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I am often asked what music I like or what I listen to in my down-time. The simple answer is not much. Being saturated in music means that the sponge is often full when I sit down to listen to something, so I tend not to explore music very often. Sometimes I am lucky enough to stumble on a song or an album that catches my interest, and this post contains some of these. Note that the "old" stuff may only have been recent finds,  As to whether any of these albums or songs have influenced my compositions, well who cares? We all absorb from our record collection whether we like it or not.

Alfie [sung by Cilla Black - Bacharach & David]
I’ve been aware of this song for years, but only realised how amazing it is when I caught a documentary on Burt Bacharach where we saw the actual recording of it. The Liverpudlian Cilla Black performs this with a power that I have rarely heard elsewhere. It catches aspects of the English psyche that fuse to Bacharach’s sublime music, and David’s simple and passionate lyric. I can’t think of another one of their songs [other than "Say a Little Prayer" as sung by Aretha Franklin] that has this amount of a kick.

Giù la Testa [Ennio Morricone]
I saw the film "A Fistful of Dynamite" many, many moons ago. The film is a bit dated, but this piece appears in the middle of the show, and stuck in my head. By stuck, I mean is lodged there. This was in the days before having access to anything we wanted on the internet. I bought a compilation of sountrack pieces by Morricone and there it was. Not sure why this one of all of his brilliant music sticks, but it does. My kids call it "Shon, shon", as these are the only words in it. These are supposed to be the name "Seán", as the character they relate to is "Oirish" - i.e. James Coburn with a dreadful brogue [which in Irish means "shoe", not accent as is supposed, and probably more appropriate as a description]. Morricone is a genius and his music is touched by something very special indeed.

Kyrie [György Ligeti] and much of the soundtrack of 2001 : A Space Odyssey
I first heard this excerpt from Ligeti's "Requiem" while I was baby-sitting some family friend’s children at the age of around fifteen. It appears on the soundtrack of “2001 : A Space Odyssey” without the returning Kyrie section. It took me some years in out-of-the-way Dublin to find the entire recording, and it still has the capacity to shock me when I listen to it. It isn’t the harmonic language that hits me between the ears, its the timbre of the singers who are almost shouting against an elastic orchestral accompaniment. The entire "Requiem" has this wildness inherent in it, and is not an easy sing by any means. Study of the vocal score [and I have a signed copy...] reveals the tight contrapuntal structure that coheres the whole "Kyrie" together. I met the composer in 1999 at the Classical Brit Awards, and blubbered out some rubbish about his music changing my life and he just listened and laughed, offering me his Brit award after my long speech. He was just massive.

Secrets of the Beehive [David Sylvian]
The best album of non-classical music I own is “Secrets of the Beehive”. This beautiful CD truly deserves the description “timeless”. There is a stasis to all the tracks, a heart-stopping sense of melancholy, allied to some of the best lyric writing I am aware of. The opening track “September”  is just under one minute and twenty seconds long. In that space of time we enter into Sylvian’s personal landscape in the smoothest fashion imaginable. Strings, piano and soft-low vocal – “sipping Cokes and playing games” in the late summer sun. Profound, complete and beautiful. "Orpheus" has the longest silence in it that I know in a song that grazed the charts. Every track is a gem - a jewel to be savoured slowly.

Grace [Jeff Buckley]
I first saw him perform this on “The Late Show” on BBC2 just after the album “Grace” was released, and he tore the screen apart singing this impossibly difficult song live. I went straight out and bought the album, not something I do often [well, actually ever]. A few months later I was invited by Elvis Costello to sing some lute songs at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the Meltdown Festival in 1995 and saw that Jeff was singing in the same gig. I got a chance to meet him in the rehearsal, and we had a singing competition in the QEH toilets to see who could sing the highest in full-voice. He won easily. His performance for the concert was unbelievable, and we went out on the town afterward in London. It was a memorable night and I got to know him just a little bit. The man and the singer were linked together, and this performance displays the part of him that I saw. I can’t really tell you what it is like, you just have to hear it. He dedicated this to me from the stage in the QEH when I requested it, and proceeded to improvise with solo guitar. Just amazing… I dedicated “Where All Roses Go” to him after his death – rest in peace.

