An Interview with Ailís Ní Ríain
A ní R: When I was nineteen. In the meantime I was working really very hard on my piano technique. That was the most important thing for me. Composition was something I never even thought about. There was a turning-point when I was around sixteen. I came to Dublin one summer to sit in on some master classes which were taking place at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I observed what was going on there for the duration of the course and one day I went to the National Concert Hall for a concert. It was my first ever classical concert and it just so happened that Jane O’Leary’s pieceIslands of Discovery was being performed. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw her get up to acknowledge the audience’s applause. Because a) I didn’t know that composers were alive; and b) I didn’t know that a woman could write music; and c) it was all so real and happening: she was right in front of me. I was really shocked, and that was at sixteen. So really, the whole music area or scene was certainly not something I grew up in. It was something very far away from my mind. As I say, I hadn’t realised that that could be a reality. And that got me thinking, although not enough to do anything about it. I was just pleased that this woman had had a piece played.
I started at UCC [University College Cork]at eighteen, just after my Leaving Certificate. We had a composition class, very rudimentary: ‘Write four bars of music’, so I did. They could be the best four bars I’ve ever written, they were actually quite inspired! Then I was encouraged -- for a very short time -- to write another four, and maybe add eight to that. And I did and that was the end of it. I mean, no one saw the piece again and I didn’t study composition at UCC.
A ní R: That’s right. I sort of forgot to come back! And things move on. However, I think as a composer that the one thing you need to be prepared to do is to move constantly and to travel. You can’t really afford to put your roots down anywhere and say for certain, ‘This is where I will be, this is where I will remain.’ So for me, nothing is definite. Things probably go in a cycle of a few years and then you take stock again and see, ‘What is the best thing for me, personally and artistically?’ Each is as important as the other and feeds off the other. It has taken me a long time to realise that and understand it fully, and both need to work in tandem. So yes, after York I was quite disillusioned and I stopped writing actually.
MD: So it had been really tough then?
A ní R: For me it was.
MD: What made you come back to composing?
Ailís Ní Ríain was interviewed on video by Michael Dungan at the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 8 August 2003.