An Interview with Michael Holohan
Michael Holohan speaks on video to Jonathan Grimes about his early musical experiences, his interest in poetry, living in the Boyne Valley and his involvement in community music.
Originally published in 2004.
Jonathan Grimes: Michael, I’d like to start off by asking you are you a full-time composer?
Michael Holohan: At this stage in my life, I think the answer to that would be yes. At different periods, different jobs and situations sometimes took precedence, but I suppose my thoughts were always turned towards music. I had quite an involvement in what I would call community activity and human life around me; but music would be the most important vehicle for my self-expression.
JG: To put it in a different way, how do you see yourself, how do you like to be described? As a composer, musician or perhaps something different?
MH: I think composer at this stage because that is the way I see the world: as a composer. As I said, there may have been different situations that might have been more important but now I devote myself full-time [to composition], especially since my election toAosdána, which has given me the opportunity to pursue composition full-time.
JG: And you were elected to Aosdána in 1999. Presumably that’s been a great help to you as a composer?
MH: Yes, it was a great liberation. I don’t do half as much teaching as I used to. I’ve also been able to involve myself fully in the arts. I was chairperson of the Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda for a number of years; I’ve retired from this now but it gave me a great opportunity to involve myself in the arts.
JG: I’d like to come back later on in the interview to your work in Drogheda. Taking you back now to your early years, did you grow up in a musical family?
MH: I did. My father was not a full-time musician; he was a flour-miller. He played the accordion but his main love was drums. He played in many of the famous Dublin dance bands during the Second World War and toured around Ireland. He also played with the Austin Stack band; a famous céilí band [traditional Irish dance band] that used to broadcast every week. His dance band and céilí band work also brought him into contact with many interesting people like Charles Lynch [Irish concert pianist active until the 1970s] and Séamus Ennis [traditional uilleann piper]. His mother played the melodeon and there was always a piano in the house. I was told that we always held ‘house parties’ every Sunday when my grandmother was alive which consisted of cooking a joint and getting in plenty of booze.
JG: A joint of ham?
MH: [laughter] Yes, we were a little before the green-leaved specimen arrived in Ireland! The house parties were famous for people doing their songs; it was like a very Joycean scene. Every Sunday night, there would be a game of cards, followed by a complete musical session that went on into the early hours. I think my father inherited that -- he always liked parties -- and I picked up music from him. My mother sang as well and did a bit of amateur dramatics. My father was more into dance band and traditional music; he wasn’t a great aficionado of the classical tradition.
JG: But still, when you were growing up, there must have been quite a lot of different musics that you were coming into contact with; so there was that mix.
MH: Yes, and also I had a lot of uncles who played music too, so it was always easy to whip up a party. I think that was where my first musical experience came: as a child sitting underneath the piano. The music was always very eclectic and there were no barriers between styles or types of music; I always found that fascinating.
JG: At what point did you begin formally having music lessons?
MH: My father thought that somebody in the house should read music so he sent my sister and myself to piano lessons. I went to O’Connell’s School [primary and secondary school in North Dublin]. We did music there but the emphasis was just on learning songs. O’Connell’s was very much a sports and academic achievement school and I couldn’t do any formal musical studies. I was beginning, by the Inter Cert [state examinations in Ireland taken at around the age of 14], to become more interested [in music], so I went to the Dublin College of Music to musicianship classes and to study music for the Leaving Cert. I started at sixteen trying to notate my first pieces.
JG: Was that the first point that you felt you were interested in creating music, or was that interest there earlier?
MH: There were a series of events or epiphanies in music that I suppose you could say lit a fuse. I remember Dvorák’s New World Symphony had a huge impact on me, as did George Gershwin’sRhapsody in Blue; these were LPs I played to death! Another composer -- a very strange choice -- was Frederick Delius. It would be hard to find a link between all these! The big discovery for me was Debussy. I remember going to Walton’s [music shop in Dublin] and buying a piano book of Debussy and this opened a new world of sound for me.