Light Flight [The Pentangle]
I suspect that Pentangle don’t consider this to be their best track, and maybe it isn’t, but it hit me between the ears when I heard it first. The alternating rhythms relentlessly drive this song forward. The virtuoso band glitter and shine with Jacqui McShee’s almost disconnected vocal dancing over the resulting brilliance. Probably their best-known track, this one offers a window into one of the most important and influential groups for traditional and folk musicians everywhere.

Scherhererzade  [Renaissance]
This group were never very fashionable. The lead singer, Annie Haslam,  was the single greatest influence on the vocal sound of the women in Anúna when I started it. If you look her up or "Goggle" her on the interpork, you’ll hear all about her vast range and the style of Renaissance [were they ever actually in fashion?]. What you won’t hear said is that she was born with a gift, and her voice is it. At her best she had a unique timbre to her voice that is closer to the singing of a classical singer than a rock singer and that is touches me when I hear her sing. The sound is out-of-time, so could never have been truly fashionable. I will admit that Renaissance are a very acquired taste, but this voice has haunted me for many years.

Madrigals Book V [Carlo Gesualdo]
Just look this composer up on the web and then ignore everything you read and listen to this track. You can’t? Well that is probably because the man and his music are inseparable. I heard him first in college after being fascinated by a lecture given by my professor in UCD. He played Gesualdo’s work and everyone sniggered, in the same way that people sniggered at a performance given some years ago by the Beijing Opera here in Dublin. It really is that odd to the classical ear. It is pretty obvious that this music was a creative dead-end, but that doesn’t negate its beauty. Twisted chordal motion echoing the tortured text. Phrases that shift dramatically from one thing to another without reason. Sparse, atonal solo lines. It isn’t surprising that Stravinsky set this for orchestra [rather pointlessly I think]. Listen to The Consort of Musick doing this and get a copy of the music.

Archandroid [Janelle Monáe]
Well, this young lady is smokin'... I don't mean that she smokes, I mean that she is fashionable and not on fire, as the phrase suggests. Anyway this album is the most interesting thing I've heard in ages. Not a perfect album by any means, it has some lovely vocal work, and some songs that are just, well, brilliant. Some aren't so brilliant, being over-produced and repetitive to a lesser rather than a greater extent. Too many fingers in the pie I suspect, but she really is an original. I suspect that she will be shatteringly huge. Saw her interviewed recently and there is more than a touch of David Bowie there I think - studied responses to questions, but I suspect that she is being very careful with the message she puts out. One of the most positive role-models for young women in music I have come across. My kids love "Wondaland" obsessively, and this...

Heroes [David Bowie]
This album rattled the socks off me in 1977 when I bought a cassette of it. The title track is superb, but there are so many things on it to explore - I love "Joe the Lion" and "Beauty and the Beast". Its great to say that I still listen to this album today and get something from it. Like Monáe, Bowie's gift doesn't lie in his own musical ability, rather in the ability to collaborate with the best of the best, guiding the finished product to completion.

Vespertine [Bjork]
This album is bloody marvellous. Icy, rich, imaginative, wondrous, sensual, feminine and bonkers. Just great. Favourite track is "Pagan Poetry". This is "Aurora", and just listen to the words. She is one of the few non-native English speaking artists that uses the language deliberately in a non-idiomatic way just to prove, I think, how messy it is. Nuff said...

Metamatic [John Foxx]
An enigmatic character. While the sound of this record is now dated, the influence at the time was huge. Foxx is a poet, like Sylvian, but deals with the relationship of the modern existence to the world around it. The landscapes are romantic but isolated. Vast, clinical expanses are traversed by figures hiding their humanity. The best-known track is the fabled "Underpass", which, to the Irish ear, gained a degree of notoriety because it sounds like Foxx is shouting "Underpants". However the song "Plaza" and "Blurred Girl" are aural science fiction. This piece below "He's a Liquid" is a pretty accurate description of the differences between men and women. Actually, I wonder if there is anything in common between us.

Claude Debussy [Virtually Everything]
This man influenced my music more that I can say. A deep, shimmering pool of sound. Vastly influential, he sparked my love for France. I remember travelling there in my early teens and all I could hear was snatches of music superimposed over the beautiful landscape. If I had anything that I would say you must hear, then I would suggest starting with the "Nocturnes" and "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" through the piano music and earlier songs, to "La Mer" and the orchestral "Images" and finally resting with the the Cello Sonata and the wonders of "Jeux".

This is only a rough selection of music I listen to, and I hope you take away some suggestions from this posting.

