Michael Dungan: What's on your desk now?

Jane O'Leary: At the moment I'm writing a piece for the chamber orchestra in the Royal Irish Academy of Music [in Dublin]. It's part of my work as composer-in-residence at the Academy, which I have been for the past three years. This is a piece for small string orchestra of about 18 or 19 players, and I'm just in the midst of it.

MD: And when you are in the midst of something, do the ideas for the next piece come to you?

JO'L: Sometimes. But not really when I'm in the midst. I'd say more when I'm finished, and there was something that I liked or some kind of idea that came to me and I felt that I wanted to work it out more. I do very often pick up strands from various pieces and take them into the next one.

MD: And are you merciful, given that this is for student orchestra?

JO'L: I'm trying to be! I find I have to stop myself sometimes. In fact, I had a whole lot of music written which I scrapped. I just felt, 'Hmm, it's not really going to work'. So there are limitations you have to be aware of, and in some ways that's a little bit restricting. But it's also good as a challenge to think very hard about the practicalities of how a thing works for an ensemble. And they don't use a conductor, so I'm very conscious of things like the rhythmic pattern and that it has to be clear.

MD: Say a little bit about being composer-in-residence at the Academy.

JO'L: It's been very interesting. I had never taught before. But it was something I found very exciting, and when I saw the job advertised I was really quite excited about the idea. And I have found that it has been good for me. I have learnt an awful lot about how I work and how I write music. I have had to think about it in order to try and help other people. That's what I've gained from it. I've really enjoyed working with the students. They're very committed and hard-working, and that's inspiring to see.

MD: You come up to Dublin from Galway one day per week and are bombarded with new music?

JO'L: Yes! I have a mixture of different kinds of students. The youngest were fourteen when they started, and the oldest were my age. A great variety of students. Also, I have some group classes with third level students, and that's fun as well. The way I see it, I'm talking to people who love music and want to create it. We're all interested in the same thing, so it gives us a chance to talk together about all the difficulties.

MD: You mentioned re-examining the way you yourself work. How do you work?

JO'L: The way I work, basically, is to put something down on paper. Try to get ideas, but I have to put it down. I make myself write down anything at all. It might be just words, it might be pictures which define a shape. I think a lot texturally about the broad shape of a piece. Whether it's single lines, or spreading to a big, wide range, keeping within a narrow area, moving around... Those kinds of visual aspects. Or I might just get a motif or a chord or some kind of sound. So I start writing. Once I have it there in front of me, I play with it. I twist it around and analyse it, and try and see what's in it. And all the time I'm writing, I'm asking myself, 'What am I doing?' So I'm kind of combining the instinctive: 'Okay, let's just see what comes into my head, just leave your head open and see what floats into it...' But then once things start floating in you put them down and you ask yourself, 'What have I got? What am I going to do with it? How am I going to use it? Have I progressed logically from the beginning? Can I draw more out of this? Can I get something more before I go on?' That's the method: put it down, think about it, analyse it, keep re-working it, re-writing. I just keep re-writing all the time, until I get what I like.

MD: How much of this is away from instruments? Or do you like to be at the piano?

JO'L: It's a mix. I do need to be at the piano some of the time in order to create the initial shapes and chords and sounds and pitches. Just to get a kind of pitch-skeleton. But I can't limit myself to that either, so it's really a mixture. I think it's very important to think away from the instrument once you've got the skeleton of something there. That you think bigger than what what you can play on the piano.

MD: Do you find that some of your Academy students operate in a totally different way? Or do they wait for a lead from you?

JO'L: I think they're looking for guidance. The fascinating thing about teaching is that everyone is different. I just love the way everyone produces something totally 'themselves', from the start, from the first little mark they make on a page. You try and lead them in a way that they can continue with their own voice.

MD: What about routine? Both ideally, and what actually happens.

JO'L: I'm not very 'routine' about anything I do, I have to admit. I don't really follow the same pattern. I suppose with composition it comes in bursts. Certain periods of time would be very intense. I like to zero in on what I'm doing when I can, but then I need spaces of time to do that. Sometimes I go away from home. I like very much going to Annaghmakerrig, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre [an artists' residence in County Monaghan in Ireland]. I find it fantastic for focusing totally. I try to go there once a year just to get an intense period. Sometimes I'm not able to do it at all, and then I'd be thinking about it in a more abstract way.

MD: I would have thought Galway [where Jane O'Leary lives] would be an inspiring place to write music!

JO'L: Wherever home is, is never as quiet as you'd like!

MD: Can you compose anywhere?

JO'L: Yes. I don't care where. Just give me a piece of paper and a pencil and sit me down. I don't care what's around me.