JG: And that was your first experience of Debussy: through buying the actual sheet music and not through buying a record or going to a concert?
MH: Yes, I just went out and bought it. I had heard Clair de Lune and thought I had to investigate this composer further. I realised that music was a lot wider than Bach and Beethoven; more and more, I responded to what I liked by imitating it.
JG: So you went to UCD [University College Dublin] to study music after you finished school?
MH: No, after I finished my Leaving Cert I went to work in the civil service. I had decided that I was going to college; the civil service at that time wasn’t really for me. I was composing during this time and was fortunate to win an RTÉ [Irish national radio and TV station]Young Composers’ competition. At that stage, writing music was to me a private pursuit; I hadn’t thought of music in terms of writing a piece and performing it. The RTÉ competition launched this idea of a public performance of a piece.
JG: Were you getting any composition tuition at this stage or was this something you were teaching yourself as you were going along?
MH: I was teaching myself -- a lot of it was trial and error. When I went to UCD in 1974, the course itself was not made for someone interested in composition; it was a very academic course. I thought, if I really am interested in composition I should seek out some tuition. There were a number of people who were very helpful to me: Eric Sweeney; Jane O’Leary had just come to Ireland at that time and I had some lessons with her. I also had some fruitful consultations withSeóirse Bodley who was then in UCD. Generally speaking, you had to do a lot of self-teaching at that time.
JG: And also go abroad and seek tuition?
MH: Well that was tremendous. The Centre Acanthes, an organisation in France, had been organising these masterclasses. They were assisted by the Ministry of Culture in France and the idea was to get a very big international composer and to bring together young composers and performers over a period of three weeks. The first one I went to was given by Luciano Berio in 1983. There were 100 young composers from all over the world and about 150 performers, all focusing on Berio's music. I found that an incredible experience; even though you didn't have private one-to-one lessons, it allowed you to enter the world of a composer quite deeply. I returned there in 1985 for a week with Xenakis, and in 1988 with Messiaen. Messiaen, of all the people, was a teacher; he had a method to his teaching. He came in every morning and he would deal with specific topics, presumably that he had taught in Paris [Conservatoire]; he was a wonderful teacher.
JG: How did you feel coming from Ireland and attending those masterclasses in contrast to other student composers who might have come from richer contemporary music traditions? Did that matter or did you all feel in the same boat?
MH: Well, at that time you got a fair idea as to what countries were very tuned into composition in a big way -- France, Germany, the American University system, Finland. You could actually see the countries where composition was taken as a very serious pursuit; you did notice the gap that existed.
JG: Coming right bang up to today, tell me about the work you’ve just finished which is, I think, the commission for the ReJoyce 2004festival in Dublin which marks the one-hundredth anniversary of James Joyce’s ‘Bloomsday’ in June of this year.
MH: Well, the piece I’ve just finished...I’ve been agonising over the title for ages. In the end, I chose the title His final journey. The piece is about the chapter Hades from [Joyce’s] Ulysses. It’s about the journey and Paddy Dignam’s funeral from Irishtown all the way over to Glasnevin cemetery, which was known then as Prospect cemetery; it’s the longest journey in Ulysses. What I have done in the work is use a lot of Joycean material, which meant that I myself had to stand back and re-compose some music of the time. I had to go researching some of the tunes. I decided to work with that material, and also to try and bring out a bit of humour. I really enjoyed writing it and enjoyed the fun of trying to find out what atmosphere Joyce was trying to create. There were a lot of tunes I had to leave out. If the work had been longer I would have had a ball!
JG: I was going to ask you that: did you find it hard sticking to three minutes?
MH: Very difficult!
JG: Of course, this isn’t the first work you’ve written which draws heavily on literature as a source of inspiration. There have been many others including literary collaborations with the likes of poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan. How important has literature been as a source of inspiration in your music over the years?
