An Interview with John Buckley

Jonathan Grimes: The last time we spoke in this capacity was way back in 1999 when I interviewed you about a collaboration you were doing with artist Vivienne Roche. Obviously a lot has happened since then so perhaps you can tell me about your current situation. What are you working on now?

John Buckley: 1999 does seem a long way back and a lot has happened in my work since then. I’m now very much involved in academic life as a lecturer in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, which is part of Dublin City University. I have kept my compositional career very active as well and I’m currently writing a series of large-scale orchestral works. These include a violin concerto for Gwendolyn Masin, a piece for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Concert Hall for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra [RTÉ NSO]; and a concerto for flautist William Dowdall for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. In the case of the flute concerto, it’s a form of rewriting -- the first time I’ve done such a thing. I wrote a piece for alto flute and guitar for Bill Dowdall and John Feely, In Winter Light, and the idea now is that I will make an orchestral version of it. I’m loath to use the word ‘transcription’ since I have a feeling that once I start the imagination will take control and the music may well reshape itself; though I have to wait and see as I haven’t begun the work yet. So, there’s a line of pretty large-scale orchestral works, which will occupy me for at least another year.

JG: And your last major orchestral work was a bassoon concerto, which you wrote four years ago?

JB: That’s correct. I haven’t written for the orchestra for three or four years, which is a little unusual because the orchestra is a medium that I’m very much drawn to, and it’s a medium for which, quite fortunately, I’ve received a lot of commissions. It’s always a pleasure to have an orchestra to work with, especially the RTÉ NSO. I’ve worked so much with the individual players over the years in various projects and when it comes together as a unit it’s a pleasure to be able to write for an orchestra of such caliber.

JG: You've written quite a number of orchestral works. Would it be true to say that the orchestra would be your preferred medium of expression, or are you equally happy writing for smaller combinations of instruments?

JB: I'm certainly drawn to the orchestra as a medium: the sheer versatility, the almost plastic quality of the sound you have. I see it as one large instrument that you can mould and shape in so many ways and directions. However, I don’t want to write every piece for orchestra; I'm very interested in chamber music and I'm particularly drawn to the opposite extreme to writing for orchestra -- writing for solo instruments. This is a genre that appeals to me very much and I've written at least as many works for individual solo instruments. Writing for solo instruments is a different type of discipline -- it's much finer in many regards. You have the single strand of sound with which you have to play and you have to be very finely focused in what you do.

JG: So you enjoy both of these extremities of approaches. Would that be true to say?

JB: I think that's true to say. They both make different demands on the composer and I think about them in almost entirely different ways. With a solo instrument, I think almost entirely in terms of line -- a continuity of a single strand or line of sound and how one must vary that line so that it keeps a balance and coherence. It's also the expression of an individual player, and virtually all my [solo] works would have been written for specific players, so something of their temperament or style of playing would also find its way into the music. With the orchestra, you look at it as a large body of sound, and look at the possibilities of combinations of instruments and, of course, works for orchestra tend to be on the larger scale because of the nature of the medium.

JG: And staying with writing for orchestra for now, when you plan a large-scale work, such as any of the ones you've mentioned earlier, how important is the pacing of the piece in terms of how you approach writing it, so that you're not in a situation that you're suffering from exhaustion after it?

JB: You're talking about the pacing of the compositional process?

JG: Exactly.

JB: Well, one would always like to have just the right amount of time to write every piece but it never works that way. You're either in constant demand to do something or nothing happens for a period of time. I simply always rise to the challenge of the deadline. I think I've completed maybe forty or fifty large-scale commissions over my career and I've never yet missed a deadline, even by a single day. I'm rarely a day ahead, mind you, but I do time it rather carefully -- it's part of the profession of being a composer. Part of the craftsmanship is the timing: that you deliver the product on time, that it's the highest caliber you can make it, and very often given more time, you won't necessarily make it better. There comes a point when you have to finish and say, 'this is it -- this is the statement I'm making. Here is the work -- it's now complete.' Having another year on it wouldn't improve it; in some ways you might disimprove it. It gets a little more complex when you're trying to have a full-time career as a lecturer to fit the work around it, but that's the job of juggling and balancing all the aspects of one's career.

