An Interview with Martin O'Leary

'You can’t teach somebody to be a composer,' says Martin O'Leary, 'they either are or they aren’t.' He talks to Bob Gilmore about his works to date, the influence of Mahler on his composing, and the relationship between teaching and composing.

Bob Gilmore: Martin, I’d like to ask you first of all about your beginnings in music. Tell us about how you got to think of yourself as being a composer. When did that all start?

Martin O'Leary: Well I suppose you could distinguish between being a real composer, whatever that might be, and somebody who’s just writing self-penned pop songs which I did when I was a kid. In my teenage years I encountered classical music for the first time and was completely swamped by it. So the very first things that I wrote were piano sonatas that were a very weird cross between Mahler and Beethoven. I think the first piece of mine that I heard was a piece called In Memoriam, a 12-minute organ piece which I wrote after the Stardust fire [North Dublin nightclub in which 48 died] in ’82. That was also the first piece I heard, which meant that the sense of power was a very intoxicating thing -- to hear an organist play it and go, ‘Wow, I’m responsible for that noise’. I suppose composing starts out as a very sincere form of flattery for all the music that you love. It’s only when you start to get performances that the drug really takes hold and you start to think, ‘I haven’t tried that, I must try this and see if it works in a performance.’

Going to college -- I went to Trinity [College Dublin] where I studied music -- was completely different from secondary school where I was the guy who was into music. In Trinity I was surrounded by people who were equally into music as me, so that was really stimulating. Writing for contemporaries and for fellow students was a great source of inspiration as well -- things like pieces for trombone and piano, which I wrote for Donal Bannister and Ray Keary, who were contemporaries of mine. I did a piece for the college singers for a competition that they organised, and various other bits and pieces during my time at Trinity, as well as writing pieces as part of a[composition] portfolio.

I must have an inbuilt stubbornness in terms of regarding myself -- some composers I know look back on their early stuff and go, ‘That’s rubbish, you wouldn’t want to hear that.’ It’s not really for me to decide what the worthwhile listening experience is for somebody. But I think there is something of me in most of what I’ve done since then. Although what that “me” is has probably changed quite a bit over the years too.

BG: Who would have been the influences on the earliest things you did back when you were a student?

MO'L: My musical daddy is Mahler. I still struggle to get away from him sometimes, in the sense that I think everything that I write is aimed at a communication of an expression of something. I think that stems from him. He’s definitely responsible for that because his music hit me fairly and squarely between the eyes when I got to know it first. It was a question of buying the symphonies before I’d even heard them, that was how much trust I had in his music. Stravinsky has always been a prime influence… When I was in college I was listening to everything and anything. Michael Taylor’s [music lecturer in TCD and current head of department] advocacy of Haydn was certainly a big influence and I’m a certified Haydn freak now. I remember thinking, not in a bad way, when I went to college that Mozart was the composer and there was this guy Haydn who was around at the same time. It’s now flipped completely. I actually prefer Haydn an awful lot to Mozart. I wouldn’t say he’s necessarily a greater composer but I feel closer to him.

BG: It’s funny you mention Mahler and Stravinsky as being influences back then because in a certain sense you could say they’re extremely different composers, almost polar opposites. Mahler very much about self-expression and Stravinsky very much denying self-expression, claiming composition was just work and everything had to be made in a matter-of-fact way. How did you reconcile those two quite opposite aesthetics?

MO'L: Well I think Stravinsky is just striking a pose, to be quite honest, when he said that. He’s one of the first great composers and an equally great self-publicist. He knew exactly how to get a nice quote out, preferably controversial and even better if it was witty. If you listen to something like Symphony of Psalms, the Mass, even things like the violin concerto, to me it’s very expressive music. It’s certainly anti-romantic in the sense that it doesn’t indulge in what people who don’t like late Romantic music would call excess. But there’s an influence of Mahler on Stravinsky’s own music, even though he would deny it himself. It’s there in certain pieces. And I think part of your training as a composer is that you absorb all these things which are bound to be contradictory.

