Michael Dungan: Are you a full-time composer?

Kevin O'Connell: I am and I'm not. I've always composed and I've always taught as well, for some twenty years now. And of course the mixture of the two varies from one year to the next and at different times of the year. It's a very inconstant thing. But the catalogue of works now is quite a substantial one, including three chamber operas, several orchestral works and a lot of chamber music. So somehow the composing gets done.

MD: Over the years, as you've combined composing and teaching, have patterns evolved? Are you like Mahler, finishing your works in the summer-time?

KO'C: There are patterns, but I would be hard-pressed to say exactly what they are. For example, I was voted into Aosdána, which is our academy of creative artists in this country, about five years ago. And in the immediate wake of that there was a big spate of producing pieces. I think that the three to four years after that were the most productive period of my life. So it depends on the circumstances at the time. Various things can plug into this: how much teaching you're doing; I've been involved in performances of my own works; I conduct a bit as well. Sometimes commissions are tied in with residencies. The string quartet I wrote for the Lotus Quartet was tied in with a residency in Dún Laoghaire here in Dublin which involved doing workshops as well as the composing itself, so there was always an element of mix-and-match going on.

MD: When you sit down with a manuscript, are you methodical? Or do you squash it in whenever you can? Or do you do an amount before breakfast or before you go to bed?

KO'C: I find when I'm working to commission, which is more often than not the case, I have to stick fairly closely to a routine. I just find that pieces of any size don't get written otherwise. They can't get written. Benjamin Britten said that writing music is manual labour and that's the best definition of the activity that I've ever read. People underestimate the amount of sheer work that goes into composition. And one thing that twenty years of doing it has taught me is that you've got to have the time to make sure that those dots go on paper. So you do need a routine.

MD: Do you have to take precautions? John Kinsella said he almost burnt himself out working on one of his latter symphonies. Then the next jolt of inspiration came along and he got back into the saddle. But he was quite fearful, I think, that he had nearly burnt himself out. Do you ever experience that? Not just in terms of deadlines but in terms, as you say, of the sheer effort that it takes?

KO'C: Yes. I think that most creative people [do]. After you finish the piece, there's that fear that it might be your last. There's a well-known depression that people go through after finishing pieces. It's like your appetite for food. If you sit down and eat a heavy meal, you feel like you'll never need to eat in your life again. That's the way you feel after it. But give it six hours or a day or whatever, and the inclination comes back. The thing about composing is that you don't really choose composing, it chooses you. That, in my experience, is how it has worked.

MD: Where does inspiration spring from?

KO'C: Inspiration is an old-fashioned word but I think it's a very good word. Because you do need the inspiration. Whether or not it's inspiration… I prefer to think of it as 'suggestions'. Inspiration is a word that some composers are wary of. I'm one of them. Not that it's not there, not that it's not important. But you don't like to look too deeply into the well that stuff comes out of. It's superstition. But there are suggestions that can set you off, most obviously if you're writing a vocal piece, which is what I'm working on at the moment. The text... for the first time ever, I happen to have written the text for the piece as well, something in principle I tend to disagree with. But I'm breaking my own principle there. A suggestion can come very obviously from another piece of music, either because you profoundly like something about it or profoundly dislike something about it. So there are things that will get you kick-started.

As to inspiration, I think the poet Philip Larkin was good on the subject, on how important it was. He said inspiration is like a football match, an FA Cup Final. You've got the two teams, you've got the referee, 100,000 people in the stadium and so many millions watching on TV. And then, somewhere in the middle of it all, there's the ball. They'd all look pretty stupid without the ball. That's inspiration.

MD: Is there ever a big gap between receiving the commission, agreeing to do the piece and the first inspiration? Or sometimes are there ideas that are stored up until the perfect commission comes along that can accommodate the ideas already there?

KO'C: The second is the ideal situation. My experience of working to commissions is that people have a degree of flexibility if you come back to them saying, 'I'm interested in your idea but how about this? How about we go about it in this way?' I had to write a piece [From the Beseiged City] for the tercentenary of the Derry Siege -- I come from Derry [in Northern Ireland] -- and this was 1989. I was thirty and it was my first opportunity to write a big orchestral piece that I could hear played. The thing about that was, you could only too readily imagine the kind of piece that could come out for that kind of occasion, like an evocation of a battle and all the rest of it. What I wanted to write about was what I think of as 'Siege Number 1', which is the one inside people's heads. Which is where conflicts like Northern Ireland basically arise from. What goes on in here, not out there. The thing is that Derry City Council had also commissioned a piece from Shaun Davey, for the same occasion in the same year. And in a way that was wonderful because it took a lot of pressure off me. I wanted to set a quite obscure modernist poem by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, called From the Besieged City. It is about a siege but it's more about the siege that goes on inside people's heads. And in a way, because Shaun was doing the big set piece, a big orchestral piece about the Derry Siege, it enabled me to write the piece that I wanted to write.

