Technology is about to open up the whole musical soundscape for the flute, William Dowdall tells Arminta Wallace

On his first day at high school William Dowdall signed up for the school band. He has been playing the flute ever since; one-time principal flautist with both the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, he has also made a number of recordings with the guitarist John Feeley. He has, he insists with a wry grin, been lucky. He took up the flute by accident - and nearly never made it to his first day at work.

Dowdall was born in a corporation house in north Dublin. His father died when he was small, and he and his mother emigrated in the cash-starved early 1960s. They headed for Cleveland, Ohio, where a large contingent of immigrants from his grandmother's native county of Mayo provided a ready-made home from home. When he turned up at high school, however, Dowdall discovered that "extra-curricular activities" were actually part of the curriculum.

"At home I spent all my time out on the street playing football," he says, "so I headed for the football table. But when I saw the size of the guys queuing up I thought, 'Uh, oh . . . maybe not'."

The next table was for the school band, so he hastily joined that queue instead - and signed up for the flute because the teacher told him he could have the use of a school instrument for four years. There was just one slight problem: Dowdall couldn't produce a single sound.

"Weeks went by, and nothing was happening," he says. Having tried to persuade him to change to percussion, the long-suffering teacher - take a bow, Norman Novak - arranged for a senior boy to give him flute lessons after school. "The kid picked up the flute to play it himself, and it turned out there was a piece missing from inside the head joint. Once that was fixed, I took off."

He is full of praise for the American education system, which paid for his musical tuition right through from junior school to third level. But when, at the age of 19, he came home - "complete with anti-Vietnam T-shirt, embroidered jeans and really long hair" - for a holiday, Dowdall decided to look for work in Ireland.

"I was a typical American teenager, accent and all," he says. "I walked into Walton's music shop and asked if there were any orchestras in town. The old guy behind the counter said, 'Ah, yeah - there's one across the road. It's called the light orchestra'. " Dowdall walked across O'Connell Street to to O'Connell Hall - which was beside the Royal Dublin Hotel - and requested an audition. Within a year he had joined the band as principal flautist.

"I wasn't sure what sort of orchestra I was coming to," he says. "But I reckoned the name 'light orchestra' was incredibly forward-thinking. The big pop group of the time was the Electric Light Orchestra - so I thought, 'Wow; this is great'. I spent the whole summer studying volumes of orchestral extracts, trying to cover all possible musical angles. I arrived nice and early for my first day's work at O'Connell Hall. There was no one there except an old porter who said; 'They've moved to the Francis Xavier Hall.' Nobody had told me."

Happily, those were the days when a taxi could get you across Dublin in short order. "I rushed to the FXH," says Dowdall, "ready to face any Beethoven Symphony, any Brahms, any piece of the classical repertoire you could care to name. I opened the folder on the music stand in front of me - and found the theme song from The Magnificent Seven."

DOWDALL'S REAL EDUCATION in music was just beginning. "They were a great bunch of people in and around that orchestra, and it was a fantastic experience," he says.

The orchestra's main function was to broadcast a daily radio programme; the repertoire was eclectic and the schedule beyond hectic. "Most of the time you were sight-reading. It was hair-raising, but incredibly exhilarating."

In 1979 Dowdall auditioned for the position of principal flautist with the National Symphony Orchestra. He got it - and stayed for 25 years. "Had a great time," he says. "But there were bad times as well. The orchestra went through a terrible time in the 1980s when Bryden Thompson wasn't re-appointed. The orchestra had improved tremendously under him - looking back, I think my biggest professional regret is that we didn't stand up and say, 'No - this can't happen'. That's the only black spot. The orchestra suffered for quite a few years afterwards. It's all different now, of course."

Can he say how, exactly, it's different? "The general standard is much higher now. There always have been - and always will be - fantastic players, but the standard now is higher right across the board. The administration is superb now, too; and so is the artistic direction. And I'm not just saying that" - he grins his wry grin again - "because they've chosen me to be a soloist."

Dowdall joins the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra for its forthcoming tour. But he's not going solo in a personal sense - two of his daughters play violin and viola in the orchestra, and the plan is, he says, that they'll all travel together. To say that music runs in the family is an understatement. Dowdall's wife Susan is a music teacher. Their eldest daughter runs a music business and another is currently in her final year as a cellist. His son is a trumpet player.

"People say it must be wonderful to have all those string players in the family - you can play chamber music together," he says. "Whooooooa. We've raised quite independent young ladies."

Nevertheless, he insists that neither he nor his wife pushed their offspring into music.

"I've seen people who've had a very tough time over the years. The main thing is employment. You can throw your heart at it, you can throw money at it - and it's still ridiculously expensive to even get into music in this country. Which, given my background, bugs me. I still see a lot of privilege around music - which is wrong."

One of the highlights of the tour programme will be John Buckley's piece, Winter Light. Originally written as a flute and guitar composition, Buckley has written a new version - virtually a new piece - for this orchestral outing, technically a premiere since the reworking was commissioned by RTÉ. But it's still, says Dowdall, as difficult - for the flautist - as ever.

"John Buckley plays the flute himself, and that's dangerous - because he knows what's possible. It's very flashy, very virtuosic, and the last movement is very dance-like. There's also a very busy new three-minute cadenza. He just threw that in."

FEARSOME TECHNICAL challenges aside, new music holds no fears for Dowdall. His interest was sparked when he was a student at Cleveland Musical Institute and Donald Erb arrived as composer-in-residence, and he has been fascinated ever since. In the past 12 months he has given four world premieres of works by Irish composers, including Donncha Dennehy's piece for flute and tape, Fat, and recently gave the Irish premiere of Takemitsu's I Can Hear The Water Dreaming.

Dowdall believes electronic development is about to open up the whole musical soundscape for the flute, and is keeping a close eye on developments in the field - which has to be good news for students at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he now teaches full-time.

He recently travelled to New York on an Arts Council grant to study contemporary techniques, and waxes lyrical about the new sounds produced by what are virtually new instruments.

"There's a quarter-tone flute which will be going into mass production next year and which gives you all sorts of wonderful multiphonics and tone colours," he says. "There's also a new computer programme which makes the computer react to your playing. I met a guy in New York who can just about play complete chord progressions on the flute. And I came back with a sliding head joint, which is like a whammy bar on a guitar. You put it here" - he holds his hands across his cheeks - "and you get a complete slide."

With some glee, he demonstrates the resulting sound. It's somewhere between the whistle of a high-speed train and a Hendrix guitar riff. He may have become a flautist by accident, but his face is fixed firmly on the future.

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christian Gansch, will play symphonies by Mozart and Tchaikovsky along with the world premiere of John Buckley's In Winter Light with William Dowdall, solo flute, at the National Concert Hall on Friday Nov 17. The composer will give a pre-concert talk at 6.45pm. A nationwide tour begins at the Royal Theatre, Castlebar on Monday Nov 20 and continues to Leisureland, Galway (Tues 21); the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul, Ennis (Wed 22); the City Hall, Cork (Thurs 23rd) and the Good Shepherd Chapel at WIT Waterford (Fri 24)