The man behind the music

When his new work has its debut this week, Raymond Deane will forgo hispassion for Palestine to be there, writes Arminta Wallace

It's pretty thrilling, the première of a significant piece of contemporary music. The orchestra tuning up, the buzz of anticipation filling the hall, the soloist poised, instrument in hand, and the score, pristine on the music stands, ready to make its presence felt.

For Raymond Deane, the first performance of his Violin Concerto - by the National Symphony Orchestra, with the soloist Christine Pryn, at the National Concert Hall on Friday - will be a cause for celebration. But the joy will also be tinged with regret, because just as Deane's work gets under way an Israeli newspaper columnist will embark on a lecture at the Irish Writers' Centre, across Dublin, under the auspices of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Deane is the chairman and a founder member of the campaign, with which he is deeply involved. And although he isn't the effusive type he is clearly torn between the two events, full of enthusiasm about the lecturer, full of excitement about his new piece. "An unfortunate overlap," he says with his wry smile.

Not that Deane is complaining. At 50 he is one of Ireland's most highly-regarded composers of contemporary classical music, and at a time when commissions for full-scale orchestral works are hard to come by, to put it mildly, the concerto is his third big commission from RTÉ, the others being 1998-99's Oboe Concerto and a 1993-94 piece called Ripieno.

"I've been luckier than most," he says. "These three pieces would be milestones in my work as a whole, and I feel very fortunate to have had those commissions. But although it's still my profession the role of composition in my life has changed drastically. It was more or less the centre of my life. Not any more." Deane is just as likely to be found these days poring over an Internet account of an unreported atrocity in the Middle East as working on the finer points of a cadenza.

In a parallel though not necessarily related shift in his musical interests he has rediscovered the delights of the early baroque. Is any of this reflected in the new piece? "I've been listening to a lot of Bach and pre-Bach - [the Renaissance composer Carlo\] Gesualdo, people like that - and I suppose in some ways that must have gone into the way I write," he says. "I don't tend to think in terms of big dramatic gestures any more. Although" - another wry smile - "there are one or two in the Violin Concerto. You can't quite get away from them."

As for the Arabic influence, he is reluctant to write what he calls tourist music. But the Oboe Concerto, composed soon after a visit to the Middle East in 1993, was a personal response to his trip. "It's almost a programmatic piece in that it has a specific reference to that situation," he says. "And it's quite a violent piece. There are violent bits in the new concerto as well, but it's a more abstract concept on the whole."

Like many of Deane's works the new concerto uses the four-movement structure so beloved of classical composers. Did he choose this as a nod to tradition? "A lot of my pieces have a four-movement structure," he says. "In some ways it's an archetypal format: it's the standard sonata format, even though these are not sonata-form pieces. But in things like harmony and melody, as well, I like to refer to the great tradition without actually occupying it. I like to think that I write on it rather than in it. So I tend to choose these formal templates that, on the surface, seem to be part of a tradition, but of course the actual material I'm working with is outside the tradition. I like that idea of being inside and outside at the same time."

In another playful comment on the notion of tradition, the piece features a recurring A minor chord. "It's one of the most traditional sounds that you could imagine. A very simple gesture, which itself is full of historical resonance, but in the piece it comes and then everybody runs away from it as fast as they can. It always comes with a sense of menace. Whether that means something or not I don't know."

There's also a quotation from the final song of Schubert's Winterreise cycle, which Deane says has haunted him since he first studied the music, at university. "I don't quite know how Schubert crept into this piece," he says. "I had just got a recording of Winterreise and had been listening to it a fair bit. And it struck me, without going into too much technical detail, that there was a relationship between the pitch structure of the song and the pitch structure that I was using. So it seemed appropriate."

Deane's use of the orchestra has changed considerably over these three "milestone" pieces. The Oboe Concerto was something of a battle between orchestra and soloist; Ripieno was a purely orchestral piece; in the new concerto the orchestra and soloist achieve greater harmony. "In a way," he says, "I prefer working with a soloist. The dialectic between an individual and the collective is something which interests me, anyway." This sounds like politics again. He laughs.

He got interested in the Middle East when, living in Paris at the time of what he calls the first Gulf War, he began to mix with people who challenged the views he has always taken for granted. "I also read \ Chomsky for the first time, very belatedly," he says. "But it was still a slow and difficult process for me to come around to being slightly more active than just writing letters to The Irish Times and other papers, which I did with alarming regularity, and still do. Partly because I'd come from an almost purely pro-Israel perspective. Without questioning it too much, I believed that because of the Jewish trauma Israel had the right to do things to other nations. It took me a while to shake off that way of thinking, which came from the influence Jewish culture and civilisation has had on me - and still does. When I look at my books I find it quite astonishing how many of them are by Jewish writers."

The current situation, including the "abomination" of suicide bombing, drives him close to despair, but that's insufficient reason to stop doing what he does. Besides, it puts the troubles of contemporary classical music in perspective. "Yesterday we had the a.g.m. of the Association of Irish Composers," he says. "I fulminated for a while. But that's my fulminating on that score done for a bit, whereas three years ago I would have been in a constant tizzy." About? Oh, the usual things, he says: the difficulty of getting new works performed more than once, the impossibility of getting new works performed outside Ireland, the reluctance of many composers to write for the orchestra at all, the horrors of commercialisation and globalisation and goodness knows what. It's bad, but the stuff he's reading about on the Internet is much, much worse. "I read every day about the lives people are leading in Palestine. It's just unimaginable."

What is also unimaginable, however, is that Deane's commitment to the plight of the Palestinian people will not, at some point, influence, or at least interact with, his work as a composer. "I began to study Arabic last year but had to give it up for lack of time. And the whole theory of Arab music is something I want to learn about. It's so sophisticated. The scales are so refined, so subtle: they put our miserable 12 semitones to the octave to shame. But . . . possibly. One day. We'll have to see where all this goes in my life."

Raymond Deane's Violin Concerto is being performed at the National Concert Hall on Friday at 8 p.m. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign lecture is at the Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin, at 7 p.m.