 

 

I recently stumbled on a performance of the original Riverdance on YouTube. This video comes from the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. It’s interesting to read retrospective assessments of this six-minute segment, and it turns out that it is sixteen years old in 2010.

Anúna and my part in Riverdance consisted of creating an atmospheric introduction to the two-minute segment that makes up the beginning of the entire work using the music of Bill Whelan. He was very familiar at that time with both my own compositions and the specifically unique sound we make. I remember having a conversation with him in January of 1994 where he described his vision of the opening segment of the piece as a helicopter shot, with the choir on a raft in the middle of the Liffey – mad but brilliant. In the end we were filmed at 3am on Howth Head overlooking the city of Dublin [rather a nightmarish experience], and it still managed to look like a studio shot.

I had been exposed to the supersonic tones of English singers like Emma Kirkby, who came from a cathedral tradition, and the vocal sound I favoured in Anúna very pure and unadorned with unnecessary affectation. This is the “Anuna” sound – with the added element of humanity that I particularly strive for. We were powerful and fragile, immediate and human. When I developed our sound, it was almost as a protest against the artificial nature of choral groups I had been part of, where singers appeared to sing for themselves, rarely as a genuine unit and rarely for the audience. The short vocal section, also known as “Cloudsong” still resonates with many people today, particularly those interested in choral and vocal music. Many people have informed me over the years that Anúna’s contribution to Riverdance was the highlight of the Show [which debuted in 1995]. This continues to surprise me, but I do know that the impact of our voices played a part in the world-wide success that followed.

Ireland took off after this performance. Summer 1994 was the crest of a great wave, and we were 18 weeks at number one in the Irish charts and in the upper reaches of the U.K. Top Twenty for much of it. I remember walking through the streets that year listening to “Riverdance” blaring out of every car stereo and shop in the city. Strangely enough Sinéad Ó Connor released a song "Famine" at the same time which exposed a rotten underbelly to society that was largely ignored at the time. She seemed to be saying something different to us, and I think with time her view was much more grounded in reality than the rest of ours.

We were overnight household names, which meant very little to me but the singers had a great time on the back of it. Despite the initial success it was with a light heart that I pulled the group out of the show in September 1996 and I have never looked back since with any regret at all. There were many reasons for leaving the Show, but the main one was that I had not been trained to participate in the music industry, nor had any business background. I had little interest in the financial gains, and huge interest in maintaining Anúna as a vibrant and developing group. More importantly, I am a composer, and I needed to use the instrument I had created to develop my craft. During the year and a half I was part of Riverdance I released three records of my own work, Invocation, Omnis and Deep Dead Blue, and I think that is why I survived the experience intact.

Sixteen years later the name Anúna rings much less of a bell with many Irish people than it did then. The version of Ireland that Riverdance was the figurehead for has come crashing down spectacularly around our ears. Despite the huge boost it gave to Ireland’s cultural brand it sadly had no effect on Irish choral music, and Anúna remain “unique” in every sense of the word. There is no development of an Irish choral voice beyond what we do, and that is disappointing. Ireland Inc. has fallen so far and so quickly that it seems we were obviously not the little pig that built his house of stone.

The Ireland that Riverdance came from was one built on hope, patriotism and a good education system but it was also built on dynasties of mediocre parochial politicians, business nepotism and greed. The vast bulk of our population is made up of hard-working decent people, with strong values. It amazes me how they tolerated the abuses of these type of people. So often as a nation we used to complain about petty corruption and a government system where no one resigned due to incompetence. Here we have a term – “cute-hoorism” – it sums up much of what went on over the past decade and a half. Those with the right connections made untold millions while everyone else fed into the artificial bubble that they were blowing up. Coupled with a “spend, spend, spend” mentality, we were on our way to a disaster.

I have to say I hated that Ireland. It is hard to explain to non-Irish people the current mood of the ordinary citizen of this country. Our society is now littered with people whose lives have been shattered by incompetent politicians and greed.

For all of that, I think that in the long run we will be a better society as a result of this and far less tolerant of our inequitable State, so maybe it is appropriate to look back on Riverdance and try to remember what it was that made us so proud of our country and our spirit that night in 1994.