MH: Before I wrote a piece of music, I was trying to scribble poems. I always carried that appreciation from a young age, particularly of poetry. I suppose it was inevitable that I would read a lot of poetry and that it would be a great inspiration. It depends really on the poet and the text; some poems that I set of Seamus Heaney are very straightforward settings whereas something by Paul Durcan...we use an ensemble where there could be a more experimental feel to the setting.
JG: How do you find writing for the voice? Do you enjoy it?
MH: Yes. I have to like the text; something has to spark me off. If I don’t like the text, I’m not just going to set it for the drudgery; I have to find the right material and I’ve found material from all over the place. Whatever strikes me about the poem affects how I’m going to write vocally. Maybe I have too much respect for the text but that’s very important to me. I suppose I would be at the opposite end to Berio who completely deconstructs texts so that you don’t know what the text is in the end. I’ve found that I’m loosening up a bit that way now. At one stage, I liked that the text would come across; that would affect the vocal style so sometimes the style of writing would have to be simpler than one wanted -- that would be out of respect for the text.
JG: But uppermost in your mind is this faithfulness to the text you’re setting?
MH: Yes, in many cases where I worked with poets, a lot would be attending the performances. You get some poets and they feel very aggrieved when a composer butchers their text! People use poems in different ways. I would find more freedom if the text is experimental.
JG: I’d like to ask you about another major source of inspiration in a lot of your works: the subjects of Irish history and archaeology. Perhaps you could tell me where this interest stems from and how some of the works have resulted in this interest?
MH: My father was very interested in Irish history and local history, so history was often talked about in our house. I did classical studies with music and also archaeology and when I moved to Drogheda[town north of Dublin], I literally had the Boyne Valley [5,000-year old Megalithic cemetery] on my doorstep. A lot of people say that the Boyne is the Irish Ganges -- it is the spiritual river of Ireland and so much myth, history and archeology surrounds it. We’re not just talking about Newgrange; we’re talking about a vast megalithic complex that’s spread out over many acres. Then you’ve got the Early Christian monastic tradition of Monasterboice and Mellifont Abbey. That sucked me in and inspired a lot of works: Spalpann an Ghrian[Beam of Light], The Dream of Aengus, Ritual Landscapes...
JG: There’s a whole stream of works.
MH: Yes [laughter]. When I arrived in Drogheda in 1983, Nano Reed[artist] had died in 1981. She was the major figure in the arts in Drogheda and did wonderful drawings of the Boyne Valley. When I saw Nano’s work, she was able to find inspiration in the Boyne Valley with her art; maybe in the same way I could find it in my composition.
JG: Obviously the Boyne Valley and the whole archaeology and history that surrounds it has resulted in quite a lot of works from the mid-1980s up to the late 1990s. Do you intend to write any more works inspired on those themes?
MH: Yes. I look at the Boyne Valley in the same way as you look at a layer of archaeological stratification: you start from the top and you see these bands going down. Sometimes I look at these layers as to how I might deal musically with the subject. I feel that, at times, I would like to go deeper; in other words, to go more abstract and experimental. As I have got to know the landscape more, I think there’s more to be brought out.
JG: It’s often been said that a composer reflects the community or society in which he or she lives. What effect do you think your environment -- living in Drogheda -- has had on your development as a composer? Or, if I was to put it another way: do you think you would have developed differently as a composer had you lived elsewhere?
MH: That’s a good point. When I arrived in Drogheda, I remember my first work I wrote for brass band had a whole string of twelve-note chords [laughs].
JG: It wasn’t a march?
MH: No, I’m afraid not! I remember the astonishment. I actually wanted to have some musical interaction with these people. I suppose when I read about Maxwell Davies working up in the Orkneys, I thought it can be a valid pursuit to work in this way. I did have a reasonably long period where I did a lot of work within the community I live in; perhaps in the last number of years I’ve moved away slightly from that and gravitated more towards writing for professional musicians again. It was a very good learning curve for the craft of composition -- when you’re writing [for amateurs], when you make a mistake, you make it big; so you learn very quickly all the possibilities. The more you know these things, the faster you can get a musical response from people, and rehearsals go easier. Sometimes in the professional world of music, unless a person is a generous performer, you don’t often get the feedback you want; they’ll often just go through and play it and it’s up to you to learn your mistakes, whereas with amateurs you can have a more prolonged interaction.
