Michael Dungan: What came first for you: composing, or electro-acoustic music and multimedia?

Jürgen Simpson: Composing. I came into electronic music relatively late compared to my interest in composing. Composing was always there. I was surrounded by music and instruments as a child, and surrounded by pianos. Composing was definitely my first interaction with this whole world.

MD: What music was there?

JS: I grew up in a household which, from when I was ten onwards, became a musical-technical household. My father was a piano-tuner, or at least he became one when I was ten. Being surrounded by piano actions, pianos and the interiors of all these machines… I think at the age of thirteen or fourteen I was actually re-building piano actions. So I came into contact with both the technical aspect of the piano as an instrument, and also the music of it. There was always music in my house. My mother sang an awful lot and my father played the piano. So I grew up in a very musical household.

MD: And was the music broad, or folk-oriented, or a bit of everything?

JS: It was mostly classical. Mostly Bach to Chopin. My mother loved singing Schubert's Die Forelle, which was a favourite in the house and which she would sing while washing the dishes. So for the most part it was very eighteenth and nineteenth century music in the house. I don't think we ever heard anything twentieth century.

MD: Pop music?

JS: I have very, very vague recollections of pop music. Pop music was mostly Elvis. My mother liked Elvis and the Beatles. But apart from that I can't remember that much pop music.

MD: And folk music?

JS: Yeah, there would have been a bit of folk music in the house. We had lots of musicians over. There were often trad sessions. My father played the accordion, which I have inherited, and the folk music element of that cropped up again and again. My father played in traditional music bands as well for a time. So I heard that quite a lot.

MD: And when did you start getting formal instruction?

JS: From a very early age. I started piano lessons with my father. But that was soon abolished because we just fought too much. I went to a whole series of different piano teachers. I think my parents saw me as being a young genius child-pianist, as most parents see their children being geniuses at something. They thought that I would make a very good concert pianist and so they sent me to all the very best teachers. And I went through all the usual big names in this country before realising that I really didn't like playing the piano. Or at least, I didn't like playing other people's music on the piano. Too often my memory of playing in music lessons was me inventing the chords for some Chopin piece, and preferring my own to the ones that were on the page! Besides, I wasn't a very good sight-reader, and I much preferred to improvise as a child. I spent many, many hours as a young boy at the piano, improvising my Keith Jarrett-style improvisations.

MD: And when did you first start putting pen to paper after all this improvisation?

JS: Well, I was writing my own versions of pop songs from a relatively early age. In fact, I even appeared on Poperama at one point, and Playback a few times when I was twelve. So I'd started composing my own songs and writing lyrics when I was twelve. And then it all suddenly stopped when I was about fourteen or fifteen. When did I seriously begin putting pen to paper? Not until I was about nineteen did I start writing. And that was pencil and paper.

MD: Did you do Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate music?

JS: No. I tried, but I failed miserably because I found it too boring. And I think, in fact, that most of the people in music that I know did not do their Junior Cert. or Leaving Cert. in music and did something else instead. I think I did art and geography instead which I found far more interesting.

MD: I remember being in your house some years ago, and your CD collection betrayed an incredible breadth of interest. Is that still the same? You seem to have a voracious appetite for every kind of music. Beethoven was there alongside Xenakis. It wasn't in alphabetical order!

JS: It probably is now because the collection has grown so big! I've always had a huge interest in music in whatever form. I don't think you could keep me away from pop music now, as much as then you couldn't keep me away from getting my hands on as much of Xenakis as possible. But the appetite is still there. The important thing has always been for me that, while shrinking away from a certain academic, formal education in music, and trying to keep away from knowing too much about the interior of a fugue, at the same time I've always had huge respect for it. So a huge Bach collection sits alongside a Xenakis collection quite happily. And I think, of course, that they're all part of the same tree anyway. But at the same time there are other huge areas of music which I've been collecting over the years as well.

MD: Such as?