MD: How much of a struggle is it to deal with that particular tension between writing the piece that you want to write, as you say, but keeping an ear out for your audience or for the people who are paying for it or, God forbid, for posterity? Is that a struggle or do you just put your head down and write the piece that you want to write?

KO'C: I suppose the answer that many people would give is, 'Oh, I write what I want to write and that's it'. We're very, very suspicious now of doing anything that seems tailored to an audience. Having said that, I think there's hardly a composer who has not, at some level, done it. Most obviously, if you're writing for young people or children, which I've done -- not a lot, but some -- it's not a case of compromising in terms of your language or the integrity of the music you want to write, but you'll compromise in terms of the sheer difficulty. You'll not give them very jagged atonal lines to sing. So what you do there, again, is a case of looking at what I wanted to do and what are the most economical means for doing it, and still write a piece of music that you're prepared to stand by. I don't consider that any kind of limitation at all.

MD: You mentioned Dún Laoghaire and that you were composer-in-residence there. Can you describe that a little bit more: what it entailed, what it was like being an artist in the community in a sort of prescribed sense?

KO'C: It's not the first of this kind of residency I've done. But it was probably the most satisfying for many reasons. There's a very good arts department in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, who were a terrific help to me and a support. They asked me two questions at the interview: a) 'What group do you want to work with? To focus on?'; and b) 'What kind of piece do you want to write?' And without having thought about it very much I said I'd prefer to work with senior citizens. Because the automatic thing is, 'Oh, I'll go into schools'. In fact a fair amount of work is done in schools now and I've done my share of it. And I thought, well, no one ever suggests older people and to get them composing. So I ended up working with senior citizens groups for that year. It was one of the most satisfying things I think I've done in terms of workshops. We put on an improvised performance at the end of the year with a dance company who were also resident at the time. We improvised the score, myself and all the participating musicians, and the dance company improvised a ballet along with it. And it was a fantastic experience.

MD: You often hear composers talking about their first string quartet as being a frightening step to take. Did you experience that?

KO'C: I did. I felt, this is the real test. The thing is, I don't play a string instrument myself. I have a brother who plays cello. A lot of my favourite music is string quartet music: the quartets of Beethoven, Bartók, Carter, Ligeti et al. And I really felt that this is walking inside the circle of flame. But it was an exhilarating experience writing that piece, I must say, once I got into it. Partly because of the fear I felt and the anticipation.

MD: So you fed off it, creatively.

KO'C: I did. Fear is a very creative thing.

MD: And you mentioned the vocal work that you're working on at the moment. What's that?

KO'C: This is a commission for the Crash Ensemble. I'll be using the full ensemble with some computer input as well, processing the sound, and two voices. I based this on the story of Apollo and Marsyas. They appear together in Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Marsyas is a satyr, half-man, half-beast, an earthy creature. He becomes expert on the flute and challenges Apollo to a musical contest. Typical upstart: hubris. What happens is that, inevitably, Apollo wins the contest and as a punishment for Marsyas he flays him until his skin drops off. Certainly there are so many elements in that story about the whole nature of music and the ownership of music. This is a rather Marxist standpoint but we all know it's true: music, for all its high ideals and so forth, is something that people own. There's ownership. There's insider-dom, there's outsider-dom. It's got all that. And the other thing that it shares in common with all the ancient myths about music -- Orpheus is another example -- is just the sheer violence. The terrible bloodthirstiness that the ancients associated with music and with musical transgression, with remaining inside the line or stepping outside the line. Which is what Marsyas does. You see it doesn't really matter whether or not he wins. The fact is that, like Prometheus, he has made the challenge and those on the upper deck can't forgive that. So it's exploring all that. There are two singers, for Apollo and Marsyas.

MD: Where do you think this comes from within you? I don't think that you are a violent person, that you have a violent side.

