1. How and when did you get interested in composing?
I remember tuning in to BBC Radio 3 one morning when I was about eleven and hearing music the like of which I'd never heard. It was Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale. That, if anything, was the great initial provocation.
2. Is composing your 'day job' or do you do something else as well?
I teach composition and musicianship at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.
3. Where do you mostly get your ideas?
From inside my head. That's a sufficient answer but scarcely, I know, an adequate one, because plenty of other people's ideas have got in there too. This is a help to a composer and a nuisance. It can take years for you to realise where you have borrowed an idea from. There is also the more knowing kind of borrowing of course, about which composers are coy, though we all do it.
4. What are you working on at the moment?
I am working on a dramatic concerto -- my own term for it -- for soprano, baritone and instruments on the subject of Apollo and Marsyas. Marsyas is the satyr in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book VI who ill-advisedly challenges Apollo to a musical contest and pays a terrible price for his presumption. This is a story which should be as fundamental to musicians as that of Orpheus but for some reason is not. My explanation for this is that its subversive message would have been too much for most of music's upper-class patrons, so composers steered well clear of it. No reason for not setting it now of course. Or is there?
5. Describe your typical working day.
There isn't one. Even when you are working flat out on a piece, days are very different depending on whether you are sketching, doing the inevitable spade-work by which a piece gets written, or copying the final score. I find four hours of the spade-work much more exhausting than ten of the copying.
6. What is it like hearing a new piece played for the first time?
Depends on the performance! And what a tale of joy and woe that is for any composer. Some performances are so appalling that you can only ask: was that the piece I wrote? Yet I have to admit composers can never be easy people to please. The performer in relation to the score is a Catholic: the scripture plus tradition (a cellist playing Bach is also playing Casals and Tortellier playing Bach). The composer is a Protestant: scripture only, please.
7. What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Despite 6 above there have been blessedly many. The performance of my From the Besieged City in a packed Ulster Hall when I was thirty stands out. The peculiar drama of that occasion for various reasons stands as something I will never forget.
8. What has been the lowlight of your career so far?
I won the RTE Musician of the Future Prize in 1982 and it took them almost twenty years to play another note. I have regarded prizes and the cult of 'Young Anything' with a sharp scepticism ever since. Degas said everyone is talented at twenty-five. The problem is still to be when you are fifty.
9. What is your greatest ambition?
To write something as good as Sibelius's Fourth Symphony, or better.
10. Which musician in history do you most admire and why?
Beethoven, for what Henry James might have called the sheer gravitational fact of him.
11. Which present-day musician do you most admire and why?
I greatly admire my beloved friend the late Minna Keal. Minna began (or re-began) serious composing in her seventies. But there was never any hurry in her approach. She spent six years on her Cello Concerto and had been working on her String Quintet for two years at the time of her death. She finished one movement of it. This taught me a great lesson about patience and application. Most composers, like most anybody, lack this quality and it is one reason (the others including ineptitude, lack of talent and self-delusion) why little good music gets written.
12. Which period of history would you most like to have lived in and why?
The early seventeenth century, with painkillers and anaesthetic. It was a period of questioning and discovery, and music was opening out into the radical world of harmony -- for me the most important element in music -- in an electrifying way.
13. What is the best thing about being a composer?
The quiet industry of producing work. Getting to know what Shelley called 'the tender sense of my own inner process.'
14. What is the worst thing about being a composer?
Depending on other people -- performers, administrators, collaborators -- to deliver things which they sometimes do not. Of course you meet many brilliant and dedicated musicians too, but these others have a way of sticking in your memory.
15. If you weren't a composer, what other career might you have chosen?
I didn't choose composing; it chose me.
16. What is your concept of heaven?
Writing a piece as good as Sibelius 4.
17. What is your concept of hell?
Being tied to a chair listening to the music of some contemporary composers.
18. What is your favourite food?
What I am eating at the time.
19. If someone gave you three months off with unlimited travel and living expenses, what would you do?
Stay at home and write music. I hate travelling.
20. If you could have one thing in the world that would really help you as a composer, what would it be?
More talent.