JS: Everything from electronic music, noise, Japanese music, a lot of traditional music -- as in world music and some Irish music -- and a lot of early music as well. I've been going through phases of getting back into the Irish music which I used to play.

MD: Is there anything that you don't like? Anything you leave outside the collection?

JS: I think there's a big difference between saying what you keep out of your collection and what you don't like. I think there's a lot in my collection that I don't like anymore, but it still needs to be there. Sometimes I'll actually buy something because I just need to be informed about it. Especially with contemporary music. There's a lot of contemporary music that I actually don't like but I have it. And when you go abroad to Germany or France and you see the special offers on the CDs which you know you should have, the kind of staple diet. I think it's important to be informed. So a lot of music you buy is just to be informed.

MD: You mentioned Germany. Your mother is German, you speak German, and you've spent time living in Germany. Do you think that this has made some kind of an impact on your life as a composer that you could assess?

JS: I moved [to Germany] when I was fifteen and there was a huge jump, a huge shift, from the ideas that were present in Irish education, and the way that Irish education put forward its ideas and its concepts, not just about information but about how life is run and its problems. In Germany it was the first time that I was taught, in a school environment, about political problems and how to assess them and come to terms with them, alongside things like ecological issues. So there was kind of a wide-angle lens about Germany that made a huge impression. Apart from that, the extracurricular activity that was available to people, certainly where I lived in Germany which was in the very south, was also immense. We had Jugendcentrums, youth centres, which were hugely important for the community because they provided a fulcrum for a lot of youths to meet while still being watched to a degree. In the youth centres we had amazing cinema weekends and so on, but all very left-wing, very politicised. I actually became very politicised when I was about sixteen, seventeen, while living in Germany. In the town I lived in, the people I associated with were very politically left wing. That made a big impression as well. And then musically, I was playing jazz piano and became involved in a heavy-metal jazz rig for a small while, playing Rhodes piano with a heavy-metal guy. I remember the drummer was a self-confessed right-wing radical whilst everyone else in the band was quite left-wing. And there was a guy from Poland in the band, and I was Irish. Anyway, that wide-angle lens was very important. And when I came back from Germany I had a much clearer idea of who I wanted to be than when I'd left.

MD: In terms of studying composition, you've had three very active and very important teachers: Kevin Volans, Donnacha Dennehy, Roger Doyle. What's it been like studying with those three, presumably with very different things coming from each of them?

JS: Hugely influential. Roger Doyle, Donnacha Dennehy and Kevin Volans were and are three people I owe an awful lot to in terms of being able to focus my energies in certain directions. I think each one of them has contributed in a totally different way and opened up doors. Roger Doyle, for example, was the person who introduced me to electronic music in a contemporary sense for the very first time. He was recording his Thalia/Oizzo No album in my father's house. And Oizzo No has this section in it with a piano suite [Baby Grand from Six pieces for pupils who don't like exams], and that was being recorded with my father's piano -- he rented out the house to people for recordings. And it was the first time I'd come across a DAT machine. I was about fourteen, I think. On the DAT machine, as it happened, was a recording of one of his earlier pieces, Lightyears, which used the EMI Fairlight instrument, an Australian sampling instrument which Roger owned and which new, at the time, cost $120,000, enough to mortgage a few houses. It was a very advanced machine, and this was the sound that was emanating from the DAT. Later that evening, he brought me to see the machine in his flat. And it was this incredible thing with a touch-screen -- imagine, this was 1987-88. This was the highest tech I'd ever come across. And the music coming from the machine was so incredible, so bizarre. I remember running with the tape that he'd given me home to my mother, putting it on and saying, 'Listen to this! Listen to this!' The answer of my mother was jaw-dropping, just didn't get it at all. In fact, while I was in Germany, I set up quite a lot of people with Roger Doyle's music, and quite a lot of them quite liked it. Roger introduced me to that area and I met him again and again every time I returned to Ireland. He was always very encouraging. Later, when I went and studied in Trinity, Roger became one of my tutors in composition.