'I'm certainly drawn to the orchestra as a medium: the sheer versatility, the almost plastic quality of the sound you have.'

JG: And how do you balance this? I've spoken to composers before about this and a lot of them tell me that it's always a challenge to achieve the right balance between composing and the other things they do.

JB: Yes, it is [a challenge] and I think I've achieved it in different ways during my life as a composer. I did have a period of approximately twenty years when I was full-time as a composer. During that time eighty per cent of my work was in composing, with the other twenty per cent being in freelance educational projects. At other times, including now, the balance tilts a little bit the other way and the emphasis is about 50/50 on my education work and my composition. In the early part of my career I was a primary school teacher and kept the two activities going in parallel. Then that period of twenty years as a freelance composer enabled me to write a big number of very large-scale works that perhaps I couldn’t have undertaken had I had the teaching career. I felt that I was writing so much music because I depended on it for my living. I needed to pull back and reflect. Now I’m ready to emerge at the end of this period with some new works.

JG: Do you see a connection between both activities -- the education work and the composing -- or do you try to keep them separate?

JB: The connections are certainly not on the surface. In other words, the work I do in education is, by and large, not directly related to my own composition, though at certain levels it is. For example, if I’m working with a postgraduate student in composition, obviously the work that I’m doing has some bearing [on my teaching]. I do set out, like my teacher Jim Wilson, never to have a student write in the same style as I’d wish to compose myself; I think it’s a sign of an appallingly bad teacher if all the students sound exactly like the teacher. You find this so often at international festivals -- you hear works by young composers and within a minute of their piece you know that they’re studying with a certain teacher in central Europe. The way I was taught by Jim Wilson was certainly the opposite: he would enter into the mind of the student and ask, ‘What is it you’re trying to say?’ and try to find the best way to lead you in your own direction. This is the philosophy I put behind my own teaching as well. To answer your question in a little more focused way, I suppose everything that you do, whether it’s teaching or composing, ties up in your own personality. One does affect the other but not on the surface level. They are two aspects [composing and teaching] that obviously have great significance for me, since my whole life has been dedicated to them in about equal measure, and I try to keep them in a good equilibrium.

JG: And you’ve always been doing both throughout your career?

JB: I’ve always been doing both, more or less at the same time. For example, with Jim Wilson I set up the Ennis Composition Summer School, so these things were always parallel. Part of it springs out of my interest in communication and wanting, I suppose, to put something back into the development of young composers and of music in general.

JG: Taking you back to your early years, what was your experience with music that led you to become a composer?

JB: I would say that I did grow up in a musical environment. I was surrounded by Irish traditional music in west Limerick and as a young boy of eight or nine I started taking lessons in traditional Irish music from a local teacher called Liam Maloney. He had, for a traditional teacher, a very unusual method of teaching -- he taught from notation. So by the time I was eleven or twelve I was quite competent in reading standard notation. I went to secondary school in County Laois where there was a school orchestra. Of course, as I was a musician I was immediately put into the orchestra. Since accordions are not standard members of the orchestra I was handed an orchestral instrument. I recall vividly being one of three boys who arrived in the school having an interest in music. The college had just acquired three instruments -- a trumpet, clarinet and flute. The other two boys arrived before I did; one took the clarinet and the other the trumpet, and so I was handed the flute and told, ‘That will be your instrument from now on.’ That’s how I came to be a flautist. Over the years, it’s an instrument that I’ve come deeply to love and perhaps I’ve written more for it than for any other single instrument. Quite recently, a CD of my flute music called In Winter Light has been issued on the Celestial Harmonies Label.

JG: And when did you make a conscious decision to become a composer?

JB: I think I was about sixteen and it wasn’t a notion, it was an exact conviction. It struck me with great force when I heard two pieces of music in particular that were introduced by our music teacher in the college, Fr Pat McCarr. One of these was Beethoven’s Third Symphony and the other was a piece that was written by the Polish contemporary composer, Penderecki -- Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Extraordinary that in a small boarding school in the centre of Ireland we should be hearing avant-garde Polish music literally from about five years before. These two pieces struck me with such a force that I made an absolute decision that I was going to be a composer.

