Building an audience for contemporary classical music

Fergal Dowling, director of the Music Current festival, is helping me understand contemporary classical music while pop music blares through the speakers of a north Dublin cafe. I'm not totally ignorant of the subject. I studied and like a lot of 20th-century avant garde music. I even somehow wrote a master's thesis on the unorthodox composer Cornelius Cardew. But a lot of it goes over my head, so I enlist Dowling to both explain the appeal and to outline what's happening over the six days of workshops, lectures and concerts – some free – in this year's festival, starting on April 19th.

As Ariana Grande warbles in the background, Dowling discusses his transition from a classical guitar-playing teenager to an Edgard Varèse-obsessed composition student in Trinity College. "[Varèse's music] seemed to reach into spaces and speak in a very wide-ranging language that seemed able to go anywhere. It seemed anything was possible to be said. Music is often digitised and flattened into a one-dimensional row of ones and zeros reproduced somewhere else. But there are smaller composers who are producing their own work, making [music] that had to be experienced in a different way, that refuses to be flattened, that refuses to be canned and boxed."

So in 2008, Dowling and the organist Michael Quinn founded the Dublin Sound Lab ensemble in order to perform the best international avant garde scores for Irish audiences. The Music Current festival emerged from this in 2016 with one Covid-related gap in 2020. "We tried to reignite that programme with ongoing collaborations throughout the course of 2021. We slipped a quick mini festival [out] at that time."

We leave the cafe and go to a studio at the end of Dowling’s garden, where there are speakers, computer monitors and an electric piano. “The process for me is unlike what you might think of as a 19th-century paradigm, where a composer sits at a piano and he has all the harmonies in his head and [is] just working them out and sketching them as he goes,” he says. “Using computers to compose, I’m often thinking on a much more abstract level from the get-go. I’m often trying to use technology to solve a formal problem.”

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He shows me notes he’s taken featuring diagrams and calculations and then he plays a composition he has written for the American ensemble Loadbang (bass clarinet, trumpet, baritone voice and trombone) to play at Thursday night’s concert. It’s called Everything is an Illusion and it involves a computer responding to live performers in real time. “They’re playing instruments, but the computer is listening to them and responding to them and adding this kind of fake accompaniment. The computer’s doing a little bit of improvising.”

Then he plays a video of Dublin Sound Lab musicians playing the Acceptance of Death by composer Elis Czerniak. This will be performed as part of Tuesday night’s concert. The piece involves audio of each musician talking about their collaboration which is played over parts in which they are each performing solo. “The only thing that’s fixed are the taped bits,” says Dowling. “[Czerniak is] using collage, spoken word, live processing and this kind of bebop thing where they all take a solo.” Spoken audio recordings have a long lineage in contemporary music. “Here it’s maybe borrowing a very philosophical approach from the visual arts, where the piece has become its own documentation.”

Music Current also features workshops and discussions that delve into popular features of the genre. On Friday, for example, Swiss violinist Maya Homburger and English double bassist and composer Barry Guy are presenting a lecture followed by a recital. On Wednesday, Australian cellist Ilse de Ziah is giving a workshop on writing and performing "graphic scores", a mid-20th century innovation where composers such as Cathy Berberian and Pauline Oliveros deviated from traditional notation to create something visually striking which performers could interpret in their own ways.

Increasingly, contemporary scores have to be innovative in their layouts and so partly resemble these graphic scores. He shows me Panyayiotis Kokoras’s score for Stone Age which is also to be performed on Tuesday night. He points to an unfamiliar symbol on the stave. “Here the clef refers to the cello being held upside down. A lot of this stuff becomes very unique and very particular to the composer and often to the player. The way a lot of composers work now is they spend some time with an instrumentalist and say, ‘Well, what can you do?’”

The unconventional things they “do”, are often, in the world of contemporary music, referred to as “extended techniques”. In this spirit, Kokoras designed a cello bow which was then created with a 3D printer, and which Ilse de Ziah had to learn how to play. The sound is scratchy and percussive. “He’s even given the technicians examples of the type of reverb we should aim for,” says Dowling.

Technologists are a very important part of this community. On Thursday there's a workshop called Practical Introduction to Virtual Acoustics which is facilitated by Dr Eoin Callery, who co-created a multi-speaker sound system that can change the nature of a sonic space. On Friday evening, Homburger and Guy will perform with this system. "You can map any space on to the space you're in. We don't hear the room, we hear a church or we hear a cave."

On Saturday, a panel discussion called, simply, “Future music?” delves into the realities of musical creativity in the wake of Covid lockdowns. “Music is not a trivial, faraway, abstract thing,” says Dowling. “This horrible attitude emerged in the last few years where some people involved in society were told that they were indispensable key workers and by, inference, musicians were told that they’re the most dispensable, least required, most useless workers.”

Dowling dislikes the idea that the worth of music can be judged based on its economic utility. He notes how in the UK many traditional music departments have been closed or encouraged to devise more industry-focused curriculums. “They stopped doing counterpoint and harmony and started training people to work in this kind of commercial, production environment where you were learning this kind of mercantile, utilitarian approach to music.”

Is this kind of contemporary music self-consciously political? Less so in the English-speaking world, he says. “On the Continent the first question everyone will ask is: ‘What’s the political motivation for this piece?’ When they ask you what the rationale is, they mean: ‘Why now? Why here? Why us?’ And you have to be able to explain why.”

It's often argued that modern classical music has veered down a path that's too obscure for the average music fan. In the 20th century, composers like Arnold Schoenberg began breaking with conventional harmony and later in the century the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen began using new technology to explore sounds, rhythms and timbres that were impossible to create with conventional instruments. Consequently, it's usually not the kind of music you can hum along with or click your fingers to. "When composers use functional harmony less, the audience has to learn the other form of procedures that they're using," says Dowling. "And if they don't, they won't appreciate it... this is true. There isn't a formalised structure to learn some of these things. But people are maybe much more educated now in digital technology than they were a few years ago and maybe appreciate digital music-making in a way they didn't previously."

Dowling rejects the idea that experimental music is too difficult for audiences and thinks it’s all about having suitable expectations. “We use different music for different things,” he says. “This is just one type where we sit down and think about what’s going on. What are these people doing? It’s an intellectual process. None of these pieces will make it to Last Night of the Proms [in London’s Albert Hall] but it’s not supposed to work that way.”

He recalls going to a concert as a teenager and being overwhelmed by the music of Olivier Messiaen. "Programming music or writing music, I'm always imagining that one person in the concert hall and reaching that one person and changing how they think about music or how they think about the world. We're all evangelists."

He laughs and quotes Jack Black from School of Rock: "I'm out there every day on the front line, liberating minds."

Music Current, April 19th-23rd, at Dublin's Project Arts Centre. See musiccurrent.ie.