The Director's Chair

Niall Doyle's move to his current position as director of music at RTE is the climax of one of the most spectacular climbs in Irish musical life. It's not only unusual that the significantly re-defined top musical job in the national broadcasting service has gone to someone who's never held an administrative or managerial post of any kind in RTE. But it's gone to someone who's proud boast - about which he still likes to joke - was once that he was Ireland's leading freelance tuba player. It's not as if a cleaning lady had been appointed director general, but, given the rough deals meted out to musicians over the years (and freelancers have always had it that bit rougher), it's psychologically not that far off, either. Doyle's recent track record is highly impressive. For the last six years, he's has been chief executive of the Music Network. During that time, he has seen the organisation's budget increase almost sixfold, to over half a million pounds (which includes a major, recently-renewed sponsorship from the ESB), and the staffing level rise from one to ten. The Music Network's annual concert touring programmes have expanded so that now, in season, they average one concert every two days.

He answers questions about his new responsibilities with patience and exhaustive thoroughness, always being careful to emphasise his relative ignorance about the fine detail of what he will find in RTE and conscientious about giving credit for achievements already made or developments underway. He threads his way around difficult topics with the political astuteness of an experienced government minister who believes that balanced argument is better in the long run than an easy stab at a vulnerable opponent or a glib soundbite which may all too quickly turn and bite back.

He sees his task at RTE, he says, as falling into two major strands.

"It's to create the conditions to enable music-making of the highest standard possible, and to get that music-making to as many people as possible - to make it significant for as many people as possible within Ireland."

A question trying to draw him towards specifics, encounters some evasive tactics, before he settles on a fuller reply. "I do think it's fair to say that there's been a high degree of unhappiness experienced over a long period of time by musicians in the department in general, and, I suppose, in the NSO in particular. They have had public wrangles with their employer in a way that hasn't necessarily created a very good environment for employer-employee relationships. I think those need to be improved. That, for me, falls into the first strand, very clearly. You can't make great music if people are miserable and unhappy and fighting, within themselves and within the department." In short, he wants "to unite both the management and the musicians behind a single vision".

The variability of the RTE orchestras is something that has come in for a lot of comment, and is also an issue that Doyle wants to resolve. The NSO, as the more regular concert giver, comes in for greater public attention, and it's Doyle's view that in terms of standards, "it should place itself as high as is humanly possible. We want a world-class orchestra playing to a world-class standard with world-class soloists and conductors, and providing that world-class experience to people in Ireland." And an important part of achieving this will be "that we consistently have a pool of artistic direction to draw from which is of very high quality," so that "there's a system of developing talent". Consistency and continuity are issues which he sees as being "very much about designing systems and designing policies".

Then there's the other side of the equation. "The product is meaningless if it isn't important to people. It has to reach them and it has to be important to them. It takes money, it takes lots of money, it takes more money than it currently has. Ultimately, that can only be justified if it's making a bigger difference to more people. There are political realities about funding as well as everything else, and those political realities are based on the perceptions of society, if you like, as to how important it is. It needs to become more important than it currently is, to more people, for more money to flow."

Access may be an arts administration buzzword, but Doyle speaks about it with real passion. "I have a strong sense of mission about things like that. I fundamentally, from the very core of my being, believe in the right of everybody, no matter where they live, to have as good a musical life as possible - as good a one as I've had, through a whole series of chance accidents." With the orchestras as what he calls the "pinnacle" of musical life in Ireland, they need "to impact very directly on all of the people of Ireland, everywhere". And a significant way forward, he says, will be through local partnerships, rather than the old style of we-know-what's-best-for-you supply from the centre.

Such a vision will require resources from fresh sources, sponsorship and new external relationships. At the same time, he feels that RTE has not really managed to bring home to people just how generously it has supported musical life in Ireland over the years; that, for instance, it puts far more money into music than the Arts Council ever has. "RTE shouldn't hide its light under a bushel in this regard."

One of the leitmotifs in Doyle's conversation is his openness to new ideas and his awareness of the imminence of change, since, as he puts it: "I am being given the job as a fresh face". From his perspective, he says, "all views must be taken into account" and it will be very important to have a widespread consultation process where everybody's opinions count. "The end user has to be up there as a top priority." He consulted widely when he took up his job at Music Network, talking to hundreds of individuals and organisations, and expects to go through a similar process at RTE. Doyle says he is particularly aware of the difficulties that face RTE's "other" orchestra, the RTE Concert Orchestra, in his view a national orchestra every bit as much as the NSO. "The Concert Orchestra tends to live in the Symphony Orchestra's shadow a good deal. That's unfortunate and very unfair.

"If I consider myself as a musician connected to any orchestra, I was a Concert Orchestra man. I would very much want that they get their proper place in the sun." He sees the issue of securing them a satisfactory venue to work in as a major priority. "I suffered with them. I worked in those very unsatisfactory conditions." Conditions at the NCH, with its restricted backstage space, are also in need of improvement, an issue that arises when I ask about the proposed development of an Irish Academy for the Performing Arts on the site and its impact on RTE. While personally in favour of such an academy of the performing arts (and the NCH board, on which he sits, is in favour of its location in Earlsfort Terrace), Doyle expresses a personal concern that "it may well be that we're trying to fit too many pints into the quart pot".

A development which raises more enthusiasm, is the proposed new, 24-hour music and arts radio service at RTE. "This is a great thing, frankly, a really important extension of the public service mandate, and a major contribution that RTE is making to the general health of music in Ireland." And there's another explosion of enthusiasm in relation to the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet. "I'm a big, big fan. I think what they have done for music in Ireland has been peerless. I've nothing but admiration for the way they're committed to music in Ireland. They've really gone at it with a heart and a half."

Doyle's new job was advertised as a first move on the road to creating a wholly RTEowned subsidiary company for all of the station's music groups. This proposed development was part of RTE's response to the recommendation by the ministerial review body, PIANO, that the NSO should be set up as a statutory body independent of RTE. However remote a possibility this was under the minister who set up PIANO (and the big question always was, who would then pay for the orchestra, the Government?), under the current Arts Minister, who had nothing to do with PIANO, a totally independent NSO seems a dead issue.

The idea of the subsidiary, says Doyle, is "still alive", it's just "a question of what stage of life". He will, he says, look into all options, but his own view is that he can make a persuasive case that the NSO will be better off in RTE than outside it. "Otherwise I wouldn't have taken the job." Structures, he says, are for him just a means to an end. "You begin with the end and work out the structures to support it."

It would perhaps be simplistic to see Doyle's move as being from an organisation that's small and dynamic, to one that's large and suffers from inertia, but there's no doubting the extent of the challenge that faces him in working within existing structures in RTE. "I suppose to some extent I was afflicted by the view of RTE as the graveyard of all hopes. I wouldn't have been optimistic that RTE would have been prepared to countenance the sort of corporate change that I believe is necessary. One of the really encouraging things for me is that it was made very clear from the director general and the re-positioning of this job - which now reports directly to the DG - that there is now a very supportive environment for major change. "And equally, it's clear to me, it's my understanding - and I'm taking up the job on this understanding - that I am to be the architect of that change. I'm not being employed to implement the plans of other people. I've never been interested in working as an administrator. This is not an administrative job. It's a designing job. There's a vision I want to realise. I'm to be to a large extent the shaper of that vision. It has to be a vision for all of RTE as well. There is nothing excluded from that vision. There are practical constraints on what can actually be achieved. Time constraints. Money constraints. There are urgent priorities which may mean that certain things one would love to do may need to be long-fingered. I still take the view that you take a vision that excludes nothing and you work as far as possible towards that."