Michael Dungan: You started off playing entirely by ear. And you described that to me once before as keeping you afraid of being 'unmasked as an impostor'.

Ronan Guilfoyle: I played by ear. This would be in a live playing situation as a jazz musician. I would hear stuff that I could not intellectually process but could aurally process. I was always waiting, as I said to you, to be unmasked as the impostor that I was. In other words, I was waiting for the musicians I was playing with to turn around and say, 'What scale were you playing there, on the Dorian?' Or whatever it was. And I really didn't know. I used to fill out the information by ear. So I didn't know what the Dorian was and I was always afraid of somebody asking me some question like that. So that's what I meant.

In retrospect, I learnt an awful lot from that. I actually value the fact that I played so much by ear. Because it sharpened my instincts a lot. And I know from my own students that there is a kind of proclivity towards safeness now, even amongst improvising students. Because they learn the music in a very controlled situation which is the classroom. If something goes wrong the teacher stops and they fix it and they start again. Or if they're playing, they're usually playing with their peers. So they've rehearsed the music a lot and they're very comfortable with the material. Whereas with me, I was playing with older musicians who pretty much assumed that you knew what you were doing. They just played tunes and called them, didn't even ask you if you knew them. They'd just call a tune and say 'We're gonna play this,' and play. So a lot of the time I just had to make stuff up because I didn't know the tune or I knew it incompletely. So that really sharpens your instincts and you learn to think on your feet very quickly. I think that's a very good thing for an improvising musician obviously. In retrospect, I can see both sides of that educational divide of the value of education -- in the sense that I did some really stupid things for years and years that could have been set right in ten minutes by a good teacher.

MD: What kind of things?

RG: Well, for years I didn't know that the modes of the major -- the Ionian -- scale were connected. Fascinating, huh? But, I could play them all. I knew the Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, all those things. But I actually didn't know that they were contained within the major key. So I was playing about six or seven years and at quite a high level, when it just came up as a mention: 'Of course, we know that'. And I'm going, 'Jesus! Hey!' That kind of stuff. Stuff that somebody could have showed me. And of course, once I knew the connection between the modes, that helped me a lot with playing through certain types of chord progressions. A good teacher could have shown me that in a minute, and it would have saved me a lot of time. So I can see both sides of it.

MD: I think modes still cause great headaches for people, even at university level. Suddenly it's dropped on them. Maybe more classical musicians...

RG: Yeah, maybe. I wouldn't say anything about that unless my lawyer was present! With jazz musicians, it's one of the things they learn as part of what's now become a traditional jazz education in school. That's one of the things you learn earliest, the modes. And in the school where I'm teaching now, they learn about the modes in the first year, within about a month. That's one of the first things, just because it's so important for us. So, the modes: that could have been sorted out for me by a good teacher.

MD: The school you're teaching in is still Newpark?

RG: Yes, the Newpark Music Centre [in Dublin].

MD: Has music education changed here? Have some of the ideas which you brought to Newpark -- because you founded the jazz department there -- have some of those ideas spread elsewhere? Are there signs...?

RG: There are signs that things are changing. I don't know if it's necessarily because of Newpark or anything I was doing in particular. It's just a general worldwide thing. I think it's a realisation of the practicality of a certain kind of music education and the impracticality of another. The Leaving Certificate and the Junior Certificate [Irish state examinations] have changed so much. And that's a real straw in the wind because now you're talking about a large number of people going through a music education which involves more contemporary practices. And that has to be reflected at third level eventually. And it will. We're starting to see signs of it. I was talking to a guy recently who's going to do a master's degree in jazz performance at the Cork School of Music. He has chosen jazz and he is allowed to do that. That's a good sign, although it's still not great because he doesn't really have any facilities provided for him to help him do that. He has to out-source everything. But that in itself is a straw in the wind, I think, that things are changing and things will change here.

MD: Did he come up via a non-classical instrument the way you did?

RG: No, he's a saxophone player and he did classical lessons. But then he got into jazz and did the diploma at Newpark a couple of years ago. Now he's pursuing the master's.

MD: Are the ties strong between yourselves and Cork?

