An Interview with Darragh Morgan

Jonathan Grimes: Darragh, you’ve just had your first rehearsal today with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, performingDonnacha Dennehy's Elastic Harmonic for their Horizons Concert. How did the rehearsal go?

Darragh Morgan: Excellent. They went into a good amount of detail. It was the first time I’ve worked with conductor [Gavin Maloney] and it took a little while for us to adjust, but it was fine and Donnacha[Dennehy] is delighted.

JG: This is the first public performance of the work in that it was originally recorded for TV broadcast by Ioana Petcu-Colan. How have you found learning and performing the work?

DM: This is the second piece I’ve played of Donnacha’s recently. I find it very close to the kind of music I like, so learning the piece is no problem. I learnt it purely from looking at the notes on a piece of paper -- not listening to recordings or midi files. I work out bowings, fingerings, vibrato -- all the technical side of things that you need to know as a performer. Then I put it all into context and start creating an interpretation for the piece.

JG: And you do that for every new work?

DM: Yes, I suppose one could say I’m slightly clinical in my approach but I think you have to be when playing so much contemporary music. New music will never be like a Mozart violin concerto, where a slur usually means exactly what the bowing is intended to be. So you have a whole process [with new music] where you start to work out a lot of bowing issues. It sounds very laborious but actually it’s really, really important to know exactly how you’re going to do every bit of it. And then the next stage is building up the tempo -- gradually getting faster and more comfortable with it, and then taking it two steps back again. In a lot of new pieces I play there’s a huge amount of tempo changes and tempo relations; it’s only when you’ve slowly learnt to do all the fingerings that you can actually change from pattern to pattern.

JG: How did you become so actively involved in new music?

DM: I think the very first piece of contemporary music I played was by Phillip Hammond. It was a piece called Elegiac Variation. I think I was 15. Philip was Director of Music of the Arts Council in Northern Ireland at the time and I remember going up to his offices and working with him on this piece, which I was then playing with Derek Bell, pianist and harpist with the Chieftains. I’ll never forget being blown away at certain clusters of chords. I remember thinking, ‘God, this is really conveying music in a real literal way.’ It wasn’t that I was suddenly less interested in classical music or even romantic or early 20th century music, but it was very exciting to be working closely with somebody that the music came right out of.

JG: Then you went to Guildhall?

DM: Yes, I went to study in London for four years at the Guildhall [School of Music and Drama]. I started working regularly withDeirdre Gribbin who was studying at Guildhall at the time. I also participated in a course in Aldeburgh that Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews ran at the Britten-Pears programme. I was introduced to a whole range of young composers in my particular year who have all done incredibly well. From that I started working with the London Sinfonietta, so by the third year of Guildhall I was spending a lot of time playing in Abbey Road studios, recording for Deutsche Grammophon and recording Ollie’s [Knussen] operas.

JG: You mentioned performing with the London Sinfonietta, and indeed you performed with other new music groups, including Ensemble Modern, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Icebreaker, among others. How have performing in these kind of situations shaped your development as a new music performer?

DM: I’m a performer who plays new music, as opposed to a new music performer. I started playing with the London Sinfonietta very young and it was great because it’s a brilliant group of musicians, and it’s a group of musicians who play new music, in that order. Ensemble Modern are a fascinating group because they are literally obsessed with new music and composers. I got to see the other side to the coin by playing loads of Steve Reich, Frank Zappa and Heiner Goebbels. This is the kind of pop or funky end of contemporary music, the kind of funky end. Ensemble Modern do so many different things all together and that was really influential on me because it helped me start thinking about my own programming and put very strange mixtures of people right next to each other. In groups likeBirmingham Contemporary Music Group, I got to work very closely with people like Mark Anthony Turnage and Gerald Barry. All these different groups bring different schools of composition to the fore, but the best thing is that each of them has brought a little bit into my own thinking about music, and also my own ideas about programming.

JG: You’ve commissioned many Irish composers over the years, including Deirdre Gribbin, Raymond Deane, Michael Alcorn and many more I’m sure. How do you decide who to commission and what, in general, are the traits you look for in a composer when choosing?

