A Messenger with Fresh News

Typically, the hint of vicarious outrage detectable in Crimmins is utterly absent in the composer. 'I thought with the orchestral music', says Barry with pragmatic equanimity, 'that it would be good to do things which had never been done here, and pieces which I thought were good'. Accordingly, the National Symphony Orchestra, under Robert Houlihan, will open the festival on June 21st with the orchestral works The Road (1998) and The Conquest of Ireland(1995), both long since premiered elsewhere but never before performed in Ireland.

For the National Chamber Choir, the festival occasions a rare appearance under a guest conductor. In a mixed song and choral recital, the BBC Singers' Simon Joly will present all of Barry's works for choir, including The Ring whose 1996 outdoor premiere with the Cork Airport Singers, the Butter Exchange Brass Band and the bells of Shandon Church, Cork, Barry revisited on tape recently. 'There was something very touching about their performance, and I was pleased with that because it's quite a challenge to write something that you're happy with and yet is possible for amateurs to perform.' Other concerts will feature chamber music, including a world premiere, and solo piano music, played by Noriko Kawai in a programme which mixes Barry and Scriabin.

Saturday June 24th will see three separate performances of Barry's stage piece, Three Fairy Tales, followed by an open discussion with the composer, an ideal opportunity for all but especially for anyone who hears him for the first time on Lyric. The festival will conclude with the first concert appearance in Ireland of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Possible only through the assistance of the British Council, the BCMG's concert under Rumon Gamba will present works by Debussy, Ravel, Boulez, Thomas Adès and Barry, including the Irish premiere of Wiener Blut, just days after the Group gives the world premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival.

Between music from Three Fairy Tales and this year's Wiener Blut, the festival's survey of Barry's output spans a quarter of a century. 'I'm happy to be happy with music from as far back as that,' says Barry. 'What I would aim for in music, with regard to its staying power, would be that one had always the sense that a messenger was coming to you with fresh news, no matter how often you heard that piece.'

Another messenger, with significant potential regarding new music from both Ireland and abroad, is Lyric FM itself. The station's involvement in the Gerald Barry Festival reflects both its commitment to Irish composers and a possible broadening of the new music context in the future as a confident Lyric moves into its second year with secure listenership figures. In those same twenty-five years which encompass music by Barry programmed for the festival, a black hole from the post-war period onwards -- including even the most important composers -- has existed in Irish broadcasting and performance, particularly orchestral. For Séamus Crimmins, who describes the stations's unofficial ethos as 'the Lyric Adventure', such music 'is there to be done'. There is no need to address the 'why', only the 'how' of such programming.

'We can put on contemporary music. But how do you put on that music imaginatively? [Composer] Roger Doyle wrote to me to say he never would have thought it possible that Irish radio would broadcast some of the works Michael Dervan programmed in Countdown, (one hundred programmes each devoted to a single year of the 20th century). [Composer] Ben Dwyer told us that one day he heard a piece of his on The Full Score (Lyric's afternoon slot for complete works) and he nearly went off the road, on the quays in Dublin. He wondered if he would ever have thought it was possible.

'Just do things differently if you can, imaginatively. And take risks. Try it out. If it fails, nobody loses blood. It shouldn't fail because it's sloppy. It should fail because you've tried to do something and maybe there's another format open to you. Just try and bring people with you.'

Some have questioned whether or not there is sufficient specialist expertise at production level to address an area as complex and diverse as music in the post-war/contemporary period. The future value of a programme like Horizons, for example, will depend on its capacity to discern and evaluate what there has been of significance in the past fifty years, and then put it before listeners in ways which are searching and rewarding. For the most part, the burden of making up for lost time which Lyric inherits falls -- for the time being -- toHorizons. The challenge is relished by its production team who, acknowledging the softly, softly approach of the first series, are enthusiastic about digging deeper in the future.