Donnacha Dennehy was the person who introduced me to Trinity [Trinity College, Dublin University], through his influence and his amazing energy as a young composer doing fantastic work. It was awe-inspiring to see somebody doing this almost off their own bat, in a country where there didn't seem to be that much of that kind of stuff going on, in my generation at least. Not that I'm the same generation as Donnacha. I'm ever so slightly younger, but nevertheless not that far apart. But his influence was huge.

Gerald Barry lives on the opposite side of the mountain to my Dad's house in County Clare [on the west coast of Ireland]. We'd see each other every now and then. I remember Gerald in fact gave us a copy of Stockhausen's Mantra, and this was obviously to inspire me to get into this kind of music. The reaction at the time was hilarious, because Mantra is lots of very strange sounds on two pianos. We had three lovely little girls living next door, three neighbours, who proceeded to make a farce out of this piece that I had put on to try and listen to seriously. They were in our house practically all the time, coming up to play with the cats. They would sit there listening to the Stockhausen, doing all the sounds -- 'Weeeaow' -- and hitting the sides of the piano. I just couldn't take Stockhausen seriously after that, not until after a while. The girls were definitely a set-back!

Kevin Volans was probably the biggest influence of all -- I became his assistant. Kevin's own wide-angle lens on music... He is one of the few people I've met who has the ability to hear absolutely anything in any genre and make a critical assessment of it which is entirely correct. Regardless of whether you're listening to R&B or electronica, he has this ability. When I first met Kevin, when he came and visited Archie (my father) while visiting Gerald, we played him some music I was working on with a friend in the house in Clare. It was music we were doing for a project in Trinity College at the time, a project with the Photography Society. And Kevin's reaction was so positive to this music, which was so far away from the music which he himself was composing. I was really impressed. And then he offered both myself and my musical partner at the time to do some lessons with him. And we did some lessons. And then later on he introduced us both to an awful lot of music -- Steve Reich and all the whole contemporary genre which I had no knowledge of up until that point. It was an incredible period of time. I was just wolfing down all this contemporary music. Because I felt, at the age of nineteen or twenty, that I'd actually come to a brick wall. Being able to come and listen to all this music was like opening a whole new door to get into.

MD: While you were doing this, most other composers of your generation were at college getting music degrees.

JS: Yes.

MD: And then with that, and with the appetite we've already mentioned, and obviously with your abilities and your interest in composition, you were able to go into what was then a new course in music and media technologies [in Trinity College, Dublin].

JS: Yes, a relatively new course.

MD: Were you one of the first guinea pigs?

JS: I think we were the third year of the course.

MD: Past the guinea pig stage?

JS: Past the guinea pig stage. I got on the course quite late in the day. I only found out about it because of my interest in a particular piece of equipment. I have to say that at the time, and I think I was twenty-one, I had just finished building up a music studio for myself. So my interest in electronic music was pretty healthy. But I was trying to find a way of expanding it, and I had become interested in a very obscure piece of equipment from San Francisco, the Kyma Capybara made by a family company, the Scallettis and their company Symbolic Sound. I rang them in San Francisco and they said, 'There are two Kyma Capybaras in Dublin. You should go and see them before you buy one.' So I rang and of course the contact was Donnacha -- my first contact with Donnacha -- and we spent about half an hour on the phone. Finally I said, 'What are you doing with these Capybaras? It's amazing -- why do you need two?' And he said, 'Well, I run this course.' I said, 'Oh, that sounds interesting. Can I do the course?' And he said, 'It's a bit late now. We've already done interviews for this year.' But I did get on the course. And the course was such an eye-opener because up until that point I had done most of my work in Clare, living miles away from anybody else, very isolated, which I quite liked. But I was suddenly thrown into this academic environment which was full of people in the class -- who've become some of my closest friends since then -- with a really vibrant energy. We were all wolfing down this information. Donnacha would have done most of the classes on contemporary music there, plus Roger [Doyle]. What was the biggest eye-opener was... Up until that point my interest in technology was quite high, but I actually lost an interest in the technology as a kind of fetishism almost, which a lot of people around me had… A fetishism for this technique or that technique, or this latest version of this piece of XYZ... And I was into this world... What I realised soon was that the creation of sound was really quite subservient to the ability to compose. I remember coming back into class after one night of heavy working in Trinity and having rediscovered notes. Up until that time I had been working purely in sound. Then I rediscovered notes, and that was a huge experience for me. I was absolutely ecstatic. It taught me that the technology is not that important. That it was important how to compose. So I really worked hard, then, on the composition side of what I was about.

