Michael Dungan: In the quotation that's at the top of your potted biography in the Contemporary Music Centre's catalogue you make a reference to 'faith and life' in your music. Few people would deny that life plays a role in creative activity. But there are plenty of people for whom faith would have little to do with it. How does this work for you?

Ian Wilson It works for me these days in as much as my faith is just an integral part of my life. I remember my wife saying to me quite some time ago, when she came across this for the first time, 'Why do you separate them?' Because for her it was very natural that they would both be aspects of the same thing. That quote is a good ten years old and I've never changed it. Initially I was separating them to make a distinction as much for myself as for anybody else. Because there were some works that I was starting to write which were specifically exploring aspects of my faith, or Christian faith if you like. I was consciously going there because it gave me something important to write about. It felt like that for me. Because up to that point I had been writing music for a few years which seemed to be dealing with the techniques of writing. Trying to get used to dealing with all that material. And at a certain point I started to think, 'OK, that's how you write music: let's investigate why.' I felt that, if it's going to be important, even for myself -- or only for myself -- that it had to be particularly relevant to me. Therefore I was exploring aspects of my life which were most important to me. So, that was my faith, and... there were pieces I was writing which were to do with my life. Not necessarily biographical, the way Strauss would have written, for instance. But they were events or concerns about life generally which I felt were worth writing about. And then over ten years that's evolved to a stage where I don't really separate them so much. Maybe I should change the quote now. I don't feel the need, as I did ten years ago, to define that area of my life to be dealt with musically on its own. It still comes into what I write. But it's as much because my faith informs how I look at life. So it's very integral now.

MD: Hence your wife's question.

IW: Yes: 'What are you doing?'!

MD: I presume that you would draw a distinction here between faith and religion. It seems that many composers from Northern Ireland want to say, 'I've avoided religion because look where it can take us'.

IW: Strange, but I was just thinking about this in the car coming down here today. For me, Christian faith -- away from institutionalised structures -- has been a very liberating influence and it's made me a much more tolerant, open-minded and liberal person than I would have been otherwise, I think. So it's been very positive for me in that way. But I am also aware how constraining it can be, just depending on how it's presented, I think. To do with the North, really, the presentation is a lot of it. And religion has a bad press, not least because sometimes it gets mixed up with politics, which I don't think is ever a good idea. Therefore I can well understand why people, myself included, I suppose, would really want to avoid any definite reference to institutionalised religion.

Only a few composers spring to mind, like John Tavener who is very heart-on-sleeve about his Orthodox faith. James MacMillan is, I think, very socially clued-in and he ties that very much, and rightly so, to his Catholic faith. Michael Finnissy -- there was quite a bit of news in musical circles, and in his own promotional material, about his decision to join the Church of England. So it does play an important role in some composers' lives. Bruckner springs to mind.

MD: Can you describe the faith component that might be discernible in your new opera, Hamelin, that we're going to hear in the autumn?

IW: No, I can't, especially in that piece. Because the opera is, for me, very text-oriented. And structurally, and in terms of its variety and tone, everything for me revolves around that text. And therefore the overt notion of faith doesn't come into it. It's not a piece that I would have been able to write musically without the input from Lavinia [Greenlaw], the librettist. I think to isolate the faith component is difficult. It would be more possible in purely instrumental works, I think. For many years, in my instrumental pieces, I was always interested or concerned to leave the listener with a positive impression. So even in something like my Organ Concerto of eight years ago [Rich Harbour] which is actually a meditation on death and the afterlife, I was still very keen to leave the most positive music for the end. And that's a very naïve approach, I think, on my part. Not that I am anything but fond of that piece. But I think it's an oversimplification: if it was about faith in any way, then it had to be positive, it had to be bright or happy or something like that. The older you get, you can't help but realise that it's just never that straightforward. So unless there's a particularly overt inspiration behind a piece of music -- for instance in The Seven Last Words, my second trio, or pieces like that which are quite rare in my output -- then I would be very hard pressed to isolate any particular motivation from faith.

MD: Can you describe the evolution of Hamelin? Is the Pied Piper the launch-pad?

