AS of his upcoming birthday on September 27th, James Wilson (b. 1922) is an octogenarian. His eight decades have witnessed in him a gradual transformation from London-born sailor and naval officer, always interested in music, to naturalised Irish citizen and now the senior composer in his adopted country where he has lived since the late 1940s. Not only a composer of large output, Wilson has actively championed music here through his work with the Music Association of Ireland and the Irish Music Rights Organisation; through his teaching at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he was professor; and as a director of the Ennis/IMRO Composition Summer School. After all that transforming, composing, championing and teaching, the eighty-year-old Jim Wilson remains tall and lean, fit -- looking and unstooped, soft-spoken and gracious in manner (though prone to moments of deceptively gentle subversion). He is quick to confirm his state of health.

'Fine,' he says. 'Naturally I'm not as lively as I was. The odd bit of arthritis and so on. But I get out plenty -- I'm on Killiney Hill every day. And I get around. I've been incredibly lucky -- I've had nothing much wrong with me since I was about twenty. I'm working as hard as ever I worked. And I'm writing a hell of a lot.'

Creatively he is not a creature of habit, for instead of an immovable daily composing regime consolidated over decades, Wilson says that his writing 'varies enormously. I live on my own. I try to keep the house apparently clean, not terribly clean in fact. I like to take the neighbour's dog for a walk every afternoon, and I like to keep my garden looking decent because I enjoy gardening. I used to work to a definite timetable -- I don't now. But I'm quite liable to start at five in the morning, when I've got my teeth into something. I like the early part of the day for working, before the phone rings. I find that a very productive time. At my age I don't sleep the night through, which is why, if I wake up during the night and start thinking about what I'm writing, I say to myself, Well why are you lying here? Get up and get on with it!'

And it's not only things like creative regimes which he feels his venerable age entitles him to abandon. Forms, procedures and genres are all subject to an element of late recklessness from which he clearly derives a mischievous pleasure. 'For instance, I wrote a piece for the theatre at the beginning of the year, for three performers and about three or four instrumentalists. And only in the last ten minutes did I introduce the cello for the first time -- which will annoy the cellist -- and it finishes with dialogue without music. So that all the academicians will say that this is thoroughly badly written. And I don't give a damn.'

Wilson believes that the standing of new music has improved in the past ten tears, and that developments are encouraging. He cites the work and growth of the Contemporary Music Centre, and refers to Opera Ireland staging Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera, The Silver Tassie, which he considers a masterpiece. 'Fifteen years ago nobody would have dreamed of putting it on.'

What pleases him most, however, is the young generation of Irish composers. 'I am very hopeful. I think we have some quite splendid young composers. I'm talking about people aged between 23 and 35. There are some very good ones, and I think the best of them in general are women. There are some very, very good women composers working now. There are men, too, but there are more women.

'What you need is some really good school. I mean, I did what I could in Ennis, but in two weeks you can't do a lot.' Wilson has recently reduced his involvement in the annual Ennis/IMRO Composition Summer School, even though he remains one of a number of directors of the school (which has now left Ennis and moved to the National University of Ireland at Maynooth). I was down last year for a couple of days to give a lecture. But I don't really want to take part -- I did it for nineteen or twenty years. I don't want to be breathing down the necks of the people who are doing it now. There are very, very good people involved in it now: Martin O'Leary and Nicola LeFanu, who is a very fine teacher. I want them to do it their way and not be looking over their shoulders all the time.

'But to have a permanent establishment, above all where people could get performances of what they were writing... Because the way you learn to compose is by hearing what you've written and finding out what the mistakes are.' Is this an idea which might benefit from the consideration of the Contemporary Music Centre?

'Eve (O'Kelly, CMC director), bless her, has got quite enough on her plate. But I think it would be a very good thing. Young composers could hear -- as I was saying -- performances of perhaps even only bits of their own works. In trying to teach people to write music, quite a lot of the time you are saying to some student, "Now sorry. That won't work". But until they've heard it, it is very difficult to convince them. That is why, at Ennis [Summer School], when we began to get any funding at all, we engaged the absolute top people we could afford. And we had splendid performers down there, really top-notch people, and splendid composers from other countries to work with the kids. And that is very necessary for people who are going to make an international name. But above all I think it's a question of official funding to expand the possibilities for young composers here.'