JG: So, if I can call it the community music aspect to your composing, it’s still very important and you’ve actually gained a lot from it.
MH: Yes.
JG: Coming back to some of your other collaborations, a few years back you wrote a work [The Road to Lough Swilly] for uilleann pipes for Mick O’Brien. How did this collaboration come about and how did you find writing for uilleann pipes? Was it a challenge?
MH: Firstly, I do have a deep interest in traditional Irish music and that came from my connections in Drogheda where I heard very unique traditional playing. Also, the uilleann pipes are possibly my favourite instrument and I used them before in The Battle of Aughrim,The Dream of Aengus and The Lost Land. Around the time of the millennium, Na Píobairí Uilleann asked me to compose a piece. This led me to Mick O’Brien, the piper. I started to listen to a lot of recordings and soaked myself in traditional piping; I actually tried to imagine myself as a piper, even though I’m not! I think that’s really important: when you’re writing for something like that, you really need to know the instrument. When I wrote The Road to Lough Swillyit was supposed to be a short piece and it grew into a monster of a piece! After that, I composed another piece in memory of Seamus Ennis, An Fear as an Fine Gall. I eventually orchestrated The Road to Lough Swilly and it became a work of 27 minutes for pipes and string orchestra. I think I’ve possibly another work in me!
JG: You’re not tempted to write a concerto for uilleann pipes?
MH: Well, I’ve actually been asked would I consider writing something that would use the pipes for a large work for the Celtic Festival in Lorient, France.
JG: You mentioned your interest in Irish music; what about other musical influences? Are there any other composers or musicians, either living or dead, whose music you greatly admire? Debussy, you mentioned earlier on -- any others?
MH: There are a number of Xenakis’s works that I really love; also Messiaen, Lutoslawski, Duttilleux, Berio. I’d have quite a mix of people that I still take a great interest in, even though I might not write like them. I think that the whole world of composition has opened out so much. When you think about the different styles: everything from minimalism right across to ethnic music. In some ways, from the way I approach things, I feel more comfortable.
JG: ...because now there’s room for every type of composer and style, whereas before, a lot of composers felt drawn very strongly towards the serialist or modernist traditions...
MH: And if you didn’t, you felt like an outsider.
JG: Looking back over 25 years of composition, what, for you, are the works that stand out as important in your output?
MH: I’m still quite fond of the orchestral works Cromwell and Leaves of Glass; Spalpann an Ghrian, Waves; Bagairt na Marbh would be others. Making Snail in My Prime with Paul Durcan was a wonderful experience. I’m still very fond of the Heaney settings...it’s quite a range of works!
JG: And finally: what about future projects?
MH: I think the time has come to return to the orchestra!
JG: I had a question about your three orchestral works that you wrote in the mid-1990s very close together, but didn’t get a chance to ask you earlier. So you want to return to this form?
MH: Yes, and even The Lost Land came after that as well -- there were four of them, written with a mad energy! In a certain way, composers have a dread of the orchestra; I found it a great process of learning. I have a number of projects: a possible guitar concerto, a big orchestral work for Lorient, and maybe another work that might complimentLeaves of Glass which was written for the restoration of the Curvilinear Glasshouse in the National Botanic Gardens. The Palm House is now being restored and I have an idea for a piece that would make a pair.
JG: Nearly ten years apart...
MH: Yes, and I think it would be quite different; it would be interesting to see how I react.
JG: Well, here’s looking forward to these future projects. Michael Holohan, thank you very much!
Michael Holohan was interviewed on video by Jonathan Grimes in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 30 March 2004.
The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily those of the Contemporary Music Centre.