DM: I was introduced to Raymond Deane by my father. Raymond lived in Sligo at that stage and my family come from there. So I was first introduced to him from a family perspective and I didn’t know too many other composers at that stage and I really enjoyed some of Raymond’s music from the 1970’s that I’d heard. Michael Alcorn I met when I was about 15, playing in the Queen’s University Orchestra. He became a very close friend and his interest in electronic music has crossed over and influenced me and has helped create opportunities for me to meet lots of electronic composers. I knew Deirdre [Gribbin] through Guildhall but also met her when I was working at Dartington Summer School in 1996 when she was having a lot of performances with the Composers Ensemble. John Woolrich, the director of the Composers Ensemble, recommended her to me as somebody who I could work with.

I like to work with people who I feel want to develop a piece and who don’t want to just write a piece and send it to me in the post. Of course that happens quite often because of the logistics of different countries we live in.

There is a huge range at the moment of young Irish composers. There’s a whole new generation that I’m very interested in and that I think will continue to flourish. Whereas before we had about four or five names that were recognised internationally, now we have at least 15. So it’s great because we have a huge stylistic range. From someone like Jenny Walshe’s experimentalism and Donnacha’s[Dennehy] particular strand of driven, repetitive music, to people like Gerald Barry and his kind of manic, energetic, driving music; Kevin Volans and then younger people like Andrew Hamilton, Rob Canning, Ed Bennett, Siobhán Cleary, and Linda Buckley.

JG: So you prefer to work collaboratively with composers?

DM: I think certain composers can be very defensive [about working collaboratively]. I have had situations where a composer has taken what you’ve said as a criticism of their composition and creative output. Whereas all I might be saying is, ‘Listen, it’s impossible to do this kind of leap from here to here in the time constraints given”.

JG: You mentioned performing Donnacha’s bulb a number of times. Giving repeat performances seems to be something you tend to do -- is this important for you to give works you commission more than one performance?

DM: For me it’s not a case that I must give repeat performances and that this is my duty -- far from it. It’s just if we happen to get lots of really good pieces written for us and we’re lucky enough to get lots of performing opportunities, it makes sense[to give repeat performances]. It took me a month to learn Donnacha’s piano trio, to know it really well, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we perform it in the next season at least eight to ten times?’ You must programme pieces a lot -- it’s the only way you will make it sound better and feel more comfortable with them. I always think people should never review premieres. You should review by the tenth concert, because that’s the time when people know it really well, when the composer has made some revisions to the piece and the performers know it impeccably well and feel really at home with it. New music is very difficult as chamber music -- it’s not like learning a Haydn piano trio, which is also very difficult.

JG: Availability of professional recordings is something that’s very important for both performers of new music and composers. You mentioned a planned CD of Irish piano trios coming up. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

DM: That’s with the Fidelio Trio. We’re recording pieces written for us. Donnacha’s Bulb, How to Make the Water Sound, a piece I commissioned from Deirdre Gribbin back in 1997, a new commission from Ed Bennett for piano trio and electronics, which we’re premiering in April of this year, and finally, Kevin Volans’s trio. We’re giving the UK premiere of that at a new festival called Sound Waves in Brighton in June. I’m playing Donnacha Dennehy’s Elastic Harmonic on a forthcoming NMC release in May with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. I’m also involved in many other CD projects. Mary Dullea and I are recording all of Michael Finnissy’s violin and piano music for Mode Records in New York this year. The Smith Quartet has got a new album coming out next month on Signum, which includes Michael Alcorn’s, The Old Woman of Beare.

JG: And looking ahead to the next few months you’ve a number of performances of Irish composers, including new works by Ed Bennett,Martin O’Leary, Siobhan Cleary, Rob Canning and Deirdre Gribbin. Tell me about some of those performances and pieces.

DM: Martin O’Leary is writing us a new piano trio, and Deirdre Gribbin is writing a new piece for violin and piano for Mary[Dullea] and myself to premiere in Washington in May as part of a festival called Rediscover Northern Ireland. I’m also playing a piece for violin and electronics by Ed Bennett called String Factory. Rob Canning wrote a piece for me about four years ago, which he’s going to substantially revise for its premiere, which will be at the Warehouse in London in June. A person I’ve worked closely with, Frank Lyons, has written three huge violin and electronics pieces for me. I’ve just recorded all of those pieces for a CD. I’m playing his Dazed by the Haze a lot this year. It’s based on Jimmy Hendricks’s Purple Haze, and I’m performing that at the ICA in London and in Washington again. So there’s lots.

Darragh Morgan was interviewed on video by Jonathan Grimes in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on 29 January 2007. Further information this performer is available on his web site.

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