JG: And you’ve never looked back?

JB: Well, I’ve looked sideways and all sorts of ways but I have been able to fulfill that ambition. As Jim Wilson, my great teacher, would say, ‘If the fates are kind, I hope to keep working for as long as I can.’

JG: As you mentioned, your first teacher was Jim Wilson and he was obviously a very important force in your development as a composer in the initial stages of your career. You also studied with other teachers including Alun Hoddinott and John Cage. How did you find studying with both of these, as they would seem quite different?

'I do set out, like my teacher Jim Wilson, never to have a student write in the same style as I’d wish to compose myself; I think it’s a sign of an appallingly bad teacher if all the students sound exactly like the teacher.'

JB: They are quite different. The work with Hoddinott was fantastic because it came at a very good stage in my career when I needed a platform to gain access to performances abroad. He was enormously helpful in promoting my work and putting me in contact with other musicians in Britain. He’s such a fantastic writer for orchestra and this was a great influence on my style. He could analyse the works I brought him and always find the weaknesses and was always right in his advice. My study with John Cage was quite different. It was a two-week summer school in 1981 for composers and choreographers, so I worked also in this with the great American choreographer Merce Cunningham. From Cage I learned nothing of the standard musical techniques, since he did not work in this way. What I learned from him more than anything else was to take a different type of vision: to be able to stand back and think about what is music; what is its role and function; are we always tied into the obvious or are there other ways of thinking about the role and function of music in society? It was more of a philosophical concern that one might have taken from Cage, rather than advice on how to write harmonics in the violin for example, which wouldn’t have interested him in the slightest. It was more of a conceptual approach. With Alun Hoddinott, certainly there were discussions about the conceptual aspects of music but it was more practical and very focused.

JG: Turning again to your instrumental compositions. When you write for a particular instrument that you’ve never written for before -- and perhaps this is less the case now that it was before -- how much time do you give to researching how the instrument actually works?

JB: The answer is an enormous amount of time. In the early stages when I was writing for instruments which I hadn’t written for before, I would research in a variety of ways the instrument in great depth. I would get to know the great literature for that instrument, and not just contemporary literature -- I would go as far back as I could. I would, of course, work very closely with the performer, so I would write part of the music, take it to the player and try it out, and take their advice on technical things. Quite often a player would say, ‘That may not work but if you tried this it might work better,’ and if you incorporate the player’s advice and work in collaboration with them, for me it’s the only way to work. I’ve done this with all the big solo works I’ve done. This has been one of the things that has drawn me into writing these solo works -- the possibility of collaborating with really great players. I’ve been fortunate in having the finest musicians to work with on the instrumental works. I’ve written a lot of music for guitar, which for a non-guitarist is about as difficult as it gets, since it’s an instrument that hides everything -- all the notes are hidden. You never quite know where anything is unless you’re a guitarist. The only way I could really write the guitar sonatas and In Winter Light was to own a guitar and to try out all the shapes and get a sense of where everything lay across the fret board of the instrument. Of course, you can’t always do that -- it’s not that easy to acquire a concert harp, for example. When I wrote a recent solo work for concert harp for Geraldine O'Doherty, I would have worked very closely in collaboration with her. I would rarely arrive and give the player a finished product. I would take the ideas of the player and build on those, so that between us we would create something.

JG: Turning to the commissioning process, which you referred to earlier. Which comes first -- the idea for the piece or a commission?

JB: It's a very interesting question and one of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters gave a great answer to a similar question: which comes first -- the words or the music? His answer was, 'The telephone call always comes first!' and then the words and the music come. So in a way with the commissioning process the phone call does come first, or nowadays the email, and then the process falls into place. Virtually everything I've done over the last twenty-five years has been to commission and people often ask, 'Well, do you never want to just write anything for yourself?' The trick is that you take the commission you're offered and it becomes what you want to write yourself. I've been very fortunate in that all the commissions I get have been things I love doing -- writing works for orchestra, a violin concerto or a bassoon concerto. I suppose the specific nature of the commissions one mightn't think about. I probably might never have written an Organ Concerto had I not been asked to do it; but when I was asked to do it, it probably became the major work that perhaps I have composed. When you're given the commission you have a promise that it will be performed and that you'll actually get some payment for doing it as well. Once that euphoria lifts a feeling of panic sets in. So you take on the challenge of it and it becomes what you want to do. Of course, there are always ideas floating around the back of your head anyway and one of those will generally find its match in the requirements of a particular commission.

