Ita Beausang: Eibhlis, do you remember I interviewed you ten years ago [New Music News, February 1993, 9-11] and a lot has changed since then, especially your glamorous photograph on the [CMC] web site! How do you like to be described? As a composer, or an Irish composer, or a woman composer, or an Irish woman composer?

Eibhlis Farrell: I think firstly a musician. I hope [laughs] musician first, composer second.

IB: Over the last ten years has your music been affected by political events in the North of Ireland?

EF: I think that coming from the North, especially the South Down area, which is a very nationalist area to grow up in, that you couldn’t escape from the Troubles; they were always a weight you carried around with you. They’re something that you feel very passionate about and a lot of people of my generation from the North from similar backgrounds would have an extreme interest in politics and be very politically-minded; it was just something that was part of your background, was part of your psyche and you couldn’t escape. So I think that although I wouldn’t ostensibly have written any piece and said, ‘Right, this is a commentary on the North of Ireland’, probably a lot of that comes across in the music.

IB: Would that be a sadness?

EF: Well, sometimes it might even be a form of escapism because it’s with you all the time, it’s something that you try to rise above in your creative work, it’s one area where you can get above all the darkness.

IB: Your identity, is that important to you?

EF: Well, I think for any artist the identity and the landscape you come from has to be important because after all it does shape your mind in your early formative years, and it’s something that you carry with you. I was lucky enough to be born into what I would consider aesthetically a very beautiful area of Ireland -- the Mountains of Mourne -- and in growing up looking at Carlingford Lough and the history being so much around us in terms of the Viking invasion, there were relics of the Early Christian period, there were Celtic crosses, there was everything historically you could want as well as the beauty of the scenery. So that has to impinge on you; also it was interesting that we were looking across Carlingford Lough to the Border [with the Republic of Ireland]. Now the Border ran through the Lough and you were looking across to the South of Ireland and the Cooley Mountains on the other side. So it has to impinge, I suppose, on your development.

IB: Many of your works are premiered in very exotic locations. Do you think you could belong anywhere else besides Rostrevor?

EF: Ah well, if I find a very rich partner I’m sure I would [laughs], who could keep me in the style I wish to become accustomed to, I think I’d move to Timbuctoo if I had the chance.

IB: In the past decade you have had a steady flow of new works. They fall into two main genres: for voice and for solo instruments. Is this by accident or design?

EF: Well, a lot has depended on commissions I’ve been asked to do. For instance in the works for voice there are a number of chamber cantatas. I’ve always had a great interest in baroque music, in the baroque period, especially early opera, and the form of the chamber cantata -- which in its way was a mini-opera -- was something that I was very attracted to in a structural sense. So a lot of the works for solo voice take that form, and then there are some choral works as well. A lot of the texts I’ve set are older texts, partly because you don’t have to worry about copyright, but there’s something about setting older texts that it’s like adding bricks or building bricks onto words which have survived for centuries, and there is a great beauty and power in those words in the fact that they have been there for so long and that you’re adding something of yours on to the edifice.

IB: It’s very significant that you are drawn to voice because even in your pieces for solo instruments the voice of the instrument is very much invoked. Is that a conscious happening? Do you choose the instrument because you feel you can express the heart of the instrument? Or is it again because you are asked to write a commission for a particular instrument?

EF: I suppose it depends. I think that my style has gone through a period where I was very interested in the sense of line and the linearities through the music. When I was growing up a lot of contemporary music tended to be very mosaic and juxtaposed jumbled-up patterns from the aleatoric period, and I think I always had that sense of this continuous growth, and line and shape and structure growing out of that, and so I suppose I would say that linearity or even beauty of melodic writing has been very much a part of my style in the last ten years or so.

IB: You seem to have an affinity with the poetry of two very different women: Hildegard of Bingen and [the Irish poet] Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. What drew you to them and do you think they have much in common?

EF: Well, they are both extremely like myself: passionate, sensuous [laughs]. I was asked by an Italian to do a setting of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill for a group who normally played baroque music, and it was in the context of a baroque music concert. So I looked through her poetry and I found a poem, The Silken Bed, which she had written in Irish and it had been translated into English, but there was also an Italian translation. The Silken Bed itself is a very beautiful love poem so in the setting I looked at the actual sounds of the different languages and I constructed the work around the broadest and most ‘sensuous’ sounds and sonorities I could get out of the words. It so happens that the first and the last section are in the Irish language, the second and the fourth section are in Italian and then the middle section is in English, so the work is built around that particular poem. But it’s amazing how, even though the Hildegard poetry is centuries old and Ní Dhomhnaill’s is contemporary, you get the same resonances, you get the same depths of feeling, even the same word patterns. And it’s very much the same with music; you learn as much from a piece of plainchant as you do from a piece by Berio because every piece of music has to have a sense of structure, it has to have a sense of timing. You know they say there’s nothing new under the sun: the ‘changing world maintaining harmony’ of Boethius.