KO'C: I think that everyone has violence within them. And I do think that culture is about violence at some very deep level. This is where the ancients were right about music, that music is a subsuming of it, a symbolic transformation of the violence. Growing up in Northern Ireland… the first thing that strikes anyone who goes there is the amazing politeness and friendliness of the people. Indeed, they're the friendliest people you could meet. And yet for thirty years that society waged an internecine war of terrible savagery. Very often a quiet outward manner, shall we say, can disguise deeply destructive tendencies. And I think there's something -- dealing with the debate between the inward and the outward -- in that outward thing, and in the aspects of it that are within yourself; you've got to try to come to grips with that. I mean, partly because of my interest in composing in relation to teaching... I'm very interested in composers who teach, like Schoenberg, Messiaen or Stanford. I've just been looking at Stanford lately because it's the 150th anniversary and all that, and listening to some of the music. And he's a fine composer. But if I had a problem with the music it is that he's not in quarrel with himself, he's not touching his own violence in a way that, for example, Brahms does incredibly, if you really listen inside there. You actually hear the gears and the mechanics meshing very violently. And that's what I like to get down to in music.

MD: You mentioned growing up in Northern Ireland and I was going to ask you to step outside yourself twice, first to assess how great an impact that has had on you, growing up in Derry rather than Kerry.

KO'C: Here you would have to compare. And obviously you would have to be growing up in two places simultaneously to make the comparison. Curious as it might seem, growing up amongst soldiers and with bombs going off and all the rest of it, that was my normality. It is for any Northern Irish person of my generation. I can remember when the Troubles broke out. I remember the first day of them: the 5th of October 1968, with the breaking up of that civil rights demonstration. I remember that day vividly. And the thing is that, what did strike me then, what we witnessed over the next couple of years was the fabric of society literally just crumbling. You could watch it happen, literally day by day, in the late sixties and early seventies. We lived in Belfast for a period, my family: '69, '70, '71, through those very bad years. And I remember after the riots erupted in Belfast in August '69, things had quietened down a bit and my father said, 'We'll take a drive around west Belfast just to see what's happened'. And it really looked like movie reels of the Second World War: the images of destruction that one saw. I think that when you're at that very formative age, the thing is that thereafter -- and this is probably something which I think has remained with me -- is just that the sense of impermanence is really woven deep into your way of seeing things.

MD: And the layers that you talked about. Scenes reminiscent of blitzed countries come beneath a society which you were familiar with as being polite and ordinary.

KO'C: And still am. This is the curious thing, that you walked past the gun emplacements and just got on with life. Northern Ireland was a very old kind of war in terms of all the religion and all that. But I mean, as we're now seeing, it was a very new kind of war as well. It's the kind of war that happens in the modern world. It's not trenches facing one another, it's things happening in the middle of an urban environment where people, to some extent, carry on functioning. Again, I can't say how this has formed me as a musician. It's probably easier for other people to tell than it is for me.

MD: That's why I had to ask you to step outside yourself. And I might as well skip ahead and ask you to step outside yourself again, now that I've got you into the way of it. If you were giving a course on yourself...

KO'C: There's a thought!

MD: ...and you had to identify the key works in your canon in what is a substantial output, what would some of those works be?

KO'C: Well again, composers are a bit undependable in this way, especially with works they've written that have become fairly popular. They tend to hate those and then name ones that are more obscure. Which often genuinely are their favourites, it's not just that they're being perverse. Certainly the Quartet brought a lot of things together. Ten years ago I wrote a Cello Sonata -- and in a way I've moved very much away from the kind of language that it's in and so forth -- but I'm very interested in line. I think I'm more a composer of line than of texture. I'm very interested in texture, but the projection of line is very important. The cello is a good instrument for doing that. And I think that in the Cello Sonata I pushed that aspect of my musical technique forward, shall we say, of being able to sustain line over a very long period. That's one of the things that makes me tick. It's interesting that in terms of twentieth-century music, going right back to Stravinsky, we've had this very 'collage' way of thinking of music. You do one thing, you stop without any transition and do a contrasting thing, then you put in another contrasting block in relation to that. And curiously that doesn't interest me so much anymore. I'm very interested in the continuous form. Nadia Boulanger talked about la grande ligne, the 'great line' in music. I'm interested in that.

MD: In terms of your own musical interests outside your composing, who would you acknowledge as interests and perhaps influences?

KO'C: For modern composers -- for a lot of us -- Stravinsky is a big figure. And maybe he was at one time for me more so than now. I still think he's a great composer, it's just that I think I need Stravinsky less now. Curiously, a figure like Sibelius came into the picture for me about five years ago. I mean, he started happening in a big way.

MD: That seems, I won't say perverse, but not trendy!