We’re fortunate where we are -- you have 800 years plus of music to absorb and finding a common thread between Machaut and Milhaud is going to set you back a long way. It certainly taught me that there are very few absolutes in terms of definitions of what music can or can’t be. You always find something that completely ruins your clinical definition of what music is. So these contradictions, as to whether they’re reflected in the music… I don’t think they’re necessarily reflected in what I would have written. There might be some more Stravinskian pieces and other more Mahlerian ones around that time. Certainly there’s an orchestral Ballade which was part of my final year in college, which was played by the Dublin Chamber Orchestra the following year. It’s like I reduced the orchestra to a manageable size. I was soaked in late Mahler at that stage and it was like a purging of that. So Mahler’s 10th symphony has I think a 9-note chord in the first movement, so my piece has a 10-note chord. And it’s very, very much in that territory. In fact it actually begins with a gong stroke, just like the first of the Berg orchestral pieces as well, even though it goes on a completely different path. Sometimes pieces come out like that in that they seem to have been absolutely enmeshed in that particular expressive world. It’s probably down to what you’re listening to at the time.

BG: And would you say, to generalise, that music for you has remained about self-expression in the way that it obviously was for Mahler, whose music is very much about him? Is that more or less how you feel when you’re composing?

MO'L: That’s a dangerous one to think about too consciously. Again I tell my composition pupils, ‘Yes it’s about expression,’ but the phrase that I quoted in a lecture recently was Wordsworth’s one about emotion recollected in tranquillity. If you’re particularly pissed off about something or you’re particularly enamoured with somebody or whatever it is that you decide you want to express in a piece, it finds its outlet. I think it can end up being very contrived and probably bombastic if you decide, ‘Right, I’m going to write an angry piece this morning,’ with lots of szforzandos in it and big dissonant chords. It doesn’t work that way. A recent example of that was Tenebrae a piece I wrote for a performance in John Field Room by friends of mine, a trio. Brian Boydell had died around that time and Brian was a great formative influence through Trinity and through his openness. It’s also the sense that he was a real living composer, which was very inspiring. But the piece, I thought, ‘I won’t write a memorial to Brian. I won’t do that.’ And nonetheless the piece ends up being calledTenebrae and it’s a very dark piece and it uses his octotonic scale quite consciously, and still I was denying to myself, ‘No, I’m not writing a memorial to Brian.’ The proof of the pudding came with the first performance when Mary Boydell came up to me afterwards and said, ‘That was a lovely memorial you wrote to Brian.’ Okay, well it was, then!

BG: You’ve been teaching composition now for quite a few years. People often say that composition can’t be taught. Do you agree with that point of view?

MO'L: It’s a nice catchphrase but it doesn’t really cover it fully. You can’t teach somebody to be a composer, they either are or they aren’t. Looking at second-year compositions by students who may not have written anything before -- you can tell by playing through the first few bars whether they’ve actually got that sense of engagement with what’s written on the page as opposed to struggling to try and get something out on a page. That can develop into a real compositional talent later on but certainly the initial ones you could tell. You can teach the techniques of composition, you can teach the discipline of it, you can teach the craft and I think what I would call professional responsibility in terms of a composer but the buck ultimately stops with a composer for a piece. I’m not sure it’s very convincing to say, ‘Oh well I don’t know, I only wrote the thing, in response to ‘Why did you put this here?’ You certainly can’t teach somebody to find an individual voice -- I’ve no idea how I found my individual voice, so that makes me completely useless in terms of teaching that. It always reminds me of the thing about the centipede. He’s congratulated by somebody on being able to walk with 100 legs and immediately begins to think about it and falls over.

I find teaching composition is actually very renewing for me because I’m constantly confronted by new problems and sometimes new solutions to problems that students have, both through the [IMRO Composition] summer school and through Maynooth. That keeps you fresh as a composer, it keeps you on your toes. It’s also fairly important that I’m still engaged with a composition when I’m teaching, because there’s not too much point in standing up in front of a class saying, ‘Well when I wrote this piece twenty years ago this is what I was doing.’ It’s probably much more valuable for them if I can say, ‘The piece I’m engaged in at the moment is this and these are the problems.’