A desire for a fresh start, plus a romantic entanglement, were what prompted him to move to Ireland, to which he had become attracted after a spell with the Royal Navy in Derry just after the War. Now he says he would never move back to England. 'It's not a hate thing. I just don't want to go back and live there. I have since then taken out Irish citizenship. Virtually all my friends are here now. All the people I've worked with, with the exception of Jane Manning and a few others, live here. What would I go back for?'

What does raise Wilson's hackles is the question of nationality and composition. He prefers to contemplate formative or contemporary influences. 'When people say "Are you an Irish composer? Are you an English composer?" I'm just a composer. I try very hard to steer clear of that kind of attitude. I am not in the least interested in incorporating folksy stuff in my music. But I think a composer is, in a way, like a thing in natural history which we studied as children called a caddis-worm. It lives in a stream and makes itself a shell out of bits of sand and broken up other shells and bottle tops and goodness knows what. And I think a composer does that.

'I suppose my first big influence when I was twenty or younger -- sixteen -- was Vaughan Williams. And then I started hearing Stravinsky and Prokofiev. I also spent a bit of time in southern Spain, and Spanish flamenco was a big influence for a time. And later Greek music, and God knows what. And they all sort of come through at times. I listened to something I wrote years ago and said, Ah yes, that's Prokofiev! It does happen. You assimilate them. You can hear it in all composers. You can hear it in the great composers, and it doesn't detract. It's part of the final product.

'I do like writing vocal music because it is always an experiment. To me the only way to write for the voice is as though you've never done it before in your life. I always feel like a total beginner writing for the voice. One often is afraid that the writer of the words won't like your music. I think of A. E. Housman walking out with his fingers in his ears when he heard Vaughan Williams' settings of On Wenlock Edge!

'To me Vaughan Williams is one of the great song-writers. I think he's rather underestimated in general for that. And God help me, I still believe in a tune. I know they're not fashionable, but it's one of my constant preoccupations, not to be old-fashioned and at the same time to preserve the viability of tunes. Especially of course for the voice, because the voice works on intervals. And if you're writing minor ninths and augmented fourths all the time, the poor singer can't cope. It's worst for a singer because a singer is his own instrument. If he or she is anxious about getting it right, the voice goes. I've heard the best singers there are trying to cope with wildly difficult vocal lines, and they usually end up swearing.

'The kind of thing I find interesting now is the Terezín composers. That music is beautiful. It comes really straight out of Janàcek. There is some kind of a society that is gradually releasing on CD all the works that have not been destroyed, in very fine performances. I've got two or three of the discs, and I think there's some very fine music indeed there. How anybody writes jolly music when he may be going to the gas-oven the next day, I don't know. But they did.'

Ten years ago, New Music News interviewed James Wilson just prior to his seventieth birthday. There are certain beliefs and sentiments in that ten-year-old interview which still resonate with his thoughts and words today. There remains, for example, an often bitter scepticism about the political authorities and their attitude to the funding of new music. There is also an occasional feeling of despair for the culturally-rich society in which he lives, which is so ready to celebrate Ireland's great literary heritage, including the writing of the century just ended, but for him remains content to neglect the place of music. Another constant, when he is asked about the styles or genres or forces he prefers when writing, is his relish for and total commitment to whatever he is writing at the time. This is as true in the autumn of 2002 as it was ten years ago and as it probably was for years before that.

'I should know better, but I've started on a very large piece for four soloists, large choir and orchestra. The libretto is by Roxanne Houston, a lady living at Aldeburgh who has written a number of libretti in the past, a former professional singer. I've only just started this, and I've no idea when I'll finish. But I'm writing it partly because I've never done anything of the kind before. It's as much for the good of my soul as anything.

'Very difficult to say what it's about, really. It is in a way a religious work I suppose, but not an orthodox religious work of any kind. I don't want to talk much about it because I'm still feeling my way, and what I say now is liable to turn out to be totally wrong in the final version! I am told by Roxanne that there is a good chance of a performance -- she's sort of mixed up with everything at Aldeburgh, and it may happen there. We may even get a performance over here, I don't know.'