This blog is great. I can rant and rave as much as I like, so this brief posting is a rave as opposed to a rant. I’m often asked by people what the formative influences of Anúna have been over the years, and there have been many. One of the greatest influences in the early stages was the work being done by Clannad. The first Clannad track I remember was called “Lisa” back in 1976 at Irish college, and Incidentally, my favourite Clannad album is “Magical Ring”, which helped me define my own attitude to my own country at a crucial time.

In August of 2009 I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Máire Brennan, lead singer of the group for a forthcoming documentary on Irish music. She asked me a number of questions that were considerably more insightful than many of those I get asked by others, one of which got me thinking. When I told her how influential the sound of Clannad was in the early days of my career she probed this statement, eventually ascertaining that one of the crucial attractions to me was the sameness of their blended voices. All of Clannad are related, and my earliest attempts at singing always involved my brothers John and Tom singing together or in parts.

So this may be the genesis point for the homogenous sound of Anúna. I’m looking for a specific rather than a universal tone to the choral group. This blog isn’t about choral techniques, but it is about the search for a unified sound. Maybe there is a point in all of our voices where we are the same on more-than an aural level? Dare I say that there are things about singing in a choir that choral singers subliminally know are there, and that some groups manage to touch that unconsciously? Anúna create a sound that is timeless and changes only slightly despite the nearly two hundred members that have passed through our ranks since 1987. Maybe that is why groups that are made up of siblings generate the sound they do. The singers know each other as individuals at a most basic level, and that influences the way that they listen to each other. Anúna is different from many choirs I know, as we get to know each other on a fundamental and basic level. This definitely has an effect on the sound we make.

My brother John sent me a link to a group on Wikipedia with the words “You ever heard of these guys? Stumbled on them and they’re amazing!” And it was there I found The Free Design. Here was something very different to Anúna and Clannad, but that used the same unconscious understanding of vocal timbre, with that “something extra” element.

I could write a thesis on what I think of this amazing group of siblings, long disbanded. Online you will find analysis that talks about their “bubblegum pop” sound and the failure of the group to break it big, for whatever that is worth. What I hear are very intelligent choral arrangements based in a classical idiom rather than a pop one and searingly honest lyrics that require a few readings to understand the depths behind them [I nearly typed "spiritual depths" but that categorises this group incorrectly]. The music has an appeal to a three year old and an adult, avoiding whimsy and tweeness.

Start with “Kites are Fun” and the extraordinary “Bubbles”

and move through “Daniel Dolphin” to what can only be described as the least commercial series of cover versions of well-known material I have ever heard – listen to “Light My Fire” – isn’t this just, well, mind-expanding? That is a top B in the soprano part…

At the moment my children love “2002 – a Hit Song” for the alternating 4/4, 12/8 4/8 time signature.

Thanks to this digital age material like this can never be lost, but simply rediscovered and absorbed by a new generation of ears. Maybe the sound we all make will touch the young ears somewhere in that "special" way. Maybe somewhere out there there is another potential Clannad or Free Design that will again ask us to "Give a little time to the child within you, don't be afraid to young and free. Undo the lock and throw away the key and take off your shoes and socks and run you"...

I enclose here the programme notes written by John McGlynn for the National Concert Hall gig on the 17th of July.

“Michael has always been an obsessive. As teenagers he would make me sit and listen to something that he’d dragged in from Freebird Records. Over and over he’d play it, stopping to enthuse over some bizarre change in mood or dynamic. John Foxx, Gary Numan, Renaissance, Clannad and Pentangle. There was weirder stuff but I think he realised how much I could take even then. If you have the right background and are of a “certain age” you’ll hear echoes of Sidney Sager’s incidental music for the utterly terrifying Children of the Stones and György Ligeti’s clouds of vocals from 2001: A Space Odyssey in Michael’s own compositions. It was from this melting pot that the inspiration for Anúna grew.

We began as singers long before that with our unforgettable rendition of the Rolf Harris song Jake the Peg in front of our entire school. Nearly forty years later we still get reminded by former classmates of the tiny twins sellotaped together on the gymnasium stage. We then went our separate ways musically, apart from his insistence on regularly confounding me with whatever strange new band or piece of music he felt the need to share.

Bizarrely some of my music rubbed off on him, enough of it for him to ask me to sing the solo on Mysterious Ways for the launch of U2’s album Achtung Baby in 1991 on a freezing November morning on Grafton Street. He hadn’t a clue what he was at no more than I did. However that was the morning that An Uaithne became Anúna. Suddenly we had farmers, doctors and traditional singers auditioning for a choral group. There was definitely something going on.