When you’re teaching composition you’re not teaching your way. It’s trying to find what the personality of the piece itself is and help them to uncover that and trace it to its ultimate conclusion. If your creative personality dominates when you teach, as opposed to your teaching personality, then there can be problems.

BG: In terms of your own output you’ve written music of all kinds -- orchestral music, chamber music, vocal music, solo pieces. Is there any medium you feel particularly more at home in than another? Or do you see them all as being different sort of challenges?

MO'L: Well they are all different challenges certainly. I think it varies from time to time. For a while vocal music was certainly something that I was very interested in. Partly because of the stimulation of the chamber choir at Maynooth. I wrote pieces for them, they performed pieces. That’s [writing choral music] a very particular skill. What instrumentalists can do in terms of fingering the correct note just doesn’t apply at all to a singer, so it demands a very different approach. I found that very rewarding. Hearing what you’ve written being sung in tune and perfectly is wonderful. So I’ve been fortunate with a lot of those performances.

There’s a clutch of works involving guitar ensemble over the past few years as well. Partly because I play the guitar myself -- I play it in a completely unorthodox way, across my knees like a dobro rather than any traditional or classical way. But it means I’ve some sort of semblance because a guitar is such an idiosyncratic instrument. Some chords that seem ridiculously difficult are sometimes very easy and what seems particularly easy can be impossible. [I wrote] two guitar sonatas and Lesley Cassidy took up the challenge of playing the second about ten years after it was written. I wrote him a group of preludes -- something short to play as well as this monstrosity of a piece -- which he could programme more easily. There’s also a guitar orchestra at Maynooth which Brendan Walsh, one of our students, founded there. That was a completely new scenario to me. It’s got fascinating possibilities. So there have been two recent pieces for the guitar orchestra there. And I did an arrangement of one of my piano pieces, Maeve’s Air, for three guitarists for a CD as well. So these things tend to come together and I’m beginning to feel a bit like Schumann having my guitar year, then my choir year, then my... Maybe this is my chamber music phase now because certainly after the trio, Bluescape, I’d certainly be interested in exploring more of that sort of territory. Schumann is a very pertinent influence at the moment anyway. He seems to be probably the composer I’d be closest to at the moment. In which case it’s about time for me to go to the asylum if I’m following him absolutely! [laughs]

BG: The piece you’ve just mentioned, Bluescape, was written for the Fidelio Trio. Was it a particular challenge writing for such a bunch of virtuoso players?

MO'L: Well it was something I could relish. I was delighted when they asked if I was interested in writing something. It came about through the summer school. They were our guest resident performers last year and Darragh [Morgan] had worked with us before as well, I think it was back in ’97 or ’98. I’m just so impressed with their musicality and their commitment. I thought, 'Well why not! Great opportunity!' It’s a completely different challenge to the sort of pieces for the guitar orchestra at Maynooth where you’re dealing with young professionals. It’s quite another thing with somebody like the Fidelio Trio where literally Darragh rang me a day or two before they premiered the piece in Drumcondra and said, 'We’re going to use Drumcondra as a dry run for Maynooth because they’re both on the same day. If there’s anything you don’t like we can rehearse it in the afternoon.' So the first time I heard it was when they premiered and it was fine. It makes you more confident in your ability to write a score that can be interpreted without months of grinding hard work; I love that. If you write a sufficiently difficult piece that can be rewarding as well. I wasn’t so worried about writing them a virtuoso piece, as in 'I must stretch Darragh to the limits of his ability', so that he's pulling his hair out trying to get the violin part right. If it turns out to be a difficult piece technically, you couldn’t have better players to do it.

BG: They can cope.

MO'L: Yes, exactly. So there’s a short cello cadenza and a short violin cadenza. Mary [Dullea] is a phenomenal pianist, although the piano part was relatively straightforward, it’s pretty much a carpet for the other two parts. And the violin and cello part ended up playing more or less in rhythmic unison by inversion a lot of the way through the piece. So they’re locked together, which thankfully they didn’t take as an affront to their independence as performers, it’s just the way the material came out. But they seemed to like it, they seemed to be happy with the piece so that’s the important thing at the end of the day.