MD: At this stage, do you feel Irish, or American, or both, or neither? And does this have any bearing on the music that you write?

JO'L: That's a very hard question. I don't know. I feel Irish most of the time because I've spent all my adult life here. When I go back to America, I feel strange. I haven't moved along with things over there. But I would also have to say that your birth-place never leaves you. Sometimes when I'm abroad at a conference in a third country, somewhere in Europe, I get confused, to be honest! People say, 'Oh, you're Irish.' And I say, 'Yes I am'. And they say, 'No, but you're American.' And I say, 'Well, sort of!' There's obviously a mix, but my feelings are Irish. I would call myself an Irish composer. I would not think of myself in any way as an American composer. But obviously you can't deny your starting-point.

Whether that comes into my music is something I have thought a lot about. I think it does. Not in the obvious sense. Not in the sense of traditional music. But somehow I feel the landscape is part of my music. I'm sensitive to the outer space -- not inside the house, but the outer space -- particularly the sea. In Galway I live near the sea. I can't see it out the window, but I can walk there pretty easily. I'm fascinated by the movement of the sea and by the sky. Those two aspects of nature are very important to me. When I'm thinking about music, I'm almost always trying to connect it in some way to the visual image of the sea or the sky. That's something that's very Irish to me, because the sky is so big and the sea is so big, and we're close to both of those things here.

MD: As you look at the sea, do you think about how over the horizon three thousand miles away is your birth-place?

JO'L: Sometimes. It's a link. A connection. In fact, one piece I wrote for Barry Douglas's Camerata Ireland is called Into the blue. I liked that title: it just came to me out of the blue! The piece was for an American audience, but it was Irish. I was conscious of my ambivalence about where I am. I felt that the title expressed the link of either the sky or the sea which lies between the two countries.

MD: What was it like studying with Milton Babbitt?

JO'L: Very, very interesting. A fascinating man. He was quite different from what you might expect from reading his writings. He's a very warm, personable, friendly man. His writings are incredibly difficult. I struggled through his classes, but I found them very satisfying in that what he was doing was taking everything apart to the extent that you had to analyse and make connections that you wouldn't make on an obvious or superficial analysis of a piece. In doing that you had to think about how things fit together. I suppose that's what I got out of the whole twelve-tone theory and how it was presented in his analysis classes. I studied with him both in theoretical classes and also individually in composition classes, and those were two very different experiences. I'll come back to that in a minute. In terms of the whole twelve-tone theory and so forth, it was difficult, and there was a lot of debate in Princeton at the time about whether theory made good music. I remember Josh Rifkin -- who was recently here conducting Bach -- he was in my class in Princeton and he used to have very heated debates about whether or not the twelve-tone system was a good thing for music. I knew in the back of my head that it wouldn't be something that I'd use forever. But it was a tool that was useful to me at that point in my life. Later on I found that it wasn't useful. I went on and I left it behind. But it's a base that I was able to build on.

The composition classes with Milton Babbitt were quite different. They were totally practical and very conscious of instrumental capabilities. Looking at what I would have written he would be saying, 'Well, for this instrument, this wouldn't be the right way to write that,' or, 'maybe you could do this a better way,' or, 'what is it that you're trying to achieve? Is that the most effective way to achieve it?' Very detailed. What I gained from him composition-wise was a sense of detail and of practicality, and mainly a sense of questioning, so that whatever you wrote down initially was not what you ended up with. You learned to question very seriously every mark on the page.

MD: So would you say that some of his ideas still inform the way you work?

JO'L: I think the method does, definitely. Detail, connections and practicality.

MD: But I would guess from listening to your music that the idea that the listener needs to be as expert as the composer is an idea that's foreign to you. I'm paraphrasing from Babbitt's essay 'Who Cares if You Listen?'.

JO'L: I think that's a bit harsh. I don't think that's really what he believed. His standards were high for everybody. But for myself, the listener is an absolutely crucial part of the whole process. Maybe living in Ireland -- performing music, presenting music, being very much involved in the actual making of music -- has made me totally conscious of the ear that's out there. That has developed since I left America and have been working in Ireland, that side of my approach to music. Okay, it's one thing to think about the performer; that was my training. But my life has taught me to think about the listener and the audience. It's something that's always in my mind.

MD: You've been artistic director of Concorde, Ireland's longest-established contemporary music ensemble, for over a quarter of a century. Can you describe the developmental curve of Irish music from the perspective of someone who has programmed lots of Irish composers in twenty-seven years? You've seen a lot of Irish music.