' I would rarely arrive and give the player a finished product. I would take the ideas of the player and build on those, so that between us we would create something.'

A commission ties you to certain things such as the deadline of when it must be completed, the instrumentation, the individual players, and the approximate duration as well. So you have to factor those in at a very early stage of the compositional process. Having said that you are then at liberty to work and deliver whatever kind of piece it is you wish to do, and as long as it's a good professional technical standard it will fulfill the commission. No one generally ties you down or tells you it has to be a jolly piece or a sad piece for this occasion -- you're left to interpret the sense of occasion as you feel you want to do. If you accept a commission, you accept the kind of situation it's been composed for as part of it. For example, this new piece I'll write for the National Concert Hall, I'm accepting it as a piece to celebrate twenty-five years of the National Concert Hall, so I'm not planning to write a mournful dirge! I'm happy to write a piece that has a sense of vibrancy and occasion, and I'm happy to do that because that's the kind of piece I feel like writing at the moment. So it fits with musical ideas that I want to express in any case.

JG: So it coincides with your musical thinking?

JB: Yes, and I've never had an issue whereby a commission couldn't coincide with some aspect of what I wanted to do. Sometimes it might bring them forward in the timescale perhaps, and sometimes if one had a particular piece in mind you might delay that and do another piece instead. Above all, once you go into the music it’s the challenge of the medium in which you're working and how the music itself unfolds that engages your full occupation then.

JG: What inspires you now as a composer? Are you inspired by different sources now than you might have been, say, fifteen or twenty years ago?

JB: I think that probably the same broad impulses are there. I continue to be fascinated simply by the way notes are put together. That's the first impulse -- the sonic imagination or the inner ear, the way sounds mix and blend together. I think about sounds virtually all the time and about how sounds mix and blend and create a logic and coherence all of their own. That's the first starting point for everything that I compose. There are particular types of things that trigger certain types of sound, such as a love of nature and of the processes of nature. I think that words inspire me as well -- images from poetry or a combination of a few words. I discovered recently that I’ve used the word 'light' in about five pieces, not having been aware I was doing it. There is A Mirror into the Light, In Lines of Dazzling Light, and other ones with colour in the titles -- And wake the purple year, The Silver Apples of the Moon. So clearly light, colour, and the interplay of light and shadow seem to be a significant source of inspiration in the work that I do. Mythology used to interest me greatly -- it still does -- but it influenced a number of specific pieces earlier in my career, such as the big piano cycle, Oileáin, and my first orchestral work, Taller than Roman Spears. I’m also influenced by other music and by the work of other composers. Sometimes a chord or a single strand of melody in another composer’s work seems to get my mind working -- that’s a constant source of inspiration. The sources are endless and behind each piece lies some kind of story or imagination before the first note goes on the page.

JG: Picking up on what you just said about titles, at what stage in the compositional process do you think of your title? Is it normally at the end or can it sometimes be at the beginning and how does that trigger the piece itself?

JB: That’s a very interesting question, and the answer is it’s all of those. Quite frequently, I find a title having written the piece. Some pieces seem to be in search of titles and some titles seems to be in search of pieces -- sometimes I will begin with a title, which will suggest a mood or a direction or maybe a shape that the piece may take. Others are purely written abstractly as music and somehow I find a title that totally encompasses what it is that I was trying to say. A title, maybe, should be a hint to interpretation by the performer or how to listen, perhaps, from the audience. It’s not meant to say everything about the piece but it’s meant to give some channel into understanding what the music is about. There are also occasions where I find a title halfway into the piece, and this happened with the work I recently wrote for solo harp, Endless the White Clouds. I had been writing the piece and was about halfway through when I found this incredible line, originally in German, from a poem that Mahler didn’t use in Das Lied Von der Erde -- he used the rest of the poem but abandoned this line. I thought that this line ideally suited the piece I was creating. It dawned on me that this is what I was doing with the piece -- it was an image of floating lightness, and this was applying to the process of the piece rather than trying to describe white clouds. It was the fusion and diffusion of the musical material that seemed to me to be summed up in this title. Having found the title, I knew where the piece was going then. When I'm writing a piece I'm not always sure where the piece is going. The process of composition is somewhat like an explorer: you are exploring but you don't have a map; you are charting out the territory and exploring at the same time. In a way a title can help you to see the way forward a little more clearly.

