An Interview with Brian Irvine

‘I've always thought of music composition as some sort of giant playground', saysBrian Irvine. He talks to Jonathan Grimes about his Associate Composer position with the Ulster Orchestra, his own ensemble, and his upcoming work with Opera Theatre Company and Welsh National Opera

Jonathan Grimes: Brian, you’ve got two premieres of works with theUlster Orchestra in September, Secret Cinema and Pocket Full of Kryptonite. It looks like the next couple of months are going to be very busy ones for you.

Brian Irvine: They are going to be hectic. There are the two orchestra pieces and then I have another premiere with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra -- an adaptation of Tom Baker’s book, The Boy Who Kicked Pigs -- and that’s happening in November. I'm also doing some gigs with my own ensemble [the Brian Irvine Ensemble] in November as well. There's a whole bunch of stuff happening at the same time so I'm going to be pretty busy.

JG: And is this normal for you in that everything is happening so close together or is this an exception?

BI: It is quite normal in that there’s always a lot going on. I think the next six months are particularly hectic though. I'm doing an OTC[Opera Theatre Company] project as well -- a small opera lab piece. It’s been full-on work now for quite a while, but I love it, it’s fantastic.

JG: You were recently appointed Associate Composer with the Ulster Orchestra. Can you tell me about that position?

JG: So it’s not just a position that you have so many commissions for a number of years; it has a wider educational/community type dimension to it?BI: It’s really an exciting project actually. Basically I had done some pieces with the orchestra before.David Byers, who is the chief executive, asked me if I would be interested in making a long-term arrangement with them for three years and I said, 'Yes, fantastic'. And basically at the heart of the project are a number of major commissions over the three years. Some of those commissions involve trying to bring in young people to work with the orchestra on a performance and compositional level. Other pieces involve working with different kinds of media, such as the Secret Cinema piece we’re doing which is for film and dance. So it’s really about trying to be involved with the orchestra on a creative level and educational level. I’m involved in a lot of different projects, from the Prince’s Trust right through to different types of people. Personally what I’d like to do is try to engage the orchestra with those different groups in a more fundamental way, and I think it’s probably something that I could help the education department do. So it’s really exciting on all sorts of levels.

BI: I wasn’t really interested in doing something that was just a commission-based thing where you write your tunes and then you get the band to play them. I am interested in working and making music with all sorts of people and that’s something that I wanted to be at the heart of the Associate Composer project. So when we were deciding what was going to be involved with the project, it was flexible and I was able to sit down with David and say, ‘Why don’t we try this?’ So we are slowly mapping out a number of different projects over three years.

JG: You mentioned one of the works, Secret Cinema, and the other work, Pocket Full of Kryptonite. Is that a Superman-inspired theme?

BI: It kind of is, yes. [laughs]

JG: That’s quite topical.

BI: You know, it’s funny, and no one is going to believe this, but I actually had no idea Superman [the movie] was coming out; it was one of those pure coincidences. It’s a very short piece in that it’s essentially a celebration of the 40 years of the orchestra -- it’s their fortieth birthday this year. It celebrates the heroic efforts of the orchestra, which has been in existence for 40 years through the guts of the Troubles and managed to stay afloat.

JG: No one will be expected to play in tights and capes?

BI: [laughs] You never know! Get a few pairs of red underpants and a few capes and just pass them out liberally.

JG: A lot of your works seem to have very colourful titles. Where do you generally get these from?

BI: I suppose it’s a really hard question to answer because there are so many different things that would spark off pieces. I know a lot of stuff that I do is about people and things that are slightly larger than life. There are a couple of projects that I’m doing now: The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, which is by Tom Baker, and I’m also doing a big thing on Roald Dahl with the [Ulster] orchestra next year. It was actually an adaptation of a Live Music Now! commission that I’ve already done with Ultan String Quartet in a number of different schools across Ireland. I could just go on forever with Roald Dahl's stuff. I suppose most of my music is about people and celebrates the cartoon aspect of life in some ways.