RG: No. It was him ringing me up and asking 'Will you teach me?'. He has to choose tutors. I've been down to UCC [University College Cork] and I'm doing a bit of teaching there and I know Paul O'Donnell who teaches down there. He's doing great work, but there aren't quite the facilities yet to provide the education for someone who wants that. In other words, fully-equipped ensemble rooms and a library that has access to the types of recordings and research materials you need for studying what, for want of a better term, you could call jazz education.

MD: I think it would be fair to describe the central tension in your own music as that between composed and improvised.

RG: I guess you could call it a central tension, although I don't see it like that. I see it as a very complementary thing. As I get older I realise how simple music is, really. There's an awful lot of obfuscation about technique and all that kind of stuff. But in the end music is incredibly simple. It's one person expressing something to another person. How that is done varies hugely across the world. But that's all it is in the end. I'm a great believer in the humanity of music, or of how music should be human. Improvising is incredibly human because it's like the person making it up on the spot. And of course sometimes they make mistakes, and sometimes they do very poor things and make poor choices, and sometimes they make great choices. And I think that's very like real life.

Where you have a situation, as in my music, where you have written material and then somebody who's allowed to respond to that material -- I really like that because the humanity of it is terrific. The soloist can respond a different way every night they play. Again, maybe that's a little bit romantic, to say that it will be completely different stuff each time. That doesn't quite happen. It depends on the situation -- the soloist and what materials they're allowed use. Sometimes in my pieces the soloist may be given harmonic leeway, may be given rhythmic leeway, and may be given both. Or may be just told to improvise off the feeling of the last passage. In which case a very wide range of response is possible. But it is really nice that you can have performances of the same piece night after night, and that it will be at least slightly different every night. And also that the soloist has a control over that. And also that you can have different soloists playing the same piece, and the character of the piece will be very different, which is an experience which I've had where I've had different soloists with the same written music in the rest of the group. But the soloist's approach is very different so you get a different piece. I absolutely love that.

MD: Can it be very wide?

RG: It can be. Again it depends on the situation. You see, I'm always writing for a particular musician. I don't write -- God forbid! -- for posterity. If I'm writing, I know who the person is that I'm writing for, so I know the way they play. And therefore I will try and write music that will provide a framework that will be very effective. Then you have the situation where the piece that was originally written for this person, and plays to their strengths, is then played by another person.

MD: Because the piece has a life of its own.

RG: And more importantly, that other soloist has a life of their own. And they interpret it completely differently because they react differently to the written material. So I guess if I'm writing for one soloist, I know -- kind of -- how they're going to respond. At least in a broad sense. But at the same time, if you have a new soloist, he or she is going to respond differently. Their response to the material is going to be different because they're different people.

And that's why I'm talking about the humanity. If you and I have a conversation... Let's just say for supposition that a few minutes after this you were to interview another composer, the likelihood is that their reactions to the same questions -- if you were to ask them the same questions -- would be different. So you would have your set questions, but my response and the other composer's response are going to be different. And it's the same thing with the written material. In a way you're providing me with the written material and I'm improvising. So my responses to your questions are going to be different from the other composer's if you ask them the same questions. And that's very nice. My response to the questions and the other composer's response to the questions will be reflections of their personality and my personality. In the same way, when you have the improvised music with the written, the response of the different soloists is their personality coming out through the music and responding to the same impetus.

MD: Conversation is a very useful metaphor because, with classical music we tend to think of the conversation between the performers and the audience. Whereas the kind of music you're talking about heightens the conversation within the music as well.