JO'L: It's an awful lot better now than it was, in many ways. Mainly in that there are so many composers now. It's very exciting to have the choice and the variety of Irish music that's out there. There was only a handful at the beginning, and you didn't really have a choice! You took everything that came your way. But now it's good. You've really got to be on your toes and be aware of who's doing what. Things are happening so fast, and there are so many different kinds of music, that it's got to the point where you have to make real choices about the types of music that you might follow. Just recently there's an awful lot happening within RTÉ [the Irish national radio and TV station] which is really encouraging. The whole opening up of festivals and the Horizons programmes [an RTÉ new music series] -- it's a breath of fresh air. It's important to have institutional support for contemporary music.

MD: RTÉ's Living Music festival was entirely aptly named, because otherwise music is at risk of being a museum art form.

JO'L: Very much so. I suppose having been at the forefront of performing and presenting new music for so long, I realise that it's a hard job. You're pushing people all the time to accept new things. And that's never easy. There's a core of people who want to be comfortable in what they're listening to and want to hear what they already know. You have to accept that. You can't be complaining about that and wonder, 'What's wrong with them?' That's the core. You just keep moving on. For myself, I have to have new things all the time. That's just what keeps me going. I always want to know what's new, what's out there, what's the latest thing. That's what I enjoy. I couldn't keep playing the same pieces over and over again.

MD: And you always mix Irish and non-Irish music in Concorde programmes?

JO'L: Yes. We emphasis Irish music. It's very important, especially if you're travelling or taking it abroad. You need to have a good, wide repertoire of Irish music. But I'm interested in it as well. You need both.

MD: And this also provides you with a special insight as somebody involved in producing it as well as composing it. Where do you see the place of Irish music on the international scene now? Is it very different from how it was twenty-seven years ago?

JO'L: I think it's much more audience-friendly. Even performance-wise, what's out there seems to be easier to come to grips with. I mean, I can remember pieces in the early days -- not just from the Irish repertoire but in general -- which you couldn't remember a note of after you'd played them. It would just go in one ear and out the other. It didn't stay! Now you play a lot of things and you have tunes going through your head and rhythms and things; more catchy and audience-friendly for sure.

MD: For your RTÉ Horizons concert [on 25 March 2003] you've programmed Takemitsu alongside your own pieces. Do you identify in a special way with Takemitsu?

JO'L: I do. At the moment anyway. But I think I've been going in that direction for quite a while. I've got to know his music a lot better in recent years. In fact the soloist for the Horizons concert is Noriko Ogawa who performed several of his piano pieces at concerts in Galway. I just absolutely adore the way Takemitsu handles musical space. He achieves what I would most like to achieve in music, which is a kind of timelessness and a spaciousness, and a special placement of sounds. It just seems right.

MD: And it's very distinctive. When you say, 'at the moment', who else has meant a lot to you?

JO'L: Well, I don't know. Personally, he would be at the fore. Leading into that you could mention George Crumb, of course. That's another world of sound and placement and spaciousness. I wouldn't see it as that far away from Takemitsu's world.

MD: And is George Crumb something that you brought with you crossing the Atlantic?

JO'L: Well, I had met him, and I had heard Black Angels, which was probably fairly new when I heard it just before coming here in the 1970s. His music was one of the earliest pieces that we played with Concorde. We're actually playing The Voice of the Whale again next week. And it's funny, it's a music that hasn't aged, for me. I know it's thirty years old now, and when I started playing it it was very new. But it still has a resonance that I find inspiring.

Of my own music, the string quartet Mystic Play of Shadows would be the piece that's had the most performances. The orchestral pieces for the Horizons concert, From Sea-Grey Shores and Islands of Discovery, are quite impressionistic.

MD: Are they Takemistu-esque?

JO'L: They are, definitely.

MD: And the first one is not grey, as in the title. It's very colourful.

JO'L: Well it's the water again. The title is from the description of Renvyle House [a hotel in Connemara] which has a connection with the piece because I worked there for a while. It's the image of the water and the movements of the sea, things below the surface -- a kind of shimmering, fluid surface, but not changing dramatically. Subtle kinds of changes.

MD: Did you write sea-inspired music from the moment you arrived in Galway? Or did it take a while for the sea to inspire you?

JO'L: I don't know! I think it took a while for me to work my way out of the theoretical side of things and into the coloristic side.

MD: Can you think of a piece that demonstrates that transition? A first post-Babbitt piece?

JO'L: Well my first post-Babbitt piece was my first string quartet in 1983. But it was only a start. It doesn't come anywhere close to achieving the kind of fluidity that I have now. But it was my first break from pre-planned compositions.

MD: So when did water and the sea start to enter in? Or Takemitsu? Of course, external commentators may find it where you don't!

JO'L: That's a good point! I like to leave those kinds of things for the theorists of today! I just keep going, keep working, towards a fluid process.