JG: Just staying with orchestral works, I was looking at your list of works and there’s certainly a big catalogue of orchestral works at this stage. Is this medium something that you enjoy writing for and are comfortable with?

BI: Yes, writing for orchestra is something I love. A lot of the orchestral pieces that I’ve done have actually been for orchestra and something else, which also interests me. We did a huge big 40-minute piece based on David Lynch’s films with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

JG: That’s Montana Strange?

BI: Yes. The idea of taking a large orchestra and combining it with some of the guys from our ensemble and a free improviser and jamming it all together really appeals to me. A lot of the orchestra pieces that I’ve done involve some kind of add-on to the orchestra in some sense.

JG: You describe your music as ‘reflecting an obsessive interest in opposing musical genres, from punk and contemporary classical to jazz’. Where do all these interests stem from?

BI: They really all come from the story of my involvement with music, which started off principally as a guy who liked to play electric guitar in a pseudo-punk band in the 1980s. From that my relationship with music became very important and I moved into free jazz and the works of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. I went to America to jazz school, Berklee College of Music, and when I was there everyone was doing jazz so I wanted to do contemporary classical. Then I left and went to the University of Surrey and everyone was doing contemporary classical so I wanted to do jazz and so it went on[laughs]. So now I’ve got to the point where I go, ‘That was all a bit hectic’, and I feel very at ease with what I am and what it is that drives me to be involved in writing music. What happens now is that everything just comes out in a very organic, innate way. It’s just a very natural process, whereas I went through a lot of years going against things and reacting to things. That forces you down one way, whether it's pop music, rock, classical, free jazz, or contemporary music.

JG: In music there’s always a great desire to put people in boxes and categories. Do you find that restricting?

BI: It’s always other people that have great difficulties with what you do. I’ve been party to that in that people don’t know what you are. Are you a classical composer? Are you a jazz composer? Are you this, that or the other? I’ve never been too bothered by that. I always thought of music composition as some sort of giant playground where if I want to do some crazy jazz music and put a band together, that’s like going on the swings. Or if I want to do something a wee bit extra I can move on to the slide. So it’s like a giant playground and I just wanted to be able to go on all the rides, to be able to express what I was thinking.

JG: And not just stick to going on the swings?

BI: Yes. I guess you have to find your own way of playing in the playground. Some people are brilliant at the swings but I just wanted to just buzz around them all.

JG: Well, that’s a great analogy! A big part of your career over the last number of years has been your own ensemble, the Brian Irvine Ensemble, and this group has gone from strength to strength. As a composer, how important is having a group of your own?

JG: So it allows you a certain amount of experimentation?BI: I think it’s critically important in many ways because it’s the only situation where you can do anything you want at any given point in time. That for me is brilliant. The difference in having your own band and working with an orchestra is that you do your stuff, you go to the orchestra and they play your stuff. If you were to say in the middle of rehearsal, ‘You know what, I think I’ll just scrap those seven pages in the middle and if you just take it at that bar, just free it up for ten bars in that middle bit’, that would be ludicrous. But in a band situation you can do anything you want. You can change, you can stop things in the middle and allow a great improvisation to take you off into a different zone and come back again. So I think it’s critically important to be able to find a different way of expressing yourself, which is very direct.

BI: Yes, it does. It also brings you into direct contact with musicians and people who you like being around. That business of actually working with musicians in a room where you’re conducting and directing what happens is extremely rewarding.

JG: Whereas with another group performing your own music you don’t have that sort of contact or that level of interaction -- you’re a passive onlooker?

BI: Yes, and that’s fine for that situation but personally, that’s not enough for me.

JG: The group is well known for their highly energetic and almost theatrical performance style, along with your pretty individual conducting style. How important is that element of presentation in terms of how the music comes across?