Before the release of the album Anúna in 1993 it was commonplace to see Elvis Costello or Larry Mullan peering back at us from a small audience. We slowly became a cult in Ireland and ever more impossible to categorise. Largely ignored by the mainstream, we were lucky to have a truly sophisticated and musically unpretentious audience for those early years. As time has passed the music has grown and developed, but it still retains that edginess and cultish ambience that allows Anúna to be re-discovered by new generations over and over again. A footnote to this would be one terrific memory I have of doing a corporate performance in 2006. I decided that we would really push the audience and do Michael’s less-accessible but beautiful arrangement of Ardaigh Cuan. At after-dinner events it is always a risk when your audience is full of expensive food and wine to do something that will stretch them. Just as the piece tapered to a thunderous close a single figure jumped up in the middle of the room wearing shades. “Rockin’! shouted Bono “Rockin’ man!”.

It says a lot that Michael considers each album to be the defining one. Our new release Sanctus includes Antonio Lotti’s (1667-1740) Crucifixus and Gregorio Allegri’s (1582-1652) fabulous Miserere Mei Deus. His decision to include two of the world’s greatest choral works on an Anúna album has brought Michael’s own compositions to a new level of maturity, and the album includes five of those. The simultaneous release of the stunning DVD Invocations of Ireland, a visual hymn to our native land, has wrapped up the last ten years of the group into a single defining audio-visual record. Filmed, directed and edited by Michael himself, the door is now open to a future based on hugely solid foundations.

From year to year we find and develop new singers. The average age of the group has dropped five years in the last ten. It has become extremely important for us to have answers to their many questions. How do you start explaining to a nineteen year-old about the history and development of something for which there is no frame of reference anywhere in the world?

That journey has been remarkable and I have many memories; arguing with the technical staff of the Albert Hall about putting Anúna into the middle of a five thousand-strong audience for the BBC Proms during a solar eclipse; listening to the eerie footsteps of the singers on the walkways in Kilmainham Gaol as the heterophony of Jerusalem filled this historic and tragic place; Basque waiters and kitchen staff crying as they give us an ovation in the corridor after a concert in the Armada Museum in Barcelona; birds singing over our heads in a great ancient tree in a palace in Fes, Morocco; a huge shout of “GOOOOOOOOAAAAL!!!” in the middle of an outdoor concert in Castello d’Empuries in Spain; corpsing as the MC falls off the stage in Helsingborg and no one being able to intone the Media Vita; Michael complaining about Sting’s Irish pronunciation during the recording of Mo Gille Mear with the Chieftains and Paddy Moloney trying not to laugh; a “Who Can Sing the Highest Note“ competition (Michael claims to have won) with the late Jeff Buckley in the toilets of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; opening night of Riverdance on St. Patricks Day in Radio City, New York in the snow; good-natured heckling by a lone Scots-American at the Belfast Proms in front of 14,000 people; singing to a packed rush-hour crowd in the Subte (Subway) in Buenos Aires on a state visit with President McAleese. Countless memories with no chronology, linked by Michael’s music and all part of a great story that doesn’t show any sign of drawing to a close.

Late in 1989 Michael nervously handed me a strange little tape covered in his own very careful calligraphy with the words “An Uaithne” on the front and spine. I was an Architectural student drawing into the early hours most nights. As obsessive as my twin I played nothing else for a year. I couldn’t believe it when he asked me to join this group and I still can’t.”

John McGlynn
June 2009

Well, it happened. Anúna sang with Chanticleer at last. It was a thrilling experience – the silky perfection of Chanticleer blending with the uniquely fragile sound of Anúna for an event that onlookers said was “magical”, “a moment of true beauty” and “I’ll have four pints of Guinness and a packet of Pringles”. The last comment was to one of the bar staff in the pub that they sang in together. So it may not have been the perfect concert venue, but it definitely fulfilled Chanticleer and Anúna’s stated aims of bringing music to every aspect of society.

In their Irish tour last year, Chanticleer left many Irish listeners stunned by the quality of their musicianship. Their sound and professionalism definitely left a permanent impression on all the choral people who attended their concerts, particularly my own choir, some of whom followed the US choir to Wexford the day after the Dublin concert. What I found most interesting was the ease that they worked with their audience. there was no sense of being aloof from them despite the heavy nature of some of their very eclectic repertoire. Further discussion with Matt Oltman, Chanticleer's director, and exploration of their website revealed the vast extent of their Education and Community Outreach work.