MD: Is that rediscovery of notes something that needs to happen for people in that course? Or is it possible to abandon notes altogether, do you think, and go on and have a career in composition without any further reference to notes as such?

JS: That's going to be very personal to the composer and what kind of music they want to write. And I suppose I can only approach it from a personal point of view. I was really interested recently to read an interview with Pierre Schaeffer, the founder of the musique concrète school. It was quite a depressing interview, actually, about his summation of his own career. And of course most of his music would have been purely non-note-based. At the end of the interview he says that he thinks he failed, and that everything had become do-re-mi, that at the end of the day all music is do-re-mi. I have a tendency to agree. I think that one needs to be able to write with notes in order not to write with notes. I think it's too easy to write music that is abstract and electronic and sounds weird or sounds amazing. It's very, very easy to do that with electronics, very easy to create an abstract sonic image. The question is, are you writing a musical image? What I've become interested in is trying to merge those two worlds, to take my interest in electronics, without becoming overly obsessive with the technology involved, and apply that knowledge to my work with instruments and bind those together. That's the biggest challenge of all and the most rewarding one.

MD: So you're working within a tension, a dynamic between those two things. You're a young composer, you've had some recent successes, you're knocking on the door and your profile is probably about to take off. Have you a publisher yet?

JS: No.

MD: And you haven't had an NSO [National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland] commission or some of the other badges of arrival. But all that is surely imminent. In the meantime, as a composer, what is life like? For you it's a mixture of the composing which drives you, the performance you're involved in, and also just day-to-day living. What's it like being a citizen who is a composer in this state?

JS: A citizen who is a composer in this state...?

MD: Yes. You do reside here. So...?

JS: I do reside here. Absolutely. I keep going abroad and coming back here and just thinking what a vibrant place I live in. How happy I am to be living here. Bit expensive, but apart from that it's great. It's a fantastic moment at the moment, just for the amount of things that are happening around me, which have all suddenly come to fruition at the same time. I'm involved in a number of different things, and they all seem to have just now come to a point where everything seems to be growing up and happening. The rock band that I'm involved in -- The Jimmycake -- has just recently got huge interest from American record companies like MCA, and we are about to play in London in the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Arts. So that's just suddenly taken off. And of course the opera [Thwaite] has been a huge boost to my career. It feels like everything I've been working on so far has just been working up to this. And I don't think I could have done it any sooner. Purely from a knowledge-base on technology, getting your bearings right and suddenly feeling rooted enough to attack a project this big.

MD: You've only really come in from the wilds of Clare in the past seven years.

JS: Five.

MD: So it's been a steep learning curve and very compressed time-wise. You mentioned the opera. Tell us about that.

JS: Thwaite. It's a second opera. The first one was Neshika from 2000, which was originally meant to be my end-of-year project for my Masters. I then scrapped it completely and re-wrote it as a one-man show with percussion and electronics. And that was performed at the 2000 Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe. During the time that I was working on that opera I came into contact with Simon Doyle, the librettist of the other composer I was working with -- we were putting on two operas at the same time -- and I really liked his libretto. I thought it was really funny yet really serious, and really Irish as well. It was the kind of libretto I really wanted to work on. The feeling was mutual. We immediately got together and we started working on perhaps doing a series of songs. I don't think I could have tackled another opera right then. So we were working together, and then I came across this opportunity for writing operas through the Genesis Opera Project which was founded in England in association with Almeida Opera. It sounded like a great opportunity so I said to Simon, 'Let's get together and put in a proposal with some of the work we've done already and some of the ideas we have now and maybe a libretto, and see how we get on. And we did. And out of something like I think 210 applications from composers under the age of forty worldwide, we were picked among the top nine, which was amazing. And very frightening. So I had to write the first act of the opera. What was really funny for me was that this was actually my first time orchestrating. Ever. I had never orchestrated anything! Up until then, everything was electronic. I had been working with notes, but not with an ensemble. So I had to learn orchestration, and of course I didn't have a music degree. So it was all suddenly self-taught.

