M usic—the natural words in the natural order. Through that formula we go back to the people.New music in Ireland is neither an attempt to move away from traditional music nor a deliberate construction upon previous works. The ‘Irishness’ of recent chamber music compositions is as idiosyncratic as the Irish counties and their distinct cultures and histories. I recently had an opportunity to explore the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin, in preparation for travel to Ireland later this year. The Contemporary Music Centre is funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and also receives funding from the Ireland Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO).
Music will keep out temporary ideas, for music is the nations’ clothing of what is ancient and deathless.”
— W.B. Yeats, Letter to Lady Gregory, 08-FEB-1937.
The diversity is phenomenal—throughout the musical genres really but especially so among chamber music idioms that the CMC-member composers represent. Some contemporary composers are clearly serial or atonal. Others among them are much more lyrical and tonal. Bodley especially inclines to settings of Irish poetry—which is especially appealing to a foreign visitor like me who craves the cultural ‘situatedness’ of compositions like Bodley’s. It is not inward-looking or insular; instead, this music just feels intensely, well, ‘Irish’.
S ee everything through music! Those chords yet to resound in you—they swim like fish in all the rivers of the world. You love their playful surge, their shadows flickering deep within you.”The act of composing classical music is, I suppose, ultimately an assertion of creativity—a cairn placed by the composer as a marker of her/his—our—existence, against the fact of our mortality. Chamber music is inherently ‘serious’ as well as intimate, regardless of the humor or other emotions it may convey. But, over the years, informal Irish folk idioms—gatherings of friends, the clairseach—have been transformed into concert pieces. So one question as I listen to the output of these Irish composers of new music is, is there now a trend ‘back to the future’—reverting to more informal folk music themes and smaller orchestrations, chamber ensemble pieces?
— Susan Connolly.
With some difficulty, it could be so—and Bodley and other composers in the CMC stable do it regularly. Boydell, too, in his earlier years—String Quartet, Op. 31, for example. But there’s no business model for it (the ‘stick’). And, to be honest, the Gaelic tradition in literature and the arts does incline toward epic proportions anyhow (the ‘carrot’). So when we have Irish composers writing new music for small ensembles, it’s clearly done as a labor of love.
Boydell passed away in NOV-2000. Along with fellow composer, Frederick May, he founded the Music Association of Ireland in 1948. Much of Boydell’s writing bears the influence of Bartók. Not that his work is entirely derivative of European traditions; it is not. But his avoiding incorporating Irish folk tune themes into his compositions is conspicuous, compared to other composers of Irish new music. Here’s a clip from his String Quartet No. 2, performed by Vanbrugh Quartet [Gregory Ellis (vn), Elizabeth Charleson (vn), Simon Aspell (va), Christopher Marwood (vc)].
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