For young musicians, carving out a career can be an artform in itself. Arminta Wallacemeets some of the bright young things who are getting a helping hand on the way up
On an unusually sunny summer evening, an expectant audience assembles in the Coach House at Dublin Castle. Three young women clad in striking blue dresses take the stage: a flautist, a viola player and a harpist. It's an unexpected and appealing combination of instruments, and the short programme they present is vivid and intriguing: an elegant sonata by Telemann; Arnold Bax's impassioned Elegiac Trio, which commemorates the events of Easter 1916; and an austere, muscular sonata by Debussy, written when the composer was trapped between the external disaster of the first World War and the internal ravages of cancer.
What's even more intriguing is the sense of watching three young Irish musicians take their first steps into the demanding and difficult world of a professional career in music. Together, Ríona O'Duinnín, Geraldine O'Doherty and Nancy Johnson comprise Triocca, and this showcase concert sees them embark on Music Network's three-year Young Musicwide programme. They are the seventh ensemble to receive the award. Its official description is "a professional development scheme designed to assist a selected group of Ireland's brightest young musicians at the beginning of their professional career" - what it amounts to is a generous push up what is, for most people, a long, steep and occasionally treacherous ladder.
Young Musicwide began in 2001, and previous recipients have included the voice and piano duo Ailish Tynan and Deborah Kelleher, the clarinettist Carol McGonnell, the traditional group Slide and the piano, cello and violin group The Syrius Trio. The first group to benefit from the three-year programme - which includes performance opportunities, a promotional CD and a publicity package - was the Callino Quartet. "At the moment," says the quartet's first violinist Sarah Sexton, "it's a case of come home, wash your clothes, pack a different suitcase, and then leave again. It's pretty hectic." Currently based in London, the quartet has toured in Norway and Holland, appeared at festivals in Lithuania, Italy and the Czech Republic, and performed as far afield as Canada. This weekend they'll be playing in Oxford, giving the world premiere of a new quartet written for them by the composer Hywel Davies. Looking back, can Sexton say what role the Young Musicwide programme played in all this? "We're hugely indebted to Music Network for getting our name known in Ireland," she says. "We were quite naive at that stage - we knew we wanted to stay together as a group, but we didn't really know how to go about it.
"Making a career in music is a matter of balance between developing yourself as an artist and having other people recognise that development. You need to be strong within yourself to survive in the music business, so having something like this helps. The most valuable thing is to gain concert experience, because you can practise in your bedroom till the cows come home but that's only one very, very small part of developing yourself as a musician. On stage - especially in a group, where the sound of the group and the relationships between its members are all-important - there's a very different vibe from just rehearsing in a room. Things happen on stage that you can't predict. You're a bit nervous; you're trying to get everything you can out of the music. So the opportunity to travel around and do lots of different concerts performing the same repertoire is fantastic for young performers."
This applies not just to classical musicians, but right across the board, and the Young Musicwide programme alternates between classical, jazz and traditional performing groups. The jazz trio Organics has just returned from playing at the Glasgow Jazz Festival. "We just performed at a new jazz venue there," says Organics drummer Kevin Brady. "It's a trade-off between ourselves and some musicians in Scotland - they're trying to book more work for us over there, and we're going to try and organise a tour over here for them. It's a really great way of meeting new musicians and playing different music." The opportunity arose as a direct result of the promotional CD, New Light, which Organics recorded during the Young Musicwide programme, he says. "It was really well received by magazines all over the world and it has opened doors for us, although it has taken until now for that to filter into gigs."
Brady's involvement with the programme has also encouraged him to pursue a growing interest in new forms of music promotion.
"I'm a really big fan of a piano player called Bill Carrothers who was brought over here by Note Productions about a year ago. He heard our CD and he agreed to come back to play with myself, John [ Moriarty] from Organics and a bass player called Dave Redmond. I set up a music collective, The Livingroom Project, to help promote the tour and it blossomed into a web-hosting setup with video artists, photographers and loads of different bands." Such virtual communities of musicians might, he suggests, be a fruitful way for the young performers of the future to establish themselves on the scene.
"Instead of contacting a venue as an individual musician, you have this behind you, so it creates more traffic, more awareness," he says. "When musicians get together they stand a better chance of getting their music heard." Eventually he'd like the website, www.livingroomproject.com, to be a place where people can download music from a variety of Irish jazz musicians.
Like the Callinos, Organics played all over Ireland in a tour organised by Music Network - "some of [ the gigs]," Brady recalls, "were in places where people didn't really know what we were all about, though they were intrigued as to what this monster, the Hammond organ, might be" - and are moving full steam ahead, with a gig at JJ Smyth's coming up over the summer and a possible trip to Austria later in the year.
Can Brady speculate about what their situation might be like if they hadn't got on the programme? "I'd say we'd definitely still be playing together, but we wouldn't have got the profile we do have." During its three years on Young Musicwide, the band stopped doing its regular residency in a Dublin pub because musically it wasn't productive. Financially, the band couldn't have afforded to pull out of regular work without the support of the programme. "I don't think," says Brady, "we would have got as professional an attitude about everything if we hadn't got that award."
For Triocca, the omens are pretty good. Speaking to them immediately after their showcase concert, they're positively brimming with enthusiasm and energy. Even the name is fresh and unpretentious. They came up with it, it transpires, when they were imbibing a glass or two in a wine bar. Triocca. Rioja. Get it? "Oh, God," says flautist Ríona O'Duinnín. "We don't want to tell people that. Do we?"
Given the experience of the groups which have preceded them on Young Musicwide, they know roughly what to expect from the next three years - but they'll be busy putting their own stamp on things. "It gives us time to learn the repertoire properly without having to do all the admin things, like finding a venue, finding a sponsor, printing programmes and thinking about publicity," says harpist Geraldine O'Doherty. "All that's taken care of - so we can just do interesting stuff, such as rehearsing and rooting around for new music. Because we're a harp and viola trio, that's quite a challenge. We've already had two new pieces written for us, and Music Network are going to commission a third. So that will help. And later, we're planning to incorporate one or two other players, as guests, because there's lot of music for this combination in quartets and quintet form."
Does Sarah Sexton of the Callino Quartet have any advice for her colleagues as they set out on what is still a difficult path? First, she asks who plays in the trio. "I know them all," she says. "They're a lot more experienced than we were. We were quite green. Whereas we needed the experience, they're great already.
"The thing is, there's loads and loads of talented young musicians. But getting from being a talented young musician to actually having a career - there's a huge element of luck and a huge element of being in the right place at the right time with the right people advising you. That's what helps one group make it rather than another, and I think that's exactly what happened to us."
Triocca play at the Church of the Ascension, Timoleague, Co Cork, on Sun at 8pm. The Callino Quartet will be playing four concerts, all in Co Cork, at the end of September. Organics, with guest saxophonist Graeme Blevins from Australia, play JJ Smyth's, Dublin on Aug 25