RG: Yes, it does. I consider classical music to be closer to a play. Now, maybe one considers a play a conversation. There is a conversation between the performer and the audience. But in a way it's almost a conversation between the author and the audience. Which is a bit like classical music, in that the interpreter has to bring out the beauty and strength and whatever it is about the piece to the audience. And their success or failure at that ties up both with their success or failure doing that and the success or failure of the composer in providing the material in the first place. In improvised music there is a dynamic within the group that is completely self-contained before it reaches the audience. In other words, the success of the communication between the improvising musicians is paramount for the audience to be able to enjoy the music. You have to be saying something to the other musicians and they have to be responding to you. And then if the audience can witness that, then they become part of the emotional to-ing and fro-ing. That's really the beauty of improvised music. It's certainly the beauty of jazz music. I mean, I think that the great thing about jazz is that it's totally about the process, not the result. Which is a difficulty that I think classical musicians have with jazz, because their music is totally result-based. You write the piece and the result is the piece. Whereas in jazz, you get involved in the process and then it's over. There's no result. It's a very strange art form in that respect. There is no result. You go and watch guys play the music. At the end of the music, the music's over. There's nothing left. There's no record. So maybe you taped it? OK, what about recordings? Recordings are just a photograph of the process. All the great recordings we might have -- Miles Davis, Kind of Blue -- that's just something they did one afternoon and never did the same way again. So you actually have a photograph of a process. Now, that process happened to be brilliant, so therefore it becomes a classic. But it's not a result by Miles Davis. He would never have seen it like that. He was very anti- any repetition of what he had done in the past. And I think that's the beauty of it. That the music is about the interaction between the people on the stage, performing with each other and interacting with each other. And then the audience becomes part of that interaction by an appreciation of what's going on, or by a reception of the emotional message that comes out from this interaction between the musicians.

MD: But that would be in parallel with plays and classical music.

RG: Except that you're going to get the same story every time. That would be the difference. That's not necessarily a criticism. It's just a difference. It's a bit like conversation and plays, again, or debate. If I have this conversation with you tomorrow, it's quite likely that I'll say pretty much the same things but never in the same order. And you may question me slightly differently. And you may have had a chance to think about it overnight, and then you may be waiting for one of my answers and then challenge me on it because you've thought of something at three o'clock in the morning: 'Aha!'

MD: Or another composer may have given me something juicy to ask you.

RG: Exactly. So therefore your response will be different. Maybe the questions will be different. Maybe your response to my answers will be different. And that's the beauty of it, the fact that we have that possibility of change. For my money, that's why I really like it. It's the humanity of it.

MD: I was once present when somebody -- not you, I don't think -- was making a generalisation about the absence of improvisation in classical music. And everyone was nodding. Except an organist who stood up and said, 'Well wait: there's a great tradition of improvisation in organ-playing'. Your background in improvisation is through jazz. Did you ever get involved in other kinds of improvisation? Organ improvisation? Or through world music?

RG: Yes, Indian music particularly, and also Arabic music. I've done a lot of work with Indian musicians and collaborative projects, usually between jazz and Indian classical music. But also Irish traditional music and Indian and jazz.

MD: So how universal is it, the humanity of improvisation, whether it's New York jazz or something from Calcutta?

RG: Improvisation is universal. In fact, it is the most natural thing that a human being can do with music. I always make this point, that if you have a small child you inevitably, at some point, will see the child singing to itself. Especially around the age of two. Before they really know tunes, although gifted kids know tunes very early. But before they're really getting into tunes. And you watch them do something on their own, when they're not aware of being watched. And they will sing. And they will play with something, [sings] na na na na na. And they're doing all this, and the blocks... And they're improvising.

If you think about what music is, music is totally unnecessary for the survival of the human race. And yet everyone does it, and everyone responds to it. We need things for survival: food, drink, warmth, shelter, procreation. After that, everything else is an optional extra. But despite that, music has been part of humanity forever. So it's a very human impulse. Now, every piece of music you ever heard was improvised by somebody. It was made up, it was heard, it was put down. Whether it was a toothpaste ad, or Beethoven, or Indian classical music or didjeridu or whatever. It's somebody hearing something and expressing it through music. The impulse to improvise is totally natural, and it's the most fundamentally human thing you can do. What happens is, you feel good and you sing. Or you hear a piece of music and you tap your foot. Who taught you how to tap your foot? Did you get lessons in tapping your foot? 'That's a really good foot-tapping technique you have. Where did you learn?' People just tap their foot because they're responding to music. So they're improvising in a physical way. And why do they tap their foot? Because they feel good. If people are out listening to a marching band on St Patrick's Day, you see everyone there going like this [moves feet]. So they're actually making a physical response to an emotional… You never see anyone sad tapping their foot, if you think about it. In the same way, with music, you feel something and you sing. Or you hum, or maybe you play an instrument. But you do something that responds to that.