BI: The whole visual representation of the band and what actually happens when we play and indeed, my own individual conducting style is something which has just evolved. Not much thought has gone into it but things happen in concert and they are more a reflection of the personalities in the ensemble, and a certain kind of environment will inspire them to do certain things. As time has gone on that element has become very integral to the whole band but it’s never actually thought out or determined. It’s something that just happens and it’s neither trying to support the music nor to shape the music -- it’s just part of the music. It’s so inextricably linked now with the actual music that it’s hard to separate the two. I don’t know what it is -- it’s just a crazy circus. [laughs]

JG: Do you think in terms of music as a visual art?

BI: Yes, I do. I think I find it hard to find boundaries in most things. Essentially I’m musically greedy. It was never enough to go just on the swings, as I said before. There are whole boundaries between things -- where music stops and life begins or theatre begins or film begins. I have difficulty determining those boundaries. Whenever I do an orchestral piece I always visualise it in terms of an event. ‘In an ideal world how would you actually present this piece?’ And I get all sorts of crazy ideas: giant flying penguins and everything. [laughs]

JG: Well, you’ve got three years with the Ulster Orchestra to do that -- perhaps the Superman costumes might come in handy!

BI: You just never know [laughs].

JG: In terms of the energy that comes out of the performances that you’re involved in, is it a challenge for you to transfer the energy that your music has to groups that you’re not directly involved in?

BI: I think you’ve got to look at those situations as being slightly different. I don’t really think I could approach a third party performance group in the same way that I would approach my own ensemble. That would be a bit daft in many ways. So it’s just a different discipline really. You’ve got to rely on different things to convey your ideas and your energy. Each situation, each orchestra, each performance situation just requires a totally different approach. Maybe the whole energy that I have in my own band has to take slightly less importance whenever you’re doing a piece for somebody else.

JG: You mentioned you were quite interested in writing for orchestra alongside other groups, including your own group. Presumably this kind of combination can inject a certain amount of energy into performances?

BI: Yes. In fact I find that if you take an orchestra and attach something to it -- be it a small group of people, or some young people singing, or an improviser, or even a film -- that little addition changes the whole thing. It sometimes can bring a little injection of energy that wouldn’t be there normally. Say if I brought my friend Paul Dunmall with me -- he’s an awesome improvising saxophonist -- and put him with an orchestra. He will bring an unrestricted energy to that situation that makes the whole thing quite explosive.

JG: Spice things up...

BI: It does. Paul is quite interesting because he is an astonishing player and he has a couple of golden rules. One of them is that he doesn’t like to be given anything to read, ever. As a free improviser he is able to shed light on certain areas of music that simply cannot be attained through written music. He’s completely uncompromising in his sense of freedom and technical aesthetics on his instrument. You combine that with a situation which is almost a complete opposite of that, as in an orchestra which is completely about detail, direction and rigorous, grounded readers, and you just jam them both together -- it’s brilliant. When we did the Montana Strange, which is a 40-minute piece for orchestra and saxophone and ensemble, I had only one conversation with Paul and it was about two seconds before we did the concert. Paul said to me, ‘So where do you want me to play on this?’ And I said to Paul, ‘Anywhere you want’. And that was the end of that.

JG: And it worked?

BI: Yes, it always does. It’s about faith and risk as well. It’s a game in many ways in that it’s all about trust and faith and risk. So if you do a piece of music it’s never a good thing in my mind to think, ‘Oh yeah, this is in the bag.’ I’m always tempted right up to the last minute to introduce something which will just throw it all off. Even when everything is nailed down and all sitting perfectly I have this uncontrollable urge to throw something in there just at the very last minute.

JG: And do you?

BI: Sometimes, yes. Well, I suppose you’ve got to keep yourself interested somehow!