JG: So you're not a composer who pre-plans a piece, or do you?

'I think about sounds virtually all the time and about how sounds mix and blend and create a logic and coherence all of their own.'

JB: I generally would do a certain amount of pre-planning, in particular with the structure or architecture of the piece. I like to have a sense of the broad shapes of where it's going, however I'm not a composer who pre-plans a piece to the extent that a calculator could do the actual composition work in it. I like the structural and motivic ideas to be flexible enough to move where the spirit takes the music. Often it takes it in unexpected places; it takes on a life of its own. A chord in the orchestra can suggest a new direction for a solo instrument that you mightn't have imagined before writing that chord, and that new direction might be far better than where you originally thought you might lead the music. Sometimes I feel that the music is leading me -- that ideas grow out of ideas and as soon as you put them on paper they become a little more concrete. The process gradually unfolds and I like to keep flexibility between the small detail of what I'm doing and the broad implications of the work. I like to keep a balance between the minutiae and the broad architecture of the entire piece. It's a matter of trying to balance both -- the telescope and the microscope.

JG: Looking back over your output, are there any works that particularly stand out for you as being important?

JB: I suppose there are works that I feel somewhat happier with than other works. There are works where you feel you have achieved the pinnacle of what you were able to achieve at that particular time. So with all their faults, they stand as a testament to the top of your creative imagination at that particular time. There would be many a handful of works scattered throughout the long list that would be hallmarks of my style or that somehow pinned down what I was trying to say more vividly or accurately than other works. Amongst those I would probably include Boireann, a work for flute and piano from 1983; the Organ Concerto of 1992; the Bassoon Concerto from about three or four years ago; and I could pick another handful of works that seem to me give the clearest expression to my musical ideas at the time.

JG: And are you ever tempted to revise any of your works?

JB: I have a doubled-edged view on revision, and indeed I have revised a number of works over the years, particularly works from the early part of my career, which in subsequent time I would have seen to have many faults that needed to be rectified. However, I think that if the work is from twenty or twenty-five years ago, revising it now is generally ill-advisable, mainly because you're a different composer now. You can no longer capture what you were twenty-five years ago. It's very hard to get back into your own mentality of that time, so revising it in the light of the composer you are now could actually destroy the original work, which with all its faults is the best you could achieve at that time. So apart from small errors, I don't tend to do large-scale revision of earlier works nowadays. I'm more interested in getting on with the next piece, and that the new ideas should go into the new piece rather than tinkering with old works.

JG: You've written for a lot of different mediums -- works for solo instruments, several concertos, orchestral works. Is there anything you haven't done yet that you'd like to do in the future?

JB: I'd very much like to write an opera. I have written one chamber opera already, The Words Upon the Window-pane, and that whole process of collaboration with a writer and an opera company I found very exciting, and it's something I'd like to revisit again, perhaps on a larger-scale. Beyond that I'm also interested in writing at least one more symphony; so far I have written Symphony No. 1 -- perhaps I was a bit rash in calling in it Symphony No. 1 as it suggests that there will be further ones. I'm very attracted to the medium of the concerto -- I've written three or four concertos at this stage. I'm writing a violin concerto at the moment, and there will be a flute concerto. I'm interested in the interplay between the soloist and the orchestra. I suppose it pulls together the two principle strands of my creative imagination that I mentioned earlier -- the solo player and the orchestra. The concerto in a way combines the two of these together. At some stage in the future when I'm old enough I'd like to write a string quartet! I feel I'm a little young and immature to write a string quartet but at some future point it's something I'd like to do.[laughs]

JG: Well I don't think I can top that with any more questions! John, thanks very much.

John Buckley was interviewed on video by Jonathan Grimes in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 14 December 2005.

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