BG: In pieces of yours that I’ve heard there seems to be a concentration on two quite different sorts of music. One is very melodic, so for example the little vocal piece Berceuse is very beautiful, melodically-driven material. Whereas at other times you seem to focus much more on texture and even gesture maybe as a way of driving the music forward. Do you recognise that sort of dichotomy in what you do?

MO'L: Yes. I think that the slow lyrical writing probably stretches back to my friend Mahler again. His slow movements are something that really, really opened up my ears. I think to sustain a slow lyrical piece of music is extraordinarily difficult, it can just collapse completely. The sense of line is quite a tricky thing to achieve. I suppose an awful lot of music, not just the music I write but an awful lot of music thrives on opposites within a piece anyway, to generate some sort of dialectic and some sense of momentum that will drive it towards either a resolution, or some sort of intensification. When I was writing for the Fidelio Trio, as I’d never written for a piano trio before I was concerned with the textures and one of the things I was most pleased about was the chorale-like thing at the end with double stops on violin and cello above the sustained chords on the piano. Again with such seasoned professionals thankfully there were no problems with tuning and it was beautifully played. And I was quite pleased with that as a soundscape as well.

I’m certainly aware of a piece like Concertante 3 as being another example, because the layout instrumentally was so idiosyncratic. I think it was trumpet, horn, double bass, violin, flute and clarinet. I had to think in terms of instrumental colouring because if I didn’t it would just be ridiculous in terms of balance to try and work it out. I would think now of the idea of texture and colour as being… not necessarily a final layer of a piece, but certainly a very important part of it. Once the ideas are there how they’re coloured is very important. It’s something I think I’ve become more aware of, partly through my own listening. Maybe your ear changes and develops as you age. The colour in composers like Knussen or Ligeti or Carter is one of the most inviting aspects of music. Boulez as well -- extraordinarily sensual music. So that’s something that would be reflected I think.

BG: Do you feel that your musical language has changed over the twenty years that you’ve been composing? And if so, in what sort of ways do you think it’s changed?

MO'L: I’m sure it has. As to how, that’s a tricky one. I remember Michael McGlynnwas at a performance of a piece of mine,De Profundis for men’s voices, in Maynooth in ’99. Ten years earlier he heard the Kyriefrom the Missa Sacra in Cork at a seminar on choral music. He said to me, 'God, Martin, your style has changed so much!' And I thought, 'Has it?' I wouldn’t spend hours worrying about whether it has or hasn’t changed. Certainly I think you move from writing exuberantly and throwing all sorts of things out -- the sort of music that you are inspired by as a younger composer. Then you begin to realise what you’re good at and what you can do and try and focus on that. And every so often I think it’s also good to try and do something that you’ve never done before that you can’t do at all. You can get too comfortable in your particular area. 'Oh well, I’ve sorted the choral music thing, so maybe it’s time to try something else.' I think each new piece should represent some sort of a new challenge, otherwise you’re just reheating an old one, rearranging it for new forces. So there’s some new compositional challenge. With Bluescape for example the idea was, which I started out with in Tenebrae but it didn’t work out at all, was rather than a slow introduction to a fast piece, I thought, well let’s have a fast introduction to a slow piece. Just to see if I could actually bring that off and would it actually work or would it be completely off the beam. So that was germane to the way that piece turned out. I think there’s a constant in terms of the harmony, the harmonic languages that I use. My ear for harmony I think is something that’s been pretty constant in my music. It’s something that I feel is very important. There’s nothing worse for me than listening to page by page of… I’m not sure I should even mention the composer’s name, but there’s some early Maxwell Davis that I have great time for, I have to say, but a lot of the later stuff is grey harmonically. To me, if it doesn’t matter what note is against any other note then why the hell choose those notes in the first place? There’s got to be a definite reason for them to be there. Now it can be crunchingly dissonant all the time, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that there needs to be some sense of discrimination in the choice of sounds. I think that is very important. And certainly, I think that’s been something that I’ve always been conscious of. Again with Bluescape, as ever when you’re starting a piece you faff around and have no concept at all of what the piece is going to be like, desperately trying to come up with ideas. Until finally I hit a chord and I went, 'Ah right, that’s me, that chord is me.' I suppose you could say the harmony led me into that piece, gave me the sort of soundscape I wanted to explore. I think that’s been a reasonably constant thing, finding the sound world.