I think that one of the problems with certain types of musical education -- and I would also include rock music in this, not just classical music -- is that it is anti- this improvisation impulse. People become very highly educated in music but can't play a note without instruction, either visual or oral, where somebody says 'Play this, play this, do this, then do that, then go to letter A, then DS al coda. And I think that's kind of sad in a way. And people say that in rock music they all play by ear -- not quite the same as improvising which is slightly different. Rock music militates against improvisation because people don't want to hear wildly different versions of what they have on record. If somebody goes to a concert by U2, they want bigger, better, louder lights, but the same music. They don't want to hear a U2 song that's totally unrecognisable because the guy is thinking, 'It would be great to do it much faster tonight.' Or, 'Let's do it in a different key'. Or, 'Change the time signature. Let's do it with just bass and drums, no vocals'. Nobody wants to hear that. People are not used to responding to improvisation. It's definitely a difficulty for them. Because people like the familiar. In all walks of life we're safe with the familiar. We're not so safe with the unfamiliar.

MD: Does anyone else in Ireland compose the way that you do? Is there anyone else who shares that central tension, if you'll allow me call it that, between composed and improvised?

RG: I don't know, is the short answer.

MD: There isn't a support group?

RG: No, I have no support group, ringing each other up saying, 'I feel the impulse to write an improvised passage here: what can I do?'

MD: Outside Ireland?

RG: Oh yeah. There are lots of people. In America they actually have a word for it: 'in-the-cracks' music. In the cracks between classical and jazz. And the reason this music can exist is probably because of the way jazz education has changed, how it has changed jazz musicians who now come through quite a strong classical background, in terms of being very familiar with classical techniques and practices. They play their instruments very well and they read well. But they also improvise. So you now are getting a generation of soloists who are quite comfortable playing large written tracts, and being told to improvise freely or over a chord progression. So you've really got a lot of leeway with this. It's never been a better time for it. Because the soloists are there, and they're very comfortable. And you say, 'I want you to play a twelve-bar blues using a twelve-note row.' And they'll say, 'OK. What time signature would you like it in? 15/8? Right: how would you like that sub-divided?'

There are a lot of musicians like that who are really incredibly skilled. And there are more and more of them as the young ones come through. In a lot of jazz schools now, particularly in Europe, for the first two years of a four-year programme they actually do classical studies alongside the jazz studies. And you can't actually go onto the final two years of the jazz course unless you pass the classical exams. So you get people with very strong techniques but also with these jazz virtues.

MD: Very balanced musicians.

RG: Very balanced and very good musicians. Very versatile, and I think that's really the key. And in this day and age, versatility is everything for a musician. In terms of employment for sure. If you look at jazz, or classical, or any art form, music is so diverse now. If you talk about -- in the classical sense -- 'contemporary' music, what does that mean? Does it mean John Adams or does it mean Lutoslawski? Or does it mean electronic music or does it mean this or that? It means all kinds of different styles. And it's the same in jazz. There is no one movement in jazz. There are lots of them.

MD: So the more rounded you are, the better equipped you are to...

RG: Work. Buy a house and have a car. Or else have luxuries like bread and cheese!

MD: Do you perceive in your own music a progression in the last ten years, or the last twenty?

RG: Oh yeah. Twenty years? If I'd not progressed in twenty years I'd have given it up! Yes definitely. There are certain things that I worked on extensively at one point in my life or another that I now hear organically, just simply because I've absorbed them. And I would hope to be always doing that. Of course when you're younger the rate of change is more rapid, simply because you're absorbing so much information because you've got no information to start with. So your learning curve is much steeper. But definitely, the way I write now... I mean, funnily enough I can hear stuff that I write and I can identify where it came from. It's not that series of notes. But that vibe or that soundworld or that feeling. I know what records I was listening to when I first heard that. And I know who the artists were that I was listening to. Or I know the thing that I was studying or I know the guys that I was hanging out with at that time, and what was really interesting me. So yes, it is developing all the time. And I think it's better all the time. I hope so. I think I'm a better musician now than I was twenty years ago. Or even two years ago. And a lot of that's not necessarily to do with technique. It's just got to do with experience which, really, just counts for so much.

