Sounds Unexpected

Roger Doyle is Ireland's oldest and best-known composer of electro-acoustic music. He has been active in the area for over a quarter of a century, in fact since before the term "electro-acoustic" won wide currency. When he began his career he was known as an electronic composer. He was among the first composers of his generation - he'll be 50 next year -- to get his work out on disc. In the 1970s his only rival on LP was Frank Corcoran, but Doyle's discography is now among the most extensive of any Irish composer. His major ongoing work, The Babel Project, integrating live and electronic music, dance and architecture, took over an entire wing of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1992, and extracts from the work were disseminated through a CD tie-in with the visual art magazine, Circa.

Interviewing Doyle turns out to be an experience littered with traps. He fights repeatedly against questions about the new work he has written for the Swedish Ensemble Son to premiere at Kilkenny Arts Week tomorrow night. He thinks we're delving too deeply into technicalities. And when I ask about how the piece relates to the sound world of other Roger Doyle pieces, I run into the problem that he doesn't acknowledge the common characteristics of his work as much as he celebrates the independence of each piece. Yet, ever the gentleman, he is ultimately forthcoming on all of these topics, throwing in just the occasional aside, a marker like the noise from a dog swallowing a growl when its reading of a situation is not quite settled.

"I'm very preoccupied with language, and musical languages, and musical styles," he explains, when he's talking about the range of his work. "I've continued to be musically schizophrenic as the years have rolled on. I haven't found the mature style that a composer is meant to find. I have expanded outwards even more than in my early years, I think. So it can be hard for some people to recognise some pieces as a Roger Doyle piece, because it will be so different from the one they heard before. "To make it even more complicated, I have always had two strands of musical interest going on in my life. Going back to my teen years was a good example of how it started. I was studying classical piano as a schoolboy and playing drums in local pop groups. So I have had a love and an interest in pop music always parallel with my interest in modern classical music or music which involves a lot of technology. "I know even you have a problem, as others do too, that you can hear a piece of music sometimes which is in the idiom, in the vernacular of popular culture. And on another day, another concert, another CD, you'll hear some hard-edged, innovative, mould-breaking, electro-acoustic music, and you won't be able to reconcile the fact that these are both Roger Doyle pieces. So, expect anything, is what I might say. I am told by other people that they can tell a Roger Doyle piece, that there's a personality there, recognisable no matter what the surface grammar is. But that's not really for me to see."

Pressed further, he offers the suggestion that, "Well, I've a definite harmonic sense in my tonal music. There are certain harmonies I just love. I would even go as far as to say there's a magic in harmonies. Maybe you could always tell the more pop culture stuff from the harmonies it uses. I don't know beyond that."

The pop culture influence can be heard at its clearest in the parts of the Babel Project which deal with the imaginary radio station, KBBL, which Doyle has lovingly created with its own DJ babble, mindless jingles and weather reports. The influential composers from the classical tradition he cites are just three, Debussy, Stravinsky and Stockhausen. "It's harder to find stuff to influence you nowadays. Maybe I'm just too set in my ways, or it's harder to hear stuff, because it's harder to find stuff in the record shops."

He traces the key experiences back to his teens. "When I was about 16," he says, laughing loudly, "I thought I was Debussy. I read everything I could get my hands on. Blame it on the Reader's Digest collection of the Great Classical Composers, which our family got when I was about 13. To read the lives of these composers was very interesting for a young lad. Also, there was a Ken Russell film about Debussy, with Oliver Reed, when I was about 14. It just blew me away.

"The musical language of Debussy I found very childlike and yet very complex. Here was a composer who was very attractive on the surface but went really deep at the same time. A deceptive sleight of hand, you might say. Stravinsky is harder to listen to and just as deep. There is an interesting aspect to surface attractiveness - some people are put off music because of it. That's obviously in parallel to people who are put off by a surface unattractiveness. I've come across many cases of people, who, because it's attractive, think it has no depth. It's not always the case.

"My first pieces were orchestral pieces and piano suites and they were very Debussian and Stravinskian. Stockhausen came next. There's one piece by Stockhausen called Hymnen, 112 minutes, composed in 1967, the same year as the Beatles were doing Sergeant Pepper - and the Beatles were well aware of Stockhausen and vice versa. That piece has had a lasting influence on me. It has to do with language also, musical languages and a feeling of global consciousness or something like that." Hymnen is based on national anthems. "I don't know if you would call national anthems popular culture. I suppose you would. It's certainly a vernacular of a type and he mixed the vernacular, the known world of anthems, and abstracted them in all the layers of recognisability to unrecognisability to completely abstract worlds. He filled in all those parts. That would appeal to somebody like me, who is interested in various levels of recognisability, and mixing vernacular in with abstract languages and sounds." The important pieces by Debussy and Stravinsky are "the obvious ones" - Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune ("one of the most beautiful things ever created. I don't listen to it often, about once every five years. I can't listen to it any more than that") and Stravinsky's three early ballets, particularly Petrushka. Beyond these composers, he yields just three names among recent figures, Frank Zappa and two Canadian electro-acoustic composers, Paul Dolden and Giles Gobeil.

Doyle describes his new work for Kilkenny as "a first for me". "I'm normally associated with electronic music or electro-acoustic music, or music which is specifically designed to be listened to in a CD environment, or radio, or in some instances in a concert situation, staring at loudspeakers, which can be problematic sometimes. This time it's for a quartet of Swedish musicians, playing trombone, percussion, saxophone and guitar. There's no tape part, but there is a live electronic part."

Using what's called a pitch to MIDI converter, Doyle has written a piece in which specific notes on the trombone will activate pre-composed electronic sounds. And, given the predilections of the Swedish players, the piece, Shindstu (named after the street in which the trombonist lives), includes controlled opportunities for improvisation. He has been to Sweden to work with the players before getting down to writing the piece, and he asked for cassettes of their rehearsals so that he can be sure the looser elements of the work will develop along the right lines in performance. His enthusiasm for the new work is palpable as he describes the electronic sounds he has placed around the opening trombone solo, "long, abstract, gorgeous sounds which remind me of some science-fiction dark city".

There's nothing of science fiction about Composers Ink, an agency for composers that Doyle has been instrumental in setting up. "I'll be 50 next year. I had a mid-life crisis, I guess, a few years ago, a mini one, where I thought, I'm getting nowhere here, I'm at the same place I was 10 years ago with my career, and nobody really wants to know that much about what composers are up to. Anyway, we were tired of growing older and not getting the recognition we felt we deserved."

So, he collaborated with his colleagues Raymond Deane, Fergus Johnston, Benjamin Dwyer and Donnacha Dennehy to form an agency that plans to put on concerts (they're running a weekend of new music on September 12th and 13th), to create pressure for media exposure, and "to reach out to ensembles, publishing houses, CD labels, concert organisers here and abroad to play our stuff". The proselytising fervour with which Doyle enthuses about the quality of Irish music suggests that the determination which put his name on so many LPs, cassettes and CDs, has just found an altogether broader constituency to work for.

Roger Doyle's Shindstu is premiered by Ensemble Son at St Canice's Cathedral Kilkenny, tomorrow night, in a programme that also includes new work by Barry Guy and pieces by Richard Barrett. For information on Composers Ink, tel: (01) 661 5605 (voice and fax).