A note of change

In the National Concert Hall's Composers' Choice series, major composerschoose a programme of music that has influenced them. Seóirse Bodley, aleading figure in Irish music for a generation, talks about his choices andhis latest piece for piano, premièred tonight, writes Michael Dervan

If Seán Ó Riada had lived an average lifespan, he would be in his early 70s now. It's probably idle to speculate what Ó Riada might or might not have done on the classical side of his output during the three decades since he died in 1971. It's interesting, however, to see what paths the other major Irish composers born in the 1930s explored in the years since Ó Riada's passing.

Thirty years ago or so, both John Kinsella (born 1932) and Seóirse Bodley (born 1933) wrote pieces which were aligned with the output of the European avant-garde. The whole notion of the avant-garde as it prevailed in musical circles in the 1950s and 1960s has since disintegrated, and both Bodley and Kinsella have come to write music in a manner that, I suspect, neither of them would have predicted at a time when Ó Riada was alive. It was Bodley who took the most unexpected turn, taking his European modernism into a head-on encounter with the sound-world of traditional Irish music.

The composers born in the early 1930s reached their teenage years at a time when orchestral music in Ireland was in a state of rapid development. Courtesy of Radio Éireann, symphonic music was becoming a regular feature of Dublin's musical life, and Bodley was in his mid-teens when the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra was formally established.

As a youngster, he had always had an interest in painting and theatre as well as music. He remembers clearly how he came to have his first piano lessons. He had been sent to what he calls "a very nice, as in naice, painting class, where there were a lot of young ladies, and all you could hear was deep breathing, and the scratch, scratch, scratch of the pencils on the paper. So I asked . . . could I do music".

By his early teens, he'd started to try his hand at composing (the pieces still exist, but he has no plans to show them to anybody), and, as he puts it, "one thing led to another". His parents, he says, weren't really deeply musical. "My father had played mandolin in a mandolin band, and I'm actually a failed mandolin player. My tremolo is gone, so I haven't touched it for years. My mother played the piano. It was a fairly normal kind of background."

The symphony orchestra's activities in the Phoenix Hall brought him two free concerts a week and a range of repertoire that makes today's programmes look tame by comparison. He recalls hearing the Schoenberg pupil Winfried Zillig conduct Schoenberg and Berg - Zillig had been involved in one of the first performances of Berg's Wozzeck to be given outside a major opera house. Conductors arrived from all parts of Europe, often bringing samples of their local compositional styles with them. Not all of it, of course, provided memorable listening. But as a stimulus to a young mind, the diet of new music was extremely valuable.

It's easy to see where a teenage composer in the Ireland of the 1940s might have found guidance in the skills of academic harmony, less easy to see who might have steered him in the altogether more demanding paths of writing modern music. "I came across a person that you mightn't think very likely but who turned out to be very good, and that was Hans Waldemar Rosen, who later became conductor of the RTÉ Singers. He was very well versed in musicology as well, and he'd really been around - he'd corresponded a lot with Richard Strauss and various other people, and knew quite a bit about it. He was a good person to start me off."

Rosen was then in Ireland as a private singing teacher -the RTÉ Singers had not yet been formed - and when Bodley came to study abroad in the 1950s, it was to Rosen's native Germany that he gravitated.

The earliest of Bodley's compositions that you're now likely to hear is his Music for Strings of 1952, a piece clearly influenced by Bartók, but supremely confident for a teenager in the musical Ireland of the time. Another influence was Hindemith, more the theories than the music, he says. And when he moved to Stuttgart on a travelling studentship in 1957, he studied with Johann Nepomuk David, a conservative German figure from whom he learned "how to construct larger works, how to get that sweep and span".

But change was around the corner. Bodley won a Macauley Fellowship, valued at £1,000 ("incredible riches in the early 1960s"), and this enabled him "to go here, there and everywhere", including the famous course at Darmstadt, hotbed of cutting-edge music at that time, where he absorbed the music and ideas of men such as Berio, Stockhausen, Boulez and Maderna, someone who impressed him both as an utterly unconventional lecturer and as an outstanding conductor. Other expeditions included a visit to London for performances by the Hamburg Staatsoper of Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu (he went to every single performance) as well as Henze's Der Prinz von Homburg.

THE outcome was dramatic. Bodley became the first Irish composer with an unalloyed allegiance to serial techniques, though, sadly, those works from the 1960s rarely feature in concert programmes any more. The move into serialism wasn't to prove his only comprehensive stylistic changeover. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a work for two pianos from 1972, a decade after his first visit to Darmstadt, gave an inkling of a shift in manner, in which he chose to juxtapose the techniques of traditional Irish music with those of European modernism.

The dissonant and angular style of the 1960s was something the composer felt he had had "to come to grips with". But, he says, he has rarely found himself to be dealing with just one thing at a time -there's always something different lurking at the back of his mind. So, even as found himself handling the Darmstadt experience in his music, he was also thinking about grappling with the legacy of traditional Irish music.

He speaks of the irregularity of his style of the 1960s somehow becoming, as it were, regularly irregular. "And then I thought about putting something in the middle of this that would totally conflict with it." Which is exactly what the Irish music did. Perhaps the most striking encounter the two were to have in his output was in the orchestral work A small white cloud drifts over Ireland of 1976, a piece where the raw juxtapositions can still startle by their immediacy. The Irish material, by the way, is freshly composed, Irish in spirit and gesture (with often a strong concern for ornamentation) rather than engaging in the actual quotation of existing tunes.

Writing with such an Irish flavour, he says, is fraught with problems for performers. He offers a German phrase in explanation: Geschriebene Musik ist wie ein erzähltes Mittagessen - this could be loosely translated "Written-out music is like a lunch you've only heard spoken about".

He wrote his First Symphony in 1959 in pre-serial style, and waited until 1980 to produce his second, subtitled I have loved the lands of Ireland; four more followed by 1991, and a Sinfonietta (for the National Youth Orchestra) was added in 1999, the style now fully reconciled with the tonal elements which suffused his earliest work.

Naturally enough, given his predilections, it's not the only kind of music he has producing.

"In the last couple of years, I've started to write these piano works, which are rather different from the orchestral works. It's weird - I can't help it if I'm a bit weird. I wanted to tackle a different sort of musical problem in these works. There are three of them, Chiaroscuro, based on Caravaggio's pictures, News from Donabate, the longest work I've ever written, 50 minutes plus, and now this new piece, An Exchange of Letters, which is being premièred at the Composers' Choice concert tonight."

They're all, he says, without a trace of Irish music, and are based on note series (of up to 15 notes, in the case of the latest piece), which he's using to distance himself from the material, and to avoid at all costs getting into a sentimental vein. The pieces, he says, are "pretty well atonal in the main", though tonal moments are not excluded.

Bodley's recent piano music has not been much heard in concert yet, and he'll be lucky indeed to find many players willing to add a 50-minute work to their repertoires. But, clearly, he has never been afraid to follow his instincts, no matter how surprising the outcome. Who knows exactly what surprises An Exchange of Letters may bring from the man who, for half a century now, has been the most chameleon-like of Irish composers?

Seóirse Bodley's An Exchange of Letters will be heard NCH John Field Room in the context of works by two men the composer admires greatly, Ligeti (his remarkable series of Études for piano), and Xenakis (Nomos Alpha, a typically uncompromising solo cello piece from 1965). There's also a pre-concert talk at 6 p.m.

Composers' Choice continues at the NCH tomorrow with Frank Corcoran, on Wednesday with Jennifer Walshe and Thursday, Fergus Johnston, all at 8 p.m.