There are pieces that I’ve written, some serial pieces, for example the piano concerto; the finale is based on a 12-note passacaglia. It's not strictly serial, but there are pieces that are very strongly tonal but with little changes and that’s a really tricky thing to do as well. And then there’s different levels of dissonance in different pieces. Certainly the unaccompanied choral music by its nature can’t exist in a completely dissonant sound world, it’s just impossible for singers to orient themselves unless they’ve all got perfect pitch. So that would condition the sort of harmonic language. Feldman said he didn’t like to push the notes around too much. Not that I like to push them around too much, but I think there’s a way that I push them around. There’s a way that I nudge them around in a piece that probably is personal. It’s working habits. I think that’s what develops your individuality as a composer more than anything else, is that you are who you are, you’re going to do it a particular way because of your own makeup. It’s freeing that out rather than thinking, 'Oh god it’s 2006, I should be using this technique.' I think that’s going to result in something that’s very calculated at the end of the day. It doesn’t mean you’re not open to it, it just means you try and follow your own natural way of doing things.

BG: Your musical language in the pieces that I know seems to be, if I had to characterise it, somewhere between tonal music and atonal music. And in a sense maybe that’s not unlike your great hero Mahler in certain respects in that he’s able to be quite simple, the way some of your pieces can be quite simple and direct, and yet he’s also able to be much more complex harmonically and more enigmatic, whether the music is still rooted in a key or whether it’s not. Do you see these things as being opposites or are they part of one big spectrum for you?

MO'L: I think it probably depends on the piece. They can be part of the same, it can be part of the challenge of a piece to reconcile things. Certainly the path from a very simple tonal scheme to something that’s wildly chromatic is generally a pretty tortuous one unless you do the Stravinskian thing and just have blocks that are utterly opposed to one another and introduce pastiche and semi-quotational elements, which is not a path I’ve really gone down. I was in the National Concert Hall for Mahler 7 recently, and was just absolutely stunned by the wide-ranging harmonic language in the first movement of that. It just about fits under an umbrella of tonality at times but the lines are determining the shape as much as anything else. I probably would be reluctant to define pieces [in those terms], although some pieces I could quite clearly define as tonal and some as enhanced or broadened tonality rather than abandoned tonality.

BG: A final question, Martin. In addition to your teaching in Maynooth you’ve been involved for many years with the compositional summer school in Ennis. You seem to have a mania for teaching. Why is that?

MO'L: It’s never been described to me like that before! It’s how I earn my living. That’s partly how it started. In my Halcyon days of youth I swore blind that I would be a composer and I would never teach. Then I started teaching to earn money and actually found that I enjoyed it and seemed to be quite good at it. So it sort of flipped that coin. I certainly enjoy it. I teach analysis courses in Maynooth and engaging with the core repertoire regularly brings you back to these great pieces and you constantly discover something new in them and it keeps them fresh. I just find it is very useful from that point of view. And thankfully if you’re actually enjoying what you’re teaching it’s not as though you’re going to get fed up doing it so it keeps that interest for you. And also seeing the level of reaction of people who are hearing the music for the first time. Although that can be a bit depressing to ask a class in first year if any of them ever heard a complete Haydn symphony and not a hand goes up. I think, 'God what are people listening to?' But hearing a piece for the first time is a really precious thing -- it’s only going to happen once! I would be very wary of getting lost in the theoretical dregs about how music functions. I think keeping an innocence about listening to music is really important -- just opening the ears and letting it hit you in whatever way it may do. That keeps me fresh. Teaching is also very rewarding, it’s that thing of giving back. It sounds like a nice cliché but I’ve got so much from music, it’s enriched my life so much. And being able to enthuse other people with it is really rewarding.

Martin O’Leary was interviewed on video by Bob Gilmore in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 3 May 2007.

Bob Gilmore is a musicologist, lecturer and pianist who writes about twentieth and twenty-first century music. He teaches at Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England.

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

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