Michael Dungan: What do you remember of music in your own primary school and secondary school?

Gerald Barry: I hardly remember anything, actually. I'm sure it's rather like those memories that are buried: they're there and they surface suddenly. I suppose the music that I would remember from that time would be to do with the local church. So if there was a requiem mass, for instance, the headmaster would go and sing Latin at the standard requiem. So I have memories of that, which would be outside school. There was one woman who played the harmonium whom I realised did not have an effect on me the way another woman [who played the harmonium] did. And then, of course, I was able to work out -- around at the age of ten -- that it had something to do with the harmony, and the second 'effective' woman was more advanced and had made some harmonic changes which gave me goose pimples. Like a laboratory rat, I recognised all those signs and knew when those things were approaching.

MD: Did you learn tin whistle or anything?

GB: My mother bought me a violin and I had lessons from an old man way out in the countryside. One of my older brothers would put me on a crossbar with this violin and cycle out into the countryside. It was wintertime, and I remember always being really frightened coming back because it was so dark! I wasn't doing any music at school, so the violin would have been my own idea.

MD: Did you do music formally in secondary school?

GB: Yes, I did. I was the only boy in the school to do music.

MD: The only boy?

GB: Yes. And that was only for the Leaving Cert [state examination taken at age 17/18].

MD: And your teacher? If it was just one-on-one, you'd hope that it would be a nice teacher or an enthusiastic one.

GB: Well, he was a very nice priest, Ciaran O'Gorman. But he didn't really teach me. He found somebody -- who I never met -- to teach me by correspondence. So all my Leaving Cert was done by letter.

MD: All your exercises and harmony?

GB: Yes!

MD: Fascinating. I wonder who that teacher might be?

GB: Well I do remember his name. I think it was Brendan Boyle. I don't think we ever met, but there is a vague memory that I might have seen him for about five seconds out of the corner of my eye. I still have all the letters where he would write back with my letter covered in red. And my letter to him always had a red ten-shilling note in it -- it was ten shillings for each go! He was fantastically good, considering he never met me.

MD: So it was virtually all extra-curricular. The violin, singing in church, watching the organist.

GB: Yes, except that in secondary school there was this priest [Ciaran O'Gorman] who did make an effort with some boys and some classes. There was a kind of school play where boys sang, and I do still remember standing on the stage and singing some of the Irish songs. Those kinds of things often leave a powerful impression on you, even if you can't remember the details.

MD: So overall it was quite positive?

GB: It was.

MD: And then fast-forward to many years later, and your own music is on the Leaving Cert syllabus. Did you give talks for music students? Did you meet many music students when your piece was on the course?

GB: I did one thing, which was a video with musicians who played examples. I didn't enjoy it. Often I think that I am completely not geared for that sort of situation. If you see students en masse, a lot of the ones who are really interested may not ever make themselves known. So you don't know what effect you're having. You could be having a wonderful effect but you're not getting any evidence of it. I did find that in general talking to students, lecturing, etc., I rarely found it rewarding. I go in, give of myself and of my experience enormously, and I felt a debit rather than a credit for myself emotionally. Maybe that's an unfair expectation. The deal is, you go in, you give them as much as possible, and that's for them. But I suppose I, too, wanted to get something and never really did.

MD: I heard a good story about you giving a lecture in Trinity College Dublin. In this lecture you were talking about systems of composing. Everybody was eager to learn the systems until someone asked the question, "Well, Gerald if, in the course of writing a piece via this system, you find that another note sounds better than the one that the system demands, what do you do?" You said you'd choose the note that sounds better. And apparently you lost them after that! They weren't interested if the system could be so readily abandoned.

GB: Yes, that's perfectly possible. I think maybe Hormos Farhat, who was the professor then, may have been at one of those lectures. And he, I think, was bemused and incredulous. I don't think he took me seriously [when I said] that everything was so changeable in terms of the laws that were governing this music. And I simply said that there were none. The thing is, of course there are laws. But I often don't want to inquire in too detailed a manner into these matters because they are mysterious. They are in one's body, physically and emotionally. They are intangible and, frequently, unnamable and "not-talk-aboutable."