IW: It's not actually. It's tangentially based on it. I have never been, and to a large degree I'm still not, a big fan of opera and had never considered writing one even though I have composer friends, especially in England, to whom I remember saying, 'What is it with English composers and opera?' And I just never got it. But I saw a film a few years ago -- 1997, 1998 -- the Canadian director Atom Egoyan's film The Sweet Hereafter, which has this strand of the Pied Piper running through it. Not so much the Pied Piper, but to do with the children. In the film there's this little Canadian community. The school-bus has a crash, quite a few of the kids are killed, and the focus is partly on one who survived and she ends up in a wheel-chair. It's these same ideas of loss and guilt and abandonment. I remember coming out of the film thinking, 'Now that would be an interesting subject'. To focus on that character in that myth. Because in the myth, or legend, one of the children is left behind because they're lame and can't keep up with the other kids. It gets just a little mention in the poem or the story.

But I was really interested in this character. The idea of perhaps just making her slightly older and exploring her journey from that point of feeling completely alone and possibly very guilty for being a survivor. And feeling rejected because of her condition and all those things, and maybe investigate how she would overcome that, or if she would overcome that. So I had these rather vague ideas of some kind of psycho-drama. And to cut a long story short, I came into contact with Lavinia and just happened to ask her if she'd ever thought about writing a libretto, because I liked her poetry very much. We talked and found that we had the same likes and dislikes about opera. That was a good four years ago that we started the ball rolling. And then she took the idea and turned it into something really good, because I think my initial idea would have been rather dull. But she's made an excellent libretto and a really interesting story. It's become less psycho-drama and just more drama which is good from a staging point of view, I think.

MD: And then the audience can just take away from it what they wish?

IW: Well they can, although it's pretty straightforward. There are only three characters -- the girl and two men from the town -- and we were very keen not to present the girl as just a victim or an innocent. In some ways she's a normal girl like any other girl, with her own fantasies and inspirations. Part of the interest of the opera is seeing how those are dealt with. How she has to overcome them or see through them in the course of what happens.

MD: I'm interested in the process: this was part of your fellowship at the University of Ulster [an AHRB Research Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts], then Lavinia Greenlaw delivers to you a libretto. How much music was already floating around by the time you got that in your hands?

IW: I'm trying to think if there was any!

MD: Indeed, indeed, or if there was any?

IW: No, I think there were ideas about music, but there were no specifically musical ideas. Because we spent some time getting the synopsis right. I think we made two or three drafts of the synopsis. We actually got some very useful help from a director here in Dublin, Maureen White. She helped us with the structure of the first act, to tighten it up a bit, which was very good. Then once we finally had the synopsis right, Lavinia started writing the libretto. I think I received the first act complete: three scenes as it was at that point. Then I just wrote the music through. I finished that about March 2002. We had a week of workshops on the first act in London. And after that we decided, with Maureen's help, that the second and third scenes should be combined and inter-spliced with each other, because it just tightened up the drama. Then after that Lavinia sent the second act and I wrote the music. Sounds easy, but it nearly killed me!

MD: What were the workshops like?

IW: Very useful. English National Opera Studio were very kind to give us four days of workshops with three singers and a repetiteur, and a director for the last day and a half. And while a lot of it was note-bashing, and for various reasons the singers were largely late in picking up music -- in fact, the bass, I think, picked his music up the day we started -- it was very, very useful to hear the music. For Lavinia as well as for myself. The director blocked out some very straightforward action and it was just very encouraging to see how it worked. We really felt that it worked. There were a couple of little things that there were question marks over and that's why we changed the structure slightly. Very, very useful. We were very grateful for that kind of support because it's not really possible to get that here all the time.

MD: Does this open the door to possible future Ian Wilson operas? Or is this going to be your single statement in the genre?

IW: Well, Lavinia and I would really like to do more, actually. We've been talking about it and we'll have to see. It's not the kind of thing you just do. I was very fortunate with the fellowship that I had time and basically was getting a wage over this period of time -- three years -- to write four pieces, the opera supposedly being the last of them. And it took a long time, actually. I'd really thought, 'Oh, the way I write, maybe six, maybe nine months'. It took well over a year. And because of the fact that a German company was to produce it first, earlier this year, we decided we'd try and have a German translation made [laughs]. It was good in the end but at the time it was murderous! Because it was just so much extra work, and doing the piano reductions, everything. Nobody tells you, probably for good reason, because if you really knew how much effort it would take you might think twice about doing it.

MD: But you would never have known if you hadn't done it?

IW: Exactly. I mean, I don't wake up screaming every night. But it was a fantastic experience and I think once you know how it works, it might be easier the next time.

MD: It sounds from what you're saying as though you wouldn't have taken the plunge without that fellowship. Or not yet anyway.