MD: You described to me, before, your appetite for music as being voracious, beginning with the music that your father played in the house. Very specific taste, something like classical music from 1880 onwards, and jazz. So you absorbed all that. What do you listen to or study now that's different from what you grew up with? Do you still develop new appetites for music that you've never heard before?

RG: Yes. Nothing makes me happier than to hear something that I've never heard before that I like. Absolutely, it's a pleasure for me to discover something new. And it's getting rarer, of course. Because as I listen to more and more music… But I depend upon my colleagues, both here and abroad, to turn me on to things: 'Have you heard that? Check this out.'

I would listen to a much wider range of jazz than my father would have. He had certain tastes. My tastes would be much wider. Unfortunately he passed away many years ago, otherwise we would have had some incredible fights about music for sure. He was very opinionated, and so am I. We would definitely have had some interesting conversations about music. I also have a much broader range of classical music interests than he had. I mean, it's kind of hard for me to know. He died when I was seventeen, before I really got into the music thing in a very heavy way myself. So it's hard for me to know why he had no Bach in the house. I know he hated Romantic music in the sense of anything that he would describe as 'slushy', like Rachmaninov. Whereas I really like Rachmaninov. There was no Chopin in the house. He couldn't stand Chopin. There were certain things he really didn't like in classical music and I really did.

Then within the jazz genre, I listen to stuff that has a lot of funk influence, because I grew up listening to that in my teenage years. And I would listen to stuff that has rock influences and things like that which he would probably have abhorred, I would guess. But then the other big thing that I listened to that would never have been in the house because nobody listened to it then, anywhere, was what's now known as world music. So, Indian music, Arabic music which I'm very fond of, Brazilian music which I love, Afro-Cuban music, Irish traditional music, which we would never have heard in the house. And which is probably the thing which I came to latest: an appreciation of how great that is. When you were growing up in Ireland in the 1960s, traditional music was considered the squarest of the square. Nobody listened to it. Now of course, since then there has been a great revival in it, in the sense of our pride in it, which may be a better way to describe it. Or maybe an appreciation of its value. Through working with Irish traditional musicians in the last ten years or so, I've really come to appreciate it and to totally enjoy it. It's funny: as someone who's used Irish traditional music in all kinds of blasphemous ways in my own music, when I listen to Irish traditional music I want it as traditional as possible! When I'm listening to it in its own form. As soon as I see a guitar-player I'm thinking, Right: time to go! I just want to hear them play unison. I don't want to hear a guy playing G to C. The old bodhrán-with-strings syndrome. So it's funny. For someone who is very much involved in using different elements of music in my own music, I'm kind of a fascist about what I'm listening to.

MD: What are you working on at the moment?

RG: I'm starting to write a saxophone concerto for an American saxophone player called Dave Liebman who played a piece of mine in 1998, I think. It's a concerto for soprano saxophone and double orchestra for the Manhattan School of Music. The Manhattan School of Music has a group called the Jazz Philharmonic, and that is an orchestra made up of a symphony orchestra and a jazz orchestra combined. So it's five saxophones, five trumpets, four trombones, piano, bass, drums, guitar, and percussion -- a typical jazz orchestra. And then strings, four horns, double woodwinds, percussion and harp. So it's a huge orchestra, absolutely massive. And it'll be performed in January 2004 in New York. So that's what I'm starting on.

MD: And how do you work on it? You're full-time in Newpark.

RG: In my spare time. There are times when I write more than others. I have taken sabbaticals to write. I probably will do that in the future, though probably not in this case. I'll write it during the summer. I'm actually quite quick. That's not something I realised until I talked to other composers and I realised that my output is quite large. I'm actually pretty quick. There's a piece being performed in July for double trio -- I seem to like doubles for some reason all of a sudden. It's string trio plus jazz guitar trio (which means guitar, bass and drums). And all of the string players are improvisers. But I wrote five movements out of the eight at one-a-day up at Annamakerrig [the Tyrone Guthrie Centre artists' retreat in Ireland] in February. Which was pretty extraordinary even for me. I couldn't believe it. So I'm hopeful my speed won't desert me on this occasion because there is a huge amount of music to write. About thirty minutes.

MD: And a lot of staves.

RG: A lot of staves! But Finale will help me there.