I had this megalomanic attack recently. I went to see these three French films called Trilogy. At the end of the third, a voice in my head said to me [laughs] "I know everything". So, I left the cinema with this friend and said, "You know [laughs more], I know everything". And he looked at me and smiled and said, "What do you mean?" Anyway, I had to think of the explanation for this, and I felt that the explanation was that -- and this is the answer to students who say, "If there's a system..." (and I don't know anything about systems, I have no systems at all) -- I have felt in my life, happily or disastrously, such a wide range of emotions, that when I find a sound that I think I might use, the sound bounces off my life, which is this bank of feelings and things experienced. And that experience, of having felt for fifty or so years, is something which the sound measures itself against, because everything that I have felt is true, completely true to me, and has no false note in it -- they're all completely authentic experiences. And so the note has something, or the sound has something, to measure itself against. That may seem rather strange, but it's clear to me emotionally, because my life has been lived very truly. The sound uses my life as a gauge to measure itself against. Because some sounds, when you find them, you think they are wonderful to begin with. Then a few days pass and you realise that they are not. They have to settle, like coffee grounds or something. So now I realise that I can't really trust any sound when it comes, because in the excitement of the moment you think, "This is marvelous, this is exactly what I want", and then the following day you realise that it has completely disappeared. Whatever excitement that was in it has gone. It was just an illusion, a mirage. So you have to wait for a few days to pass to find out whether it is going to wear well and whether it is the "full shilling" or not. So I think that's what it is really, that I feel I have felt so much, emotionally, that gives me -- I don't want to be too arrogant about it -- as far as I can tell, a very good sounding-board for the music. Does that make sense?

MD: Yes. Is it like resonance, that there is a resonance relationship between experience and sound?

GB: Well when I said I felt I knew everything, I pretty much meant it, literally. And it wasn't only to do with music at all. It was to do with everything. I mean, I've always liked talking about things and emotions. "Mad" is what a friend of mine, Kevin Volans, calls the "Clare Disease"! [Gerald Barry is from County Clare] Obsessive analysing of people's emotional situations. So you get lost in this sort of labyrinth of analysis. But it comes to me naturally. I've always done it so I'm used to thinking in that way.

MD: You've mentioned two things: the connection between the sound and the emotion that has been experienced; and also, the relationship between someone like yourself and people you're speaking to, and the idea of giving and not receiving. How do you decide what or how much to reveal when you're talking about a piece of music and its genesis? Or do you not decide? Does it just happen?

GB: How do I decide to use that kind of experience?

MD: Well, when you're talking about it. Where is the boundary between what you have to keep just to yourself and what's out in the open?

GB: Sometimes you don't really want to tell everything. Because sometimes people -- and this sounds really mean or unkind -- are simply not able to see the value of something. And if it sounds very primitive or simple, it undermines their faith in it. They often have an idea that something like music is written with some vast array of techniques. And if they find that, in fact, you've just stumbled over something, and you've decided "Okay, I'm going to stick that in there" -- they don't see it. They're used to thinking with a certain kind of attitude and not actually responding to what the sound is. And also, I suppose I'm quite superstitious about things that one says because it amounts to a leakage of energy. If you tell people too much about what you are doing, you can lose control of it a little. I am not remotely religious, except when I think the plane is going to crash and I think, "Oh God! I will go to mass!" But I am religious about music. That's why I do tend to get very offended by people if they're messing with music, whether they're administrators or musicians or whatever. If I feel they're messing, that really is to me like sinning. It is sacrilege, and that really upsets me.

MD: People may well be curious about how you work as a composer. What can you reveal about how you work?