IB: It’s extraordinary how personal the emotion is in the twelfth-century text that you used. I noticed in your settings of three of your recent chamber works that you used three instruments, three very different instruments. You used oboe, viola and glockenspeil for The Lovesong of Isabella and Elias Cairel; violin, cello and harpsichord for The Silken Bed; tambourine, violin and harp for O Star Illumined by the Sun. Is there something special about the number three? How did you choose those instruments in particular for those works?

EF: The first one was a commission from the International League of Women Composers for their biannual festival which they were having in Alaska that year. I was asked would I set a work of a trobaritz. I hadn’t known much about the trobaritz until I started working on this piece. They were a group of women during the Crusades from 1150-1250 based in what’s known as the Provençale area, and they wrote the most incredible music and poetry when the men were away on the Crusades. And they had the ruling power, the control of the place when the men were away, and it’s rather sad because when the men came back the Albigensian heresy came, and they were all wiped out.

IB: O Star Illumined?

EF: That was a commission for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Adapt, which is the women’s refuge in Limerick, so I had to set women’s poetry for that and I mixed a work by the Comtessa de Dia, who was another of the trobaritz, with a work of Hildegard which is taken from the antiphons of St Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins. St Ursula was being forced into marriage and she went on this ship with eleven thousand virgins to escape but there were so many on the ship that it started to sink, so they had to go into port, so of course they were all martyred. The third text I used was a Marian prayer I found from the early Byzantine liturgy. It was a hymn to Mary, but in that I was trying to give the three different aspects of women: for instance, the second section where I do use the Comtessa de Dia is actually constructed like a French chanson of the time.

IB: You seem very fond of the harp in ensemble and as a solo instrument?

EF: It’s interesting because one of the first harp pieces I wrote was commissioned in 1992 for the bi-centenary of the Belfast Harp Festival for the Welsh harpist, Ieuan Jones. I was asked to do a piece about 10-12 minutes long and I really got tired writing it, and I realised that with some instruments you get tired in your head if you are writing for them.

IB: All those strings?

EF: I never get tired writing for voices, my ear never gets tired of writing for violin... Sometimes with the harp and the organ it gets very tired. It’s as though there is a surfeit of sound, that it’s just too much and after a while your ear just starts to... ’Oh I wish I was finished with this... ’ I think it is back again to this thing about sonorities of instruments; with certain instruments there’s such a wide range of sonorities that you can never run short of sounds, whereas other instruments maybe tend to be more narrowly focused.

IB: Moving on to your work as an educator, according to Confucius if you want to know whether a people are well-governed and if their laws are good, examine their music. How would you apply this to Ireland in 2003?

EF: Well, for someone who was brought up -- maybe I shouldn’t say this -- being taught rebel songs and anything which was banned by the BBC [laughs]...

IB: But you were educated under a different system [in Northern Ireland]. How does that inform your views of Irish music education [in the Republic of Ireland]?

EF: Well, I think the system at home [in Northern Ireland] was much more highly-developed, and it’s interesting that a lot of my early music education actually came from learning plainchant, because at that stage the ravages of Vatican II hadn’t reached the little village of Rostrevor, so for quite a number of years after Rome had given it up we were still singing away, it was just a great basis for...

IB: You didn’t have folk groups?

EF: Definitely not [laughs]. We still don’t. I think that there is a real dearth when it comes to music education, especially at primary level, because those are your future audience, your listeners, your music appreciators, your performers, or whatever. I worry too about the teacher training end, especially about students who are doing music education; when it comes to the music practice I worry about the quality of the music that they are being asked to pass on to children. To me there is nothing more beautiful or more satisfying than our own Irish music and children don’t know that any more, they’re growing up without being exposed to it and what they’re getting is this middle-of-the-road stuff you could hear either in inner London or downtown New York. We’ve lost a certain distinction and children respond to quality. If you give small people good things all the time they do respond. I just worry about the dearth of music education and the paucity and the lack of quality in what they’re being fed.