JG: Picking up on that point, in terms of keeping the interest and also what you referred to as seeing composition as almost like being in a playground and trying out different rides. For you composing is a toy, you’re playing with it, you’re experimenting with it in the same way a small child would play for hours with Lego or whatever. How important is it for you to keep that freshness of approach to composing and is it sometimes difficult for you to sustain that approach?

BI: It’s very important to. I suppose for any composer or musician, it’s very important to find new things, new areas that you can get into it. The whole playground analogy in some ways is slightly wrong in that it implies something that is about the physical experience of writing music as well. But in many ways I suppose it’s also an emotional playground where you’re digging to find a deeper way of saying something or a lighter way of saying something. I think as I get older what is actually happening is that the playground is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I’m discovering new rides, if you like, and I seem to be getting a greater sense of energy to go on those rides as well.

JG: How do you work in general when it comes to writing music? Are you a composer who has to write every day or can you go for long periods of time between commissions and not write?

BI: All of the above. At the minute I’m writing every day -- no fixed pattern really. Sometimes working on commissions demands that you work a certain number of hours, so at the moment I’m working extremely long hours. But if I weren’t trying to fulfil those commissions I’d still be writing on a daily basis, I think. I suppose the nice thing about computer technology is that you have a constant notebook, so you just bung all this stuff down and store it. So I have bucket loads of stuff that I’ve written which has never really developed into anything and may never develop into something.

JG: You mentioned about where you get ideas from and what inspires you earlier in the interview -- people and everyday life. Is there anything else that sparks you off?

JG: It’s an interesting way of looking at things.BI: Certainly books, films, cartoons, and even just odd situations. If we’re being truly honest, I often think that I’m just spending my whole life writing the one piece and whenever I finish it will be a collection of everything I’ve ever done, and somehow it will all fit together. In my mind I even have a title for it because I’ve invented this whole alternative world. I call it Dumb World and I think it’s all going to fit into this one thing. The work I’m doing at the minute is Secret Cinema and the whole idea is that there is a cinema everywhere you go if you put a frame around it. It’s this idea that whether you’re sitting here or in a coffee shop or whatever, if you stick a frame around it and look out the window or listen, there’s something incredible happening. As long as the cinema is going I still have lots of stuff to write, lots of stuff to churn out.

BI: The most amazing stories, the funniest things, the most moving things are things that you see on an everyday basis. It’s conversations that you have with your friends, stories that you hear, people that you see in the street and stories they tell you. Some of that makes its way into books or films or some other form, but it’s all happening already.

JG: So it’s not all about science fiction and Superman. And that’s the last time I’ll mention Superman! It’s the everyday things, the normalness of everyday life.

BI: It is interesting because people talk about this thing 'normality'. What is that? When was the last time you ever had a normal conversation, whatever that is? Or when was the last time you saw something normal? I mean I’ve just walked from the train station to here and I tell you, it’s not normal out there, whatever normal is. Crazy things happen all the time, beautiful things.

JG: You mentioned collaborating with Paul Dunmall. You’ve also collaborated with a lot of other people -- filmmaker John McIlduff, pianist Joanna MacGregor and many more. How important is collaboration in your work as a composer?

BI: All the people that you mentioned are brilliant lateral thinkers and brilliant creative minds, and they all see things in different ways and see different patterns -- patterns or shapes that I would never be able to see because of my personality. I think when you can get together with other people the possibilities of making something that you could not make on your own and maybe they couldn’t make on their own is very exciting. Plus it pulls you out of your own dimension, which I think is very healthy.

JG: You mentioned education in passing, in terms of the Associate Composer position with the Ulster Orchestra. Maybe you could explain the reasons why you feel very passionate about education.