'The whole area of the integration of non-Irish new music within the schedule interests me a lot,' says Crimmins. 'On Countdown there were so many works receiving their first Irish broadcast. That was significant. It pulls us into a much bigger picture. I met with Aosdána a couple of months ago (Ireland's academy of creative artists), and all the heads went up and down when I said, It's all very well to nurture whatever is considered of value at home. But then there must be a bigger context. We don't want to go back to isolationist days, neither politically nor culturally. I think that's the mood of the country today.'

Whatever about embracing the music of the present and recent past on specialist evening programmes such as Horizons and Countdown, what likelihood is there of it being integrated into the bread-and-butter day-time programming which, in large measure, accounts for Lyric's impressive market share? In other words, will new music ever catch up with the coverage received by drama, literature and other art forms in mainstream broadcasting, or will Lyric's perception of its audience profile force the station to confine new music to so-called ghetto slots?

In his highly successful drive-time show, Into the Evening, presenter Eamonn Lawlor has made a point of including contemporary composers. Music by John Gibson, Ian Wilson, James Wilson,Frank Corcoran, Roger Doyle, Gerald Barry, John Buckley,Ronan Guilfoyle, Philip Martin, Raymond Deane, Deirdre Gribbin and many others has featured on the show. Many of the composers have appeared in conversation with Lawlor on the programme, a valuable source of access to a general public whose exposure to new Irish music has always been limited.

But of non-Irish new and post-war music there has been very little. As Lawlor explains his programming philosophy, the absence reflects the stage reached in his own personal musical journey. 'Here's a road I travelled down; you might like to go down it yourself. It's as tentative as that. Programming isn't the kind of thing you decide in the abstract before you go on air: you discover. In the early days we were sort of blundering in, but we did have this clear conviction that we were going to do play new music. And we did.'

The only real forays into non-Irish composers, however, have featured the likes of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, whom Lawlor describes as making 'a virtue of not going very far in a long time'. He laughs when he recalls the timidity with which they first broadcast music from this repertoire. 'The first time we played [Pärt's] Spiegel im Spiegel, we really worried. We justified it by saying we were interviewing Tasmin Little who was playing it. And we've never had a mail response to a piece of music like we had to that. Very positive. We've given out the catalogue number of that more often than anything else we've played.'

Programming is influenced not just by the mind set and experience of target listeners, but by the more mundane consideration of what they're actually doing and where they are when they're listening. 'There's a lot of music being written that doesn't invite the kind of listening you can do in a car. That's not in any way a judgement on the worth of the music. Beethoven's late quartets were not destined to be understood until long after he was dead. You wouldn't have played them on the radio in drive-time in the early 19th century! And there are composers who write for listeners who have the score open on their lap and who appreciate it in a very intellectual way. Frankly, it wouldn't make any sense to play something like that after a piece from Verdi's Requiem and before one of Quilter's dances. It's too different an experience and in fact it does no favours to the composer.'

But as he and the station embark on their second year, Lawlor sounds ready to continue his journey into that void of unknown which Lyric has the opportunity -- and perhaps even the artistic obligation -- to explore. This sits well with that perception of his listeners which Lawlor has deduced from his own experience. 'You can only project your own experience onto other people -- that's the awful arrogance of everything that we do. In the end you can only say, I got this far -- and I haven't gone that far -- but I got this far by taking that kind of risk, by being that open-minded. And the listeners out there aren't that different from me. They persevere out of a sense that it's worth it. That sense may come from education or social pretension -- it can come from good reasons or bad. It's the thing, maybe, that defines our audience, that it's an audience that will make an effort.

'People who are used to listening to classical music listen with the conviction that their first instincts may not be right. They've learnt by experience down the years that things they didn't like the first time they heard, they grow to love. That's something very close to the reason why they listen to this music.'

For Séamus Crimmins, Lyric's future seems open to many possibilities. 'There's still a feeling that there are a lot of things that are worth doing, and they're worth doing with the enthusiasm which we have in Lyric. And it's just great to be able to enjoy that and share that with people here. And I think that transmits itself to the listeners -- I'm convinced of that.'