MD: What did you use? Walter Piston?

JS: Adler.

MD: Lots of scores?

JS: Lots of scores. I wrote the first act of Thwaite with the full score of Berg's Wozzeck beside me. Because in fact both Wozzeck and Le Grand Macabre by Ligeti were the two operas which made me think again about opera, which made me think that this was an area that I really, really wanted to get into. Previously, apart from La Traviata and the usual suspects, I wasn't really aware of that much opera. But there was something about the Berg which really struck me, more so even than Lulu at the time, though now that's changing slightly. So it was a self-taught experience, one which went blindingly fast. I did take some short cuts, which I can get into. But the end result was that we [the shortlisted candidates] then put on our operas this time last year, all nine of them. I was quite in awe of some of the people I was faced with. Some of them were almost twice my age. Some of them were, like, the right-hand student of Berio. And I thought, 'God! What have I let myself in for?' But we got through, into the top three with full commissions. Which was great. So here we are, finishing off all the work on the opera, getting five phone calls a day and realising just what a huge concept and what a huge marathon writing operas is.

MD: How long is it? What's it about?

JS: The opera is about ninety minutes in length and has been described as 'a Rabelaisian raft debate'. Which is an apt description but takes some time explaining. The essential idea is that you're talking about a post-apocalyptic scenario in which a number of protagonists come together in search of a prophet. They believe one of them is the prophet. Of course, it's a case of whittling down who the prophet might be. And the manner in which it's whittled down is quite simple: if you kill somebody, they must resurrect. And if they don't resurrect, they're not the prophet. So there's quite a lot of killing off. Which is quite normal in opera, really! So that's basically the idea. It is very Beckett. Simon will hate me saying this, but there is definitely a very Beckett style in there. And Waiting for Godot, of course, is something that is there even in the name, Thwaite, 'The Waite', which of course is ' the wait' for 'Thwaite'. It's all there.

MD: The content of a concert here in Dublin in 2003 can be very different from the content of a concert in Dublin in 1853. But apart from the content, do you think that the whole nature of concert-going is very, very different at this time? How is it different? Or is it the same, just dressed up differently?

JS: Well it's become much more specialist, obviously. The historical push, why we go to concerts, has changed so much. It's not so much entertainment in the form of pure entertainment, it's more, at times, an intellectual entertainment. And one is usually highly critical, as one has been in the past as well. But there is a tendency, I think, to squint at the music sometimes. And I'm just thinking about contemporary music concerts nowadays. This squinting at music can be quite healthy as well, I suppose. It makes for a very different experience, sometimes a very tense experience.

MD: What do you mean by 'squinting'?

JS: Not being quite sure whether you like it or not. Wondering whether what you're hearing is something which you should applaud or walk out of. There's this fine line which... I don't mean this about myself, but I mean that it's more of an atmosphere thing. You get this impression that there are people in the audience who are thinking very fast about what they're listening to, rather than letting go about it. But I'm not a huge concert-goer myself. Most of my listening actually happens through recordings, so I'm not the best person to ask about concerts in that sense because I'm not a concert 'veteran'.

MD: How about the ones that you're involved in from the performance perspective? Whispering Gallery, for example?