IB: The new report from Music Network recommends a national system for music education based on local music services. What do you think should be the main focus of such services, as well as quality?

EF: Well, I would like to see much more emphasis on choral and vocal training as well as instrumental, and I think that too much emphasis has been put on instrumental music, that it is a solo practice, that we train hothouse flowers so therefore you go off and you practise your violin and you come in and have a solo lesson. An awful lot of that early instrumental teaching, even middle and later instrumental teaching, should be done in groups and small seminars which could encourage children to partake. I’m a great believer in the power of singing so that a child is introduced to singing early and gets to use the voice and to sing with other children. You see, singing then leads on to so many other social activities with drama and musicals, opera, staging and dressing up; children get so much out of it. To me, if you miss out on that aspect you’re missing out on a lot of the creative and the magic element of childhood.

IB: As an educator you have promoted music technology. Do you think there’s a danger of technology for technology’s sake at the expense of musicianship?

EF: I think it can never replace the human element. That has to be there, the human element is, after all, the creative element and if you take that out of music or any art form you can forget about it. I think it’s important that music like every other form lives on and that there are new developments. Even in music technology, not alone is there a new sound world to be explored, but there’s also how it makes education, how it makes music writing, how it makes all that easier for a composer. And if it’s used wisely in an educational sense it is extremely valuable. But nothing would ever replace that need for the human element.

IB: Have you ever thought of writing electro-acoustic music?

EF: I have, yes, but I wouldn’t say that my expertise is as polished yet as I would like it to be in the future.

IB: The conference on Re-Imagining Ireland recently held in Virginia, USA, which included gurus from visual arts, literature, film, entirely omitted classical music, although traditional music was included. Why do you think this happened and does it worry you?

IB: Well, I think it’s happening all the time. First of all I think there’s room for all sorts of music. Traditional and popular music are much more popular than contemporary classical music in this country, but it’s very important to have contemporary composers underpinning all the music activity. I think that we are going through a phase where the interest in the great masters because of available recordings means that contemporary composers aren’t really being programmed in concerts because we’re being fed a historical diet. The other thing I’ve noticed is that if you look at pop music -- and there are tremendous things, exciting things which have happened in popular music over the last twenty or thirty years -- but no young person or old person or person like me would go out and buy a pop CD without probably buying the video as well, so that form of music has become extremely visual and it hasn’t happened with contemporary art music. Since, I suppose, the invention of television and cinema, it’s that movement towards a visual expression of art that is happening in the pop world, is happening in the commercial world, but is not happening in the more ‘refined’ world of art music.

IB: Have you found that audiences abroad are more responsive to new music than they are here?

EF: They are, yes.

IB: Can you give a reason?

EF: Well, possibly because western art music is based in countries like Germany, Italy, France. Historically, Ireland was on the periphery of all that for historical and political reasons, which is why we have such a strong ethnic voice and such a strong and powerful indigenous music of our own.

IB: Have you ever felt misunderstood by critics?

EF: Always, not just by critics, by everybody [laughs]... I’m only joking!

IB: In another life, which century would you like to be born in and where?

EF: Now is that wise to ask me? [laughs] I’ve always seen myself in the seventeenth century -- early seventeenth-century in Venice -- and I would be dressed in red and purple and gold and I’d be mistress of a cardinal and I would be ruling Venice from the bed.

IB: Coming back to the mundane twenth-first century, you have been a member of Aosdána [the Irish affiliation of creative artists] since 1996. Do you find it a rewarding experience?

EF: It’s actually very interesting when it comes to the annual meeting because it’s not so much meeting the other composers, it’s meeting the literary figures and other artists.

IB: Outside music, who has influenced you most as an artist? Who do you find most exciting to meet?

EF: Well, I would say that I don’t want to be prescriptive, I suppose. I have great admiration for [the Irish poet] Micheal O’Siadhail and his writing and his work as an academic. He’s one of the older members of Aosdána who’s always very kind to the newer members. James Wilson now is another. Jim was eighty last year and he’s an incredible man, just that sense of generosity and friendship, but generosity about his art as well, that if he can help you he will. That’s what I think is important with a lot of artists, be they musicians, be they painters, be they writers; there has to be a generosity of spirit towards younger people. A good few years ago when I was doing a setting of some texts by Seamus Heaney, I met him at a function and I asked him very tentatively, apologetically [if I could use them] and he was just so generous. He said, ‘I’m delighted. Anything, use it,’ whereas a lot of writers say, ‘Oh no, you can’t touch anything. I don’t want my work disturbed.’ So you often find that the better artists are the most generous. You always find that they are the most open-spirited.