IW: Well, that enabled me to take the plunge. I had been talking to OTC [Opera Theatre Company, in Ireland] even at that point for a while about the opera and maybe they would have got round to commissioning it, but who knows? They didn't have to in the end.

MD: The reason I ask is because I want to ask you about the composer in Irish society. It was obviously tremendously helpful to you having that fellowship and these are the opportunities that composers have to seek out and find and grab. What's it like? You are very established but presumably even being established doesn't make it easy.

IW: No, I don't think it does and I'm not even sure what 'very established' means, actually. If anything, it just means that people are a little more aware of your name but it doesn't mean that people are beating down your door. Strangely, in the last while I've had more approaches from musicians, even from abroad. This is the thing about musicians, though. They're very happy to ask you, 'Would you like to write us a piece?' but they've no notion of funding. For instance, I had an email from an Austrian trio, a good month ago. They'd done one of my pieces before and blah blah blah, 'We have stuff coming up next year, we have a few composers writing for us, and would you be interested in writing a new piece?' I wrote back saying, 'Of course, love to, and have you any funding plans?' Because the Arts Council commission scheme here is really over-subscribed, chances are slim. I haven't heard back [laughs] and maybe they're away touring but I really get the impression that some musicians think you should just be glad to write for them! And maybe that's OK if you have a real job and composing is not something you're really trying to make a living from, but I am trying to make a living from it. In those terms it means I spend quite a bit of time trying to generate work, as well as write the music. It means you have to develop a very professional, business-like approach to things, even though maybe superficially it seems pleasant and chatty and you're just pressing the flesh a bit. And you know, I would hate it to get to the point where it's just cynical, that I'd feel I'd have to go places just to see people. That's not really what it's about. I do, when I have the opportunity and I am somewhere. It's a matter of being nice to people and just making sure that they know who you are. Years ago I used to go to festivals with scores under my arm. I gave that up a long time ago when I realised that, with one exception, it never ever brought me any response.

MD: It seems like it ought to be the way to go.

IW: In my experience, not. I find that musicians, especially busy ones -- usually if they're good, they're busy -- they just get sent stuff all the time. I remember -- and I think this is true, but maybe I won't name them -- a quartet I know quite well said, 'We get sent stuff all the time and we decided we weren't going to do any of this and instead just commission our own works.' And I've a feeling that quite a few performers feel the same way. It only ever happened once to me that I gave some scores to a pianist. Four years later I got a call: 'Hi, it's so-and-so, I finally got around to looking at your stuff'. He commissioned a little piece from me. So it's not worth it. I think musicians really have to feel that there is some contact with you. And that's why I really value the musician friends that I have, people who have become friends over the years, who've been playing my music. You establish that kind of double relationship where socially they are friends, but musically or professionally there's a respect there that can make an ongoing relationship. That's one of the real joys for me in writing music, that I can write for people who I know and respect. It gives a different focus to the music completely when you really know that person well, who you're writing for.

MD: It would appear that it would be very difficult to survive as a full-time composer unless you did those things and could establish those kinds of relationships.

IW: I think it's very necessary. It's something I've had to achieve in myself in regards to personal traits, if you like. Because I can remember when I was younger, starting off, and had the odd performance here and there and I'd be introducing it. Sometimes my parents would come to the performance and they'd both be giving off to me: 'You really dropped your voice at the end of that sentence'. Those kinds of things are very helpful. The presentation package: people like that. But I think, at the bottom of it all, if the music isn't good, it's not going to help.

MD: But why saddle good music with poor presentation?

IW: Exactly. It's very useful if the two can go hand in hand. Ireland is a small place, it shouldn't be so difficult to get your name around.

MD: Hamelin is coming up in September and has had a production in Germany already and so is off your desk...

IW: Yes, since last night!

MD: So what's on your desk now? What's coming up?

IW: I have to write a wind quintet for a British group which I'm supposed to be writing now, but I just can't get my pencil to paper yet. But that will happen. I've to write a new solo for Catherine Leonard [the Irish violinist], which will involve live tape. I'm quite excited about that.

MD: That's a relatively new departure for you, is it?

IW: It is. It's not pre-recorded tape. It's tape which, essentially… No, I won't talk about it before I write it. It's live tape. And I've got an orchestral piece and a couple of other chamber pieces to write. So I have kind of a busy nine to twelve months coming up.

MD: Ian Wilson, thank you very much.

IW: Thank you.