Music to her ears

Fishamble street: as an address, it must be music to the ears of anybody who has anything to do with music in Ireland. Sure enough, right outside the door of the Contemporary Music Centre, there it is: the lump of carefully restored wall that is all that is left of the "musick-hall" where an excited audience greeted the first performance of a brand-new oratorio in April 1742.

A new home for new music on the site of the birth of Handel's Messiah? Eve O'Kelly sits in her immaculate office on the top floor of the centre and gazes down at the street. "Either it was a total coincidence and a complete accident, or it was somehow meant," she says. "Personally, I suspect the latter."

O'Kelly has been director of the Contemporary Music Centre for 10 years. She has not only presided over the centre's recent move from two tiny offices on Baggot Street to its present, beautifully appointed, architecturally listed home, but also - although she denies it, preferring to lavish praise on "fantastic teamwork" and on the Arts Council, which has footed many of the bills - been responsible for moulding, squeezing, pushing and cajoling the organisation into its present vibrant form.

Perhaps that was meant, too, for it might never have happened. Having worked in England for a decade as a teacher and musician, organising workshops with a special interest in contemporary recorder music, O'Kelly applied for the director's position - but thought long and hard about taking the job.

"In those days Baggot Street was a total mess: if you dropped your pen on the floor you never saw it again, because it went down through a crack in the bare floorboards.

"After three or four months one member of the Arts Council, who shall be nameless, came in to 'inspect' us and, walking into the office, said: 'Is this the same stinking rat-hole that I was in six months ago?'"

What was perhaps more serious was that the centre was facing closure; as it had never defined itself properly, it was vulnerable to accusations that it wasn't fulfilling its function. Her job description must have made for interesting reading.

"What was I expected to do? Well, I was expected to be a wonder woman in 12 months, as if you could fix something like this in 12 months. It took a good four or five years before the place was working the way I wanted it to work.

"But I had terrific support. The composer Jane O'Leary was chairperson of the board, and she threw herself into the fray and said: 'they're not closing us down and that's it.'"

Her experiences in England made O'Kelly determined to develop the centre not just as a resource, with its extensive library and national sound-archiving facilities, but also as a body to promote new music in Ireland and abroad.

"It's no use writing wonderful music if nobody knows it exists," she says. "And it's no use having a lively cultural scene if it doesn't reach outside the front door."

In addition to its impressive collection of scores, some of which date back to the 1930s and beyond, and recordings on every imaginable format since reel-to-reel, the centre is possessed of the technology to typeset music, copy parts and reproduce handwritten works.

"They vary a lot, depending on who's writing them. Oh, here's quite a presentable one, look," says O'Kelly, seizing a page covered with dramatic swirls of notes, elegant and graceful as an Arabic manuscript.

"But it's not just composers we work with; it's also performers, teachers, students. What we have to do is create opportunities for new music to be played. It's not up to us to say what's going to last and what isn't, or what's good and what isn't. Everything gets filtered; history will be the judge."

Creating opportunities, as often as not, means being quick off the mark when promoters or festivals ring to say they'd like to programme a piece of new Irish music, but don't know what to do next.

"It could be somebody down the road or somebody in China, but whoever it is, we say: 'great - how many pieces do you want and when do you want them for?' First we find out what instruments they have available; then we can send sample scores or pages, or find out if they have a composer in mind."

She pauses, smiles. "It's probably quite hard to get off a phone call like that without having signed yourself up to do a piece by an Irish composer."

Then there's the magazine Contemporary Music News - "newsletter" is the term she prefers - which is funded by the Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and appears three times a year, giving a directory of events and, crucially, premieres.

"It's really encouraging, because now we have to prune what we put in that calendar, whereas we used to be scrabbling around for things," says O'Kelly.

Much of this information will shortly be transferred to the centre's website, which has recorded a dramatic increase in hits over the past year and is being reorganised "to make it more user-friendly".

As well as information about composers and scores, the site offers a comprehensive catalogue of CDs for sale - as does the ground floor of the Fishamble Street building, where piles of From Ireland await delivery to radio stations and festivals all over the world.

Another of O'Kelly's ideas - "it sounds like I'm the dictator of Fishamble Street, doesn't it?" she says, only half joking - these free promotional CDs have proved highly successful as calling cards for Irish music.

The track listings also tell a tale, tracing the development of successive generations of composers, with volume one featuring pieces by, among others, Gerald Barry, John Kinsella, John Buckley and Raymond Deane. Volume two moves from Ronan Guilfoyle and Ian Wilson to Eibhlis Farrell and Roger Doyle, while the most recent mixes Marian Ingoldsby with Michael Holohan, Kevin Volans with Michael McGlynn.

"The third volume has been vastly cheaper to do, because there's so much music available now, either in commercial format or on DAT . For the first CD we could only get, I think, one track out of nine; we had to record everything else," she says.

Those first composers had nothing recorded at all; nothing that they could hand to anyone who was interested in their work, which is a shocking state of affairs for composers. Sound is their medium. If a composer doesn't come away from a performance with a recording of a new work, it's like the event hasn't happened. Even if it isn't a commercial CD, a recording is the equivalent of a book for a writer or a gallery for an artist."

Not that a first performance, even a successful one, means a piece is on the road to a successful musical life; far from it.

"I've been known to say to people who look for advice on commissioning: 'have you thought about doing one of the couple of thousand pieces downstairs that have been played once and never been played again?'

"Sometimes people think a new piece has to be literally that - wet ink on the page - and don't realise that to get something into the repertoire might be an even better career opportunity for a composer."

Wet ink on the page: there, despite the high-tech environment of music in the 21st century, is a concept Handel would recognise straight away.

Though what the composer who once threatened to throw one of his sopranos out of a window would make of the fact that many up-and-coming young composers today are women is anybody's guess.

"Oh, well," says O'Kelly. "I hope it's got to the stage where it doesn't matter a damn what you are - you're just a composer."

The Contemporary Music Centre's website is at www.cmc.ie