IB: There’s a whole new generation of Irish women composers following in your footsteps and Jane O’Leary’s. Do you think that they have more support systems than you had?

EF: I have to pay tribute to Jane with Concorde because for twenty-five years they were really the sole voice of contemporary music in Ireland and she has done some fantastic work. It’s not because I’m sitting here in this very elegant room that I remember the Contemporary Music Centre was just one room at the top of the attic with the rising damp and the dry rot, but I have to pay tribute to Eve O’Kelly [CMC’s director] because she has done a tremendous job in building up the CMC. This is a wonderful facility for contemporary musicians.

IB: What advice would you give to young women composers starting out in Ireland today?

EF: Just keep writing. You’re only as good as your next piece, so keep writing.

IB: Going back to the controversy about cultural identity, how do you see yourself in terms of Irishness?

EF: Well, I suppose it’s all about the local reflecting the universal. You come from a particular locality, be it a country, be it a small village and that influences your outlook on life. But also you have to place yourself in a context and look at what’s going on internationally, look at what other artists are doing. Even in local issues you see universal issues, even in little local conflicts there are universal lessons to be learnt. I see myself very much in that I come from, as everyone else does, a particular area and a particular type of upbringing and so forth, but through that we learn how to reflect outwards, how to...

IB: You’re not trying to re-invent yourself?

EF: [laughs] Well I think everybody does!

IB: Could you tell us about your work in progress?

EF: Well, at the moment I’ve just finished a clarinet piece. It’s not a particularly long piece but it’s looking at a particular aspect of clarinet writing.

IB: Is this your first work for solo clarinet?

EF: Yes. I’ve done pieces with clarinet ensemble, I’ve done works for alto, soprano saxophone, but this is the first clarinet piece. I never particularly liked the clarinet, I have to say, growing up. Again it was something about the surfeit of sound. It was a nicer instrument for me to write for in context of an orchestra or an ensemble rather than a solo instrument.

IB: Is there any genre that you haven’t explored so far that you would like to pursue? I know there’s one that we’ve discussed before, if you got a good libretto...

EF: I’ll probably end up writing one myself which will be banned! [laughs]

IB: Have you seriously thought about it [writing an opera] since?

EF: Yes, your mind is always working and even though you might get ideas and you don’t use them at the time, you never forget them. Some of the work as well over the last couple of years has been written for amateurs. There have been a couple of choral orchestral pieces which were very much written with amateurs in mind.

IB: What does that mean? Do you need to tailor your writing?

EF: Well, it shapes your writing in that you’re not going to give them anything which is outrageously difficult, you’re not going to give them anything which you know they won’t want to sing or they won’t enjoy singing.

IB: Does that constrain you?

EF: No. I think it’s just another form of discipline and you work around that. I remember one of my composition teachers when I was a student in Bristol saying to me, ‘There’s plenty of time for orchestras to practise Beethoven. You’ll be lucky if you get an hour and a half maybe, for them to run through a piece, so write something that they can play.’ So if people have a lot of time to practise that’s fine, you can write something very difficult, but if they’re a group who maybe can’t read music or have difficulty learning you have to give them something that’s going to work.

IB: In comparing your early and later works yourself, are you aware of new influences?

EF: I suppose it’s difficult for me to say because I’m looking at it from the inside. I mean everything in life influences you, you learn, you don’t stop learning. Every day there’s something new, be it a new sound, a new idea, maybe something broader than that, which makes you reflect back on to...

IB: Luciano Berio has suggested that music is the search for a boundary that is continually being shifted. Are the boundaries shifting?

EF: What was it Boethius said? ‘The world in constant change maintains a harmony.’

IB: In the last interview, you concluded by saying that you were striving to reach the state of wisdom, sapientiae. Have you reached that state?

EF: Of course not.

IB: Will you?

EF: Probably never.

IB: Will you be depressed if you don’t?

EF: Well probably, but hopefully I might reach some element of it! Maybe it’s a good thing that you don’t, because it is really a sign of old age if you’ve finally reached the state of wisdom.

Eibhlis Farrell was interviewed on video by Ita Beausang at a public ‘CMC Birthday Interview’ in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 22 July 2003.

Ita Beausang is a musicologist and former lecturer in the Dublin Institute of Technology Conservatory of Music.

The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily those of the Contemporary Music Centre.