JS: Whispering Gallery... I have this tendency to believe that the reason I get involved in all these things is because I have to. I just have to get involved and I have to do these things. I have to put out work. Whether people like it or don't like it, I don't really have the tendency to analyse that too much. If it gets a reaction, well and good. Sometimes I've been involved with concerts when we've had absolutely nothing. Five, six people in the audience. Then other times, it's been a full house. But the involvement at the moment for me with rock music, performing as a rock musician on very big stages in front of audiences of sometimes up to a few thousand people, has been such that I have actually taken a huge enjoyment out of making music and putting on music which people will enjoy. The enjoyment has become a much more important element of music-creating for me, and also the way I write music has become much more about writing music for people and making it enjoyable. So, primarily I think that, if I'm involved in putting on concerts, I want something which is both taxing to a certain degree, but also enjoyable and a challenge to a listener at the same time.

MD: And can you do that in both the rock realm and the other?

JS: Absolutely. Probably even more so in the rock realm. Because the rock realm is where the people are most active in listening.

MD: There's a lingua franca of rock.

JS: Exactly, and you can start playing with it much easier. And in fact what we've noticed is that by working in this particular scene you can then turn around and bring people from that particular scene into more serious concerns. But at the same time, I don't really make a huge distinction anymore between those various different areas. I view it very much as a line on which my music sits quite well.

MD: And does that line continue round to Earlsfort Terrace and the National Concert Hall? Is the line like a Luas line [new transport link in Dublin] that connects your rock concert with the Whispering Gallery concert? Does the line continue to the National Concert Hall?

JS: When I discuss the Whispering Gallery work, that is as a curator. As a composer, I meant that line as combining my operatic work, contemporary music-writing, electronic work and rock work, and I see that as being very much a through-line. One can learn so much from being involved in those various different scenes because one thing will inform the other. You find yourself quoting your rock music and vice versa sometimes. But I haven't really thought about Earlsfort Terrace that much....

MD: So it's not that relevant to you, the existent classical music scene? We can talk about the rock scene with its lingua franca. There is an existing classical music scene with its lingua franca, you could say centred on the National Concert Hall. People at The Helix [concert hall] might beg to differ. As might people in the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Opera Ireland. But if we just say symbolically for the moment, the NCH embodies or houses the lingua franca and that fraternity?

JS: In Ireland?

MD: Yes. Is that a relevant scene to you? Or do you just produce what you produce...?

JS: From my perspective, I have made most of my recent successes abroad. And in fact, for a young composer, the most amazing experience for me has been coming from England with huge successes and huge recognition from a lot of different people and different musical communities, and coming back and saying to myself, 'OK, I may live in a small country like Ireland, but in fact the music that I see around me, not just in terms of quality, is very much of an international standard.' I've never really given much thought to the importance of being very much involved in the area of the Irish contemporary music scene. I know the people involved. But it's not something that I would obsess about being involved in, and it's not something which I, up until now, have seen much of either a negative or positive about it. It exists as the Irish scene. But at the same time my biggest successes have been abroad. I think that that is probably the biggest downfall of the Irish scene that it seems possibly at times a slightly more closed system than when you go abroad where you are an unknown coming into a scenario like Almeida Opera and suddenly realise that the work you are doing is on a par with everybody else that they're working with. That's very much a relief, that you exist as a European composer now, rather than just as an Irish composer. And that a performance is as important perhaps here as it is perhaps in Holland or in England. I think that to become obsessed about scenes is a very negative way of looking at things.

MD: What are you working on at the moment?

JS: I'm still working on the opera. And I will be up until September when the last performance is finished, because I'm actually doing electronics live for it as well. So it's kind of a non-stop affair. A few other things in the pipe-line. I just came out of the studio last night with a new single for the rock band which includes a choir rendition of one of the songs from the last album. So again, you're bringing together all these strange aspects into that scene as well. When the opera is finished, I'll be working on my car! Because the marathon is just so long. I was talking to Kevin Volans a few days ago. He had just returned from South Africa. He was saying that he had just seen Gerald Barry and that we both had this opera-pale face which had come from sitting in front of our scores for huge lengths of time, into the night, and we both looked slightly haggard! So I need to get rid of that haggardness and re-charge the batteries.