BI: I actually have a slight difficulty with the word education in some ways. But basically my thoughts on it are pretty straightforward and it’s one of the reasons why I find music such a captivating addiction in many ways. I think that music is probably one of the most optimistic art forms there is because whether you’re a guy who’s just had a guitar for two days, or whether you’ve been playing a bassoon for 30 years, my belief is that given the right moment in time, the right situation, each of those two parties can make something incredible. It’s about trying to utilise the information, the knowledge and experience that you have at any given point in time in your life to make something which is astonishing. So if you follow that through I believe that anybody can have a crucially important and direct involvement with music, and it has a strangely powerful effect on people when they realise that, ‘Oh I can do this, I can make this and by making it, it actually changes the way I feel about the world in many ways.’ A six-year-old violin player is going to make something that you or I could never make. So it’s not so much about education but it’s more about being involved with all these different kinds of people in making something that is outstanding.

JG: I want to talk about your foray into opera. You mentioned the Opera Theatre Company commission. Is it a chamber opera?

BI: My foray into opera is quite a good one actually because I have an ongoing relationship now with Welsh National Opera. I did a big children’s opera for them last year and I’m doing another big opera for them next year, and another musical piece with the main opera. Opera Theatre Company have asked myself and John McIlduff to write a very small 10-minute opera, which we’ve nearly done. I love opera because it’s just so ridiculous.

JG: I’m not surprised that you say something like that because opera seems to have all the possibilities of what you’re about.

BI: Yes, I think it does actually. I went down to London last week to see Nixon in China. It was great. It was the Peter Sellers production and it opens with the front portion of a jumbo jet lowered down onto the stage. Everyone has seen that image, but when it happens you just think, ‘That’s what opera is all about -- something as ludicrous as that.’ The possibilities that happen in opera are brilliant but I suppose it all comes down to practical things like budget and so on. You need big money to realise big ideas.

JG: And the Opera Theatre Company one, is that coming up later this year?

BI: Yes. I’m not sure how they’re being presented but there are three short operas. I think the idea was to team up writers and filmmakers to do these short things. I think [writer] Colin Bateman and [writer and actor] Pauline Mclynn are doing ones too. I think the idea is that one of the operas will be developed into a bigger piece at some stage; so we’ll see.

JG: The one in 2007 for Welsh National Opera -- is that a chamber opera or a full-scale opera?

JG: And are you working with a writer on that?BI: It’s a chorus opera and it’s essentially using 50 singers under the age of 30 -- youngish singers from 15 through to 30. They’re part of the WNO MAX chorus and they’re a brilliant bunch of young singers. It will be for quite a large 20-piece chamber orchestra and will be about an imaginary call centre.

BI: Yes, I’m working with an English fellow called John Binias who’s written some great books. We spent a couple of weeks researching call centres -- going to call centres and talking to all these people and listening to conversations down the line and finding out about it all. It’s one of those classic situations where you come away thinking, ‘You’d never be able to write something as good as the actual reality of this’. [laughs] So that’s the problem that we’re facing at the minute because if we take what we’ve seen and what we’ve done and put it on the stage, people will think ‘you’re just making that up, it’s too ridiculous!’

JG: It seems like a very contemporary theme.

BI: Yes, it is. Call centres have been around for a while and they will be around for a long time.

JG: What stage are you at?

BI: John is still doing the libretto at the minute and it will go into production next August. Now I just need to get cracking on it once he’s finished that.

JG: It sounds really interesting.

BI: I have to say, I love working with WNO, and they’re just a brilliant bunch of people. We just had such a great time doing the first opera, The Taylor’s Daughter. It’s a total joy.

JG: And looking ahead beyond 2007 into 2008, what else do you have coming up?

BI: Well, I still have the Ulster Orchestra stuff and I’ve got a couple of feature films in the pipeline. We’re going to America as well with the ensemble to do some touring. It’s all spread over the next three years. There’s the WNO project and I’m also doing stuff with the Prince’s Trust -- I run this residential music summer school for them, which I’ve been doing for about six years.

JG: Sounds like you’ve a very busy time. That’s pretty much all I wanted to ask you, Brian.

Brian Irvine was interviewed on video by Jonathan Grimes in the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin, on 20 July 2006..

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