Education work is probably one of the most rewarding aspects of being a musician. The effect it has on young people at the time may appear to be minimal, but over time it can change their lives. I could see why Chanticleer's ease of audience communication would be enhanced and deepened through work which made them aware of the effect and the privilege of what they did on both themselves and their audience.

This year Chanticleer inaugurated what has to be one of the most exciting things I have been involved in - Chanticleer’s first National Youth Choral Festival™ - you can read about the project here. My involvement with this amazing event was to help the 400-strong group to perform "'Sí do Mhaimeo Í" via a Skype link-up at 5am Irish time on a cold winter's morning. What a buzz! How proud I was of the music of my native land, and honoured to represent my country. One of the guests at the final performance that I supplied a pre-recorded message for was Fredrica von Stade, one of my favourite singers - an indication of the serious. This was choral music for young people given the priority that I feel it should have in an artistic healthy society.

Eric Whitacre is a phenomenon. He has street cred, a sense of confidence in himself, is photogenic, young and has produced some genuinely original and beautiful choral music in a very American tonal musical language. He came to classical music through rock music, using the immediacy and energy inherent in that form in a way that I haven't seen before in my end of the business, and the way he has developed and expanded his database audience has been a lesson to all composers. His YouTube, MySpace, Facebook etc. etc. etc. sites are hugely subscribed mainly because his performers are generally students or ex-students of High Schools who came across is music at choir, latching on to its accessible tonalities and relishing the sense of achievement that comes from the performance of well-written modern choral music.

Eric and Chanticleer are only small aspects of what is happening in the USA in relation to young voices. There is a huge surge of interest in the performance and expansion of choral music among High Schools and Colleges. The TV show Glee has made most young people aware of choral music sometimes for the first time [auto-tuned and all as it is], and a fraction of them only need look further for what is on offer. Its a good time for choral singers in the USA, and I really hope that they can sustain and develop that interest.

There are very good things happening here too chorally, with dedicated people at the helm of school, youth and adult choirs. We have an active, if chronically under-funded, choral association, The Association of Irish Choirs. However, all this good will is fragmentary, suffering from an unforgivable lack of interest and nurturing by The Department of Education in Ireland. However, it is visits by groups such as Chanticleer that make us truly appreciate the gift and privilege [as my brother John always says] that we have been given. Hopefully what is happening elsewhere will motivate the younger generations of Irish singers into doing it themselves.

To finish a rambling post - I’m not sure why this seems to touch places that maybe were not the original intention of the composer. However, this video is very special for lots of reasons, the main one being the age of the singers. Well done Eric Whitacre and well done to all of those who have energised choral music to this level in the USA. I just hope enough people here are watching...

In 1993 I went into a church in Blackrock, only a short distance from my home, and recorded what was to become the album “Anúna”. It took four hours to record and I released it about two weeks after the recording. One of the tracks was called “Sanctus”.

The inspiration for that piece was not musical. I remember visiting Europe for the first time in my mid teens and walking through gigantic cathedrals, listening to the choir practicing somewhere away in the distance. The air positively hummed with energy. Generations of people had given these buildings an overpowering sense of the ancient and intangible. That is what I tried to capture with “Sanctus”. As a recorded piece I have never really been happy with it [although the live recording done in Sweden last month may be the best one yet]. After Anúna’s debut I got side-tracked with the second album “Invocation” and the whole Riverdance thing, I held on to the idea that I would come back to the essence of the piece again one day.

Last year, while preparing for the PBS special “Christmas Memories” I took the bull by the horns and decided to put together an album of spiritual music. This was somewhat of an antidote to the seasonal material, as it is dificult to write and arrange such material in the Spring. I didn’t want to write a full album of spiritual music. I wanted to present three of the songs off the album Sensation album ["Lux Aeterna/The Road of Passage", "Tenebrae" & "O Maria"] together with new material that would show these pieces off in a more appropriate context. I have always wanted to record the Lotti “Crucifixus” and Allegri’s “Miserere” so they went on together with my recent “Agnus Dei” [commissioned by Chanticleer].