GB: Well, just touching on what we said before, when I was saying about how much you should tell people, if I do something which seems terribly primitive, I know that often what I do is terrifically sophisticated. But one has to have made quite a journey to do the simplest thing. That person who makes that move -- whether it be a sign with a brush on a canvas, or with a pen in writing or in music -- it is the fact of having made a journey in your life and whatever art you are involved in that allows you, then, to do this fantastically simple thing, but which is filled, again, with the experiences of your life. So while it may seem very simple, it is actually really sophisticated. So I don't make any plans when I write music. It can be a real problem actually. I never think of myself as having a technique. I always feel that I am beginning all the time, always at the start. I suppose I do use the world and my life a lot as materials, and I use found objects and sounds wherever I find them: on the TV or in other people's music. In the 1970s, I along with two friends of mine -- Kevin Volans and the English composer Christopher Newman -- founded a society called the Society for Newer Music or SNERM for short! It was a jokey but deadly serious reaction to the society which was founded in Cologne called the Society for New Music. We never did anything! But we had this fantastically grand manifesto, which said things like -- and you see, I can still remember, and it completely holds true today -- the world was ours, literally. We felt that everything belonged to us, that the whole history of music was ours and that we would use it as we wanted. So, that is my approach, often, to writing music: I review all of the history of music since the beginning until now as mine. At the moment I'm writing the fourth act of this opera, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I hadn't written for months, and I found it a real problem to write, so I filled in the time by orchestrating the earlier acts. I now think that the fourth act will be the first three acts sort of combined in some way. I haven't quite figured out how that will be yet. I'm taking sounds from all the first three acts to produce the sounds for the fourth act. I may decide purely arbitrarily that I am going to write down twenty A3 pages of sounds, maybe from the first three acts by using some kind of childish system. I might take the first sound from Act I, the second sound from Act II, the third sound from Act III, the fourth sound from Act I, the fifth sound from Act II, the sixth sound from Act III... I'll go back and forth. It's no guarantee of anything -- it could be complete rubbish. But I do it for twenty pages, like automatic writing. And I never check to see the quality. Because if you check too early and it's rubbish, you get very disheartened and you think, "I haven't the energy to go on for fifteen more pages. I can't do this". So I never look, I never check. While listening to the radio, or during breakfast, I do it. And when the twenty pages are full, I then look. And then that's where your whole life comes into play. These arbitrarily-made, found sounds are a springboard for your imagination. And you'd be amazed. And that's the point where you then enter the fray.

I was amazed to see -- well, not amazed, because it's obvious, really -- in the recent Boulez festival [the RTÉ Living Music Festival, February 2004], in the brochure there was a quotation from Boulez and I thought, "God! I've always thought that." One of the words he used was "recognition". You've got to be able to recognise your sounds. Often, poor music that is being written now is poor because the composer is not able to recognise when he is onto a good thing. He doesn't know what's good or what's bad. He just falls by chance on something good, but he doesn't know it's good so he leaves it. He goes on to something else. It's to do with recognition. This is not something, I believe, that can be learned. I'm afraid you're born with it. You have it or you don't. [Laughs] People will think that's very arrogant, but it's the case.

MD: You mentioned The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. What is the status on the opera?

GB: Well, there will be a concert performance by RTÉ [National Symphony Orchestra] in the National Concert Hall at the end of May in 2005. I've written three acts and there are five, though the fifth act is more of a coda. I'm now working on the fourth. There are a couple of opera houses interested, and one is getting more interested. I've had that so often, and then nothing happens, so my fingers are crossed.

MD: You have such a good track-record with opera in Britain.

GB: You'd be surprised, though. People are often very slow to take things up. The Intelligence Park, my first opera, 1990, has never been done again. And what's that? Fourteen years ago? And I think, for me, by my lights anyway, it has some of the best things I've ever done. So it's a pity.

MD: My last question is about what you're working on now. Are you working exclusively on the fourth act of Petra von Kant?

GB: Yes I am. I'll finish Petra von Kant by the end of this summer. What I'll then write is a piece I'm contracted to write for the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the following year. Then I'm going to write a piece for soprano and orchestra for a concert in France. I'm not sure what I'll do for that but I have some ideas. One is a play by Strindberg called The Stronger which has only one woman in it, one singing part. There is another very important part, but it's a mute part for an actress. Another possibility I thought of was a piece for bass voice and orchestra, or bass voice and string quartet, called The Immortal Beloved, which would be a setting of the love-letters Beethoven wrote. Now, they are amazing, those letters, extraordinarily dramatic, and tragic in a way.

MD: Is this with a particular bass in mind?

GB: Stephen Richardson. He wants it for bass voice and string quartet, because he's got his buddies, the Brodsky Quartet.

MD: That sounds absolutely intriguing. The first time I heard him live was in The Conquest of Ireland. He's amazing, so I hope he persuades you!

GB: Yes, that would be good.

MD: That's all I wanted to ask you. Thank you very much, Gerald.

GB: Thanks.

Gerald Barry was interviewed on video by Michael Dungan in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 27 February 2004.

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