KO'C: It certainly isn't! The curious thing is that it's so untrendy that it's becoming trendy! In Germany now, ask any young composer from Wolfgang Rihm down, Sibelius is the man they're all into. And to think that in his own lifetime the Germans hated him. They regarded him as a crude provincial symphonist. But that's changing. The thing with him, I think, is this continuity, his sense of continuity and line. And if it's not an arrogant thing to say, but I identify with him in this respect, that you can tell in his earlier works that he had great difficulty with this. Ideas tend to peter out and then he starts something else. And it's just because he can't quite sustain the continuity. He had to work on it. But by heavens when he hit his stride, which I think he really began to do in his forties, the sense of continuity there is quite overwhelming.

MD: Forgive me for a second, but does this mean that you would approach, say, Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, as a piece of craft work; i.e., 'Isn't it amazing the way it's put together?', as opposed to a moving, aural experience? Simultaneous? Or separate?

KO'C: I think both. The one doesn't necessarily exclude the other, which is not a completely honest answer. There is this composer's thing when you're listening to a piece, when you're listening to a contemporary piece that you haven't heard before. One edge of you is saying, 'How did he do that? I wish I could see the score there'. It's a very unsettled kind of listening. And composers, in that sense, are not great listeners. I mean, they're very obsessive listeners, but they're not balanced listeners to other people's music. Because they keep listening and focusing for their own angle on things. So with Sibelius I think it's that. I enjoy the music enormously but I try to make myself aware of how he does it as well. Whether or not people like it, and I make no apology for this, an intellectual grasp and a grip on what's going on in music is part of composing. Composers are a bit wary of talking about this but frankly I don't make any bones about it.

MD: I remember at the Dublin Piano Competition sitting beside an eliminated competitor during the semi-finals. He wasn't sour by any means and there was a pianist with tremendous technical capacity playing. And the fellow beside me was in raptures about his technique, saying he couldn't believe it and he wished he could do that. But the music-making was atrocious. So I hated it and he loved it. Is it parallel to that in some ways? That you are seeing something in Sibelius or whoever it is, that goes deeper or goes on a different line from what the rest of us, who are purely listening, experience?

KO'C: Very probably so. Having said that, maybe it is best to be influenced by what you actually love. And certainly I love Sibelius's music. Janácek's as well, in a quite different way: another influence. But I think that every composer should be and probably is influenced by at least one composer whom he doesn't particularly enjoy. I mean, apart from a handful of pieces, I don't tend to sit down and listen to a lot of Schoenberg. Webern as well, by the way. But Schoenberg and Webern have had an enormous impact on the way that I think about music. Sometimes it's almost as though you have one or other of them staring over your shoulder saying, 'Don't do that'. It's that, but it's not a purely intimidating thing either. They can release you into dimensions of sound where otherwise you mightn't go, and that's important. Sometimes you're influenced by people that you don't particularly like.

MD: That's quite a revelation, I think. Two more questions: you write almost exclusively for traditional forces.

KO'C: Yes.

MD: Or, exclusively?

KO'C: Pretty exclusively.

MD: And it's been a topic recently, about commissioning and the Arts Council and so on. We don't need to talk about the Arts Council, but what impact does it have on your career or on your day-to-day living as a creative person that you are wedded in a way to traditional forces? You are not interested at the moment in electro-acoustic music or multimedia music. Or do you not pay attention to that absence at all?

KO'C: You know, I'm interested in some of the music that comes out of this. But my feeling about it is, as well, that life is short. There's not only just the one kind of composer you can be, there's also a limit to the number of things that you can be productively interested in. You have to compose according to where your strengths lie, or where you feel them to lie. If one were given more lifetimes, sure. One thing I feel is that, as a composer, you can't go around apologising for yourself. What I enjoy writing is chamber music and orchestral music and, when I get the opportunity, music theatre or opera. Those are the things that just get me going and that's the way it is, quite simply. Whatever happens in the outside environment, of course you've got to be aware of it and so forth. But finally, you are the composer you are. Beyond a certain point you can't even quarrel with that yourself.

MD: How long have you been aware of the composer who you are?

KO'C: That's a good question. I started writing music when I was twelve. That means -- frightening thought -- I've now been doing it for over thirty years. And in another sense, I don't know what kind of composer I am, and in a way I'm glad not to. A colleague said to me -- I suppose latterly, about a year ago -- 'If I heard four or five consecutive bars of a piece of yours, I would know it was yours'. And I said to him, 'Thank you for saying so, but don't tell me what it is. I don't want to know.'