Getting Anúna to sing in the appropriate style raised many questions as to what actually was an appropriate style. Was it the mainly “worthy-but-dull” recordings of “Crucifixus” and “Miserere” which litter the choral wastelands that we needed to follow, or should we aim somewhere else for our stylistic interpretation? I chose instead to approach the two choral classics as I would any Anúna piece, so both of them have an inherent and forward-thrusting energy. I think it worked very, very well, and here is a clip from the “Crucifixus” :

I’m very pleased with the result I have to say. Anúna’s pronunciation of Hiberno-Latin will surprise some people I think, as it is so at odds with what is already out there in the choral firmament. That’s just the way we sing, or at least just the way I want Anúna to sing.

Now that the album is going to Master I am delighted to say that I have not achieved my original goal of exploring beyond the “Sanctus”. That door has been pushed slightly ajar, and I will return to those ancient spaces in the not-so-distant future. The new album will be out soon, and now I can take that experience and apply it to the next recorded adventure later this year…

When I look back over my career as a composer and musician I often wonder how I got here. Before the age of nineteen my main claim to musical fame was a very weak record in piano examinations and an ability, and irritating compulsion, to sing a harmony to anything. At eighteen years I made the decision to enter the Bachelor of Arts/Music courses at University College Dublin where I chose English and Music as my main subjects before continuing on to complete a B.Mus degree after gaining a B.A..

In the early 1980s the best any of my fellow students could aspire to was to be a music teacher, and as a result the music course was tailored to instill a strong understanding of classical form and structure. The English course was mind-expanding, while Music provided discipline and form with little interest in developing the student’s appreciation of the music itself. That was left up to us to do on our own.

Every day in English threw up something provocative. I remember the shock of reading “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens, and the profound effect it had on my view of the nature of music. In contrast Music was a succession of facts. While there was some degree of musical appreciation it was limited to the late 18th and 19th centuries in the main. I remember attending weeks of lectures on the symphonic music of Bruckner which still, to this day, bores me to death. I had become obsessed with Debussy, and in four years we never analysed any of his music and I don’t actually remember any of it being played.

The lack of interest in composition resulted in me passing through the entire course without studying orchestration. Did I enjoy the course – no. Did I benefit from it – yes. Understandably things in UCD are very different today to twenty years ago. I wouldn’t change a thing if I could go back. My time there made me the musician I am today. The Music faculty of 1982 didn’t contain a bunch of trendy young electro-acoustic composers, so I was allowed to put on a series of very modest concerts of my own work in blissful ignorance of the fact that we should have been radical is some unspecified way. To be honest, electro-acoustics aren't of much interest to me. I have to work with digital processes all the time and I simply don't see how "exploring" and studying a form like this which is constantly becoming redundant is any substitute for hard graft with a pencil and a book of unfinished chorales .

I had to organise, write and perform my own modest little efforts and they were received without ridicule, but also without debate or discussion. As a result I became completely self-sufficient right at the start of what has become my career.

Ireland has a strange attitude to composers. They float in a limbo all alone, neither lauded nor dismissed. Among our own fraternity there is a clear line between “Art” composers and “Commercial” composers. Composers of “Art” are heavily subsidised through commissions to write music that will advance our understanding of the nature of humanity and our place within the infinite. Possibly. Or mostly not. The “Commercial” composers are those that make money from what they do and they come from classical and non-classical training backgrounds. Some have been enormously original and successful, but they are not often given the accolade for their success. The “Art” composers exist within a ambience that is modeled on Europe, where composition has developed and grown organically from relatively healthy historical roots of classical music. Ireland doesn’t have those, so really what we have is a facsimile of another culture’s musical history juxtaposed onto our own. That can’t be very healthy…

The problems with feeding a system like ours [a small country with lots of people clamouring after the same meager pickings] is that genuinely talented people are sometimes pushed aside by those who are

(a) loudest and most aggressive in their pursuit of commissions and grants

(b) fashionable because someone in Germany said that their sonata for potato and tuba with speaker and electro acoustic elements was "compelling"

(c) have been give their basic training outside of the Republic where composition is seen as a proper career and not some nebulous concept.

Tonal and melodic music is deeply fashionable today, but oddly not in Ireland. There is no place for an Irish Arvo Part, Eric Whitacre, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams –  not even a quasi-John Tavener. Any composer whose musical voice falls into neither camp has nowhere to go except away from Ireland. Thank goodness for the internet…