WHEN I explain to Professor Bodley that my brief is 'to get caught up with him', he replies that he wishes he could get caught up with himself. For a composer, this sounds like a favourable state of affairs.

Ironically, it's the Canadian journalist -- me -- who sits in his study in Dublin talking by telephone with the Irish composer, who is gazing out the window of a wooden lakeside house in Ontario, forty miles from the nearest community and, he's careful to point out, beyond Sudbury. Since he spends a good deal of time in Canada, I assume that he has acquired the Torontonian perception of Sudbury as being practically next-door to the North Pole, even though Sudbury is actually situated further south than Seattle, Washington (which isn't even north enough to be in Canada). Nevertheless, even 1000 miles south of the Arctic Circle it's very easy to imagine an isolated lake in rural Ontario as representing idyllic conditions for composing. But as for its being remote, says Bodley, nothing is remote any more.

'With my computer and e-mail' he explains, 'I can contact anybody, anywhere, very rapidly'. For a true picture of isolation he turns to the late 1950s when he was studying composition in Germany. 'Now that was remote. First, you were speaking a different language, with no real opportunity to speak English. And not alone was it a different language, but it was a different language from German: Swabian, the dialect from the Stuttgart area. Second, if you came from Ireland you might as well have come from Mars as far as a lot of local people were concerned, it was so far away. "Where are you from?" "I'm from Ireland." "Ah, Holland." "No. Ireland." "Oh! Iceland?" "No. Ireland." "Oh! Ireland. Isn't that somewhere in England?"

'And also, at that time, what it cost to phone Dublin was enough for two people to live on for a week. There was no question of coming back or even phoning back. You were out of contact. Nowadays, oddly enough, there's no parallel anywhere in the world with a situation like that. Between satellites and computer technology and even improvements in the telephone system, it's a different world.'

Evidently Bodley turned to good use his student experiences of cultural and linguistic isolation in 1950s Germany. His ties with that country remain strong and he is a fluent German speaker; revealing, even, some knowledge of Mittelhochdeutsch in his latest work, a piece for choir and orchestra called Fraw Musica. Commissioned with funds provided by the Arts Council, the work celebrates the friendship and collaboration of Martin Luther and Johann Walter and commemorates Luther's death and Walter's birth 450 and 500 years ago respectively. The two men shared the same belief in the importance of music in worship and collaborated on the collection and publication of hymns, some of which they composed themselves. Walter was well known as a composer and musician and came from the town of Torgau, near Leipzig, which commissioned this piece and which will host the premiere on 5 October.

Fraw Musica means, literally, 'Madam Music' as the composer explains: 'I took the texts from both Johann Walter and Martin Luther and they all deal with music in one form or another. And with the occasion that was in it, the end of the work does include a quotation from Ein' feste Burg, the most famous Lutheran hymn. The tribute speaks for itself.

'It was an unusual thing to have to do. But I really enjoyed writing it because one of the things you find -- and I suppose it's inevitable for somebody like me -- when you get involved in different countries and different places over a long period, not everything comes into play in any single work. And because my connection with Germany goes back a long way to when I lived there for three years, I suppose the music is like a German beer with an Irish whiskey chaser! That, at any rate, is the manner in which I'm thinking of it.'

The work, which he describes as 'reasonably accessible', is scored for mixed-voice choir with a solo part for mezzo-soprano to be sung by Aylish Kerrigan. The small orchestra calls for strings, flute, bassoon and organ. By happy coincidence, the October premiere in Torgau has been absorbed into the programme of Germany's 'Ireland and its Diaspora' festival which begins on 1 October and centres on the Frankfurt Book Fair. The first Irish performance takes place on 11 December in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. The Goethe-Institut Choir will, it is hoped, be joined by about thirty singers from the Torgau performance. The conductor in Torgau will be Ekkehardt Saretz, current cantor of the Johann-Walter-Kantorei. The Dublin performance will be conducted by the composer. Would he prefer to be sitting in the audience?

'Well, I can tell you that if you're sitting in the audience, it's fine if everything is going marvellously. However, if something starts to go not so terribly well, then it becomes somewhat nail-biting. Whereas if something starts to go wrong in a performance in which you yourself are conducting, at least you feel as though you can do something about it.

'Obviously I've mostly been extremely fortunate in the conductors I've had. They've done some very good jobs and I've been very happy on many occasions. Apart from various foreign conductors, Colman Pearce has done quite a few performances and done them extremely well, and Proinnsías Ó Duinn the same. So by and large I've been quite fortunate.'

At this point our conversation veers away from these imminent premieres in order to contemplate the more general problem of securing second and further performances of new works. Looking back over recent premieres of large-scale works by John Buckley, John Kinsella and Ian Wilson, there are no prizes for demonstrating how a prestigious premiere is no guarantee of a place -- even a temporary place -- in the repertoire. This frustrates not only the composer but also the audience (including the critics), who must try and assess, on the basis of one hearing, the product of many months of work. In the absence of access to multiple performances of their work, Irish composers must increasingly pin their hopes for some kind of currency on the compact disc, which has only very recently begun to have an impact on contemporary music here. While expressing the common reservation that it can never replace live performance, Bodley acknowledges the vital importance of the CD. So far his only CD brings together his song-cycles The Naked Flame (1987) and Carta Irlandesa (1988), while Naxos/Marco Polo intend to record his fourth and fifth symphonies early next year.

'CDs will help enormously at least in making stuff available in a reasonably permanent and accessible form. But they're obviously only at their beginnings in Ireland. Things have improved in some ways; they haven't entirely improved in others. In the past, there seemed to be more opportunities both for first performances and for works which weren't commissioned. It's one thing to write on commission, which usually includes a performance opportunity, and quite another to write without a commission, when you have to make your own opportunities. In the past, RTE used to have a system for dealing with this, but it doesn't seem to be operative at the moment.'

This situation must seem particularly relevant to Bodley now that Fraw Musica is finished and he is applying himself to his piano concerto. 'This wasn't a commissioned work, it's just one I decided to do. It arose from a conversation I had with Miceál O'Rourke a couple of years ago. He was over here to perform a Lutoslawski concerto. He did it rather well, and I was talking with him afterwards. That's how these things get started. I've been at it on and off for a while now. It was side-tracked by some commissions that came in -- for Fraw Musica and, before that, a brass quintet - but the short score is pretty well ready now, so it's just a matter of doing the orchestration.'

The concerto is, in fact, the first orchestral work Bodley has produced in the five years since his Limerick Symphony (No. 5) in 1991. But he doesn't believe that the orchestral hiatus represents any significant change of direction, only an indication of the kind of music he's been involved with recently. After the completion of the piano concerto he will probably continue with a solo piano work which has also suffered from interruptions by commissions ('very good interruptions to have!'). 'I wasn't terribly happy with what I'd written so it's undergoing some major changes at the moment. And if it ever sees the light of day it will be a large-scale work for solo piano. I can give you -- which I haven't given anyone else - the provisional title for the work, which is News from Donabate. It's not actually programmatic, but perhaps it will be reflective of states of mind.'

And so, armed with News from Donabate as my World Exclusive, it seems that we have indeed caught up with Seóirse Bodley. As a precaution, I inquire if I may phone back in a few days if I find that there's anything that needs to be clarified. However, this won't be possible because Bodley, intent, as he said, on getting caught up with himself, is embarking the next day on a canoeing/tenting holiday in the wilds of Ontario's vast Algonquin National Park. I hesitate to admit it, but somehow my conceptions of composer/professor and voyageur/explorer don't quite square. Very impressed, I ask if this will include white-water?