him to go and listen to Sting's latest album, that he might be surprised. 'The world is not black and white', concluded Brennan.

Certain things, however, seemed black and white to him when he was growing up. He hated mathematics for example, little knowing how it would come to figure centrally in his creative work. He wasn't that fond of music either. His parents were both musicians: his mother, Una Brennan, was a classical singer; his father, Hans Wolf, a classical pianist. But he enjoyed neither his piano lessons nor all of his mother's singing. 'It was perfectly normal for my mother to give a recital of Hugo Wolf, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert -- the whole repertoire of Romantic klavierlieder, and then throw in three Irish folk songs. But, the thing is, of course, that these folk songs were in these incredibly sentimental arrangements that people like James Galway still sell millions of albums with. Danny Boy and all these songs, and the Rose of Tralee. When I was growing up, this was more a reason to vomit, more a reason to throw up than follow up. I rejected the whole heritage of Irish folk music.'

Piano-phobia was cured when he started with a new Hungarian teacher who introduced him to Bartók. 'It is impossible to overestimate the importance for me of Bartók. My love of the piano started then.' Later in the conversation he wonders about the prospect of a Mikrokosmos-style series of graded piano tutors based on Irish rather than Hungarian folk music (an idea Frank Corcoran has explored in his Irische Mikrokosmoi of 1993.)

Meanwhile, he eventually recovered from those syrupy folk arrangements his mother sang and, as a composer, developed a rather different relationship with Irish folk music. 'I have never hesitated to use elements of Irish music. For example, a piece I wrote for Jimmy Galway called A Golly Gal's Way to Galway Bay, which is a piece for 55 flutes. He first performed it in one of his master classes, an international flute seminar. And I actually used some folklore imaginaire, kind of composed imaginary folk music, but really based on reels and the rhythms of Irish music as best as I could.

'I was interviewed by Jerome de Bromhead for RTE about twelve years ago. Afterwards he said to me, "Over here (in Ireland), everybody shies away from being the Irish Bartók."

'Why? He couldn't explain. Over the years, when I was over, I discussed it with John Buckley, Raymond Deane and all these guys. And Jerome was right. There was an unconscious or unspoken reluctance to be the Irish Bartók. And maybe things like Riverdance have made this even more prevalent.'

'Riverdance is good for tourism. It reminds me of Bord Fáilte (the Irish tourist board) selling anything with James Joyce on it, which has very little to do with the literature of James Joyce. If you were to do all of these activities with the explicit idea that you had to insert some sort of Irish ingredients into your music in order to fulfill various expectations, then you would of course miserably fail.

'I don't really think about Irish ingredients in a conscious way. Of course, I do remark and hear that a lot of people, including musicologists and so-called professional listeners or critics, detect this side in my music.' He is content for now to leave detection of Irish influences in his music to other people.

Like most creative artists, he can't afford to wait for inspiration. 'If you wait for the kiss of the muses you will never get anywhere,' he laughs. Once the early bells are ringing he tries to work a bit each morning. He also enjoys working at night-time after his three daughters are asleep. The middle of the day is taken up with part-time teaching in the local secondary school, private composition pupils, and all the business and administration and rehearsing that comes with being a professional performer. 'How easily I could fill a 28-hour day,' he says with a natural energy which makes you believe him.

Once he's composing, the process varies. He sometimes uses mathematics to get started. 'I hated my maths teacher in school, so I closed my ears like a spoiled brat and missed all of higher maths, geometry and trigonometry.' But his later musical studies brought him back into contact with maths, for instance through his lessons with Klaus Huber. 'I found myself using mathematical processes and computer software for what amounts to games, really. The way Fibonacci numbers are like games. They trigger off creative ideas that you otherwise wouldn't dream of. I fool around with mathematical proportions, scribble down a lot of series, see where they take me if, let's say, you superimpose them on a row of tones or a row of rhythm values or of metrical proportions. That's one kind of pot.

'What seems like the other is free improvisation -- sitting down at the piano or any other instrument and just fooling around and stumbling upon something that creates interest or whatever. And then trying to take it from there, to work on that little motif that has come up in a morning's meditation on the piano. Or actually singing. Or just sitting out in the garden and having this haunting rhythm which I couldn't sleep again because of! It just tormented my mind, so I had to write it down, really get rid of it in the process of notation. So that is another kind of pot.'

His favourite metaphor, of his own devising, for the relationship between composition and improvisation, is of the different physical states of matter. 'The gaseous form would be linked with improvisation, and the solid state of matter would be linked with composition. In between you have the liquid state, everything that comes between these two states. And what I find intriguing is that, in terms of physics, we all know that -- to take the example of water -- all it takes to change from one state to the other is a little bit of heat. You can melt a block of ice with a little bit of heat. Sometimes I even use the word 'comprivisation'. It's maybe stupid, or not so elegant, but it is a way to describe how both states of matter can go on at the same time.'