Composers congregate on the footpath outside the new Contemporary Music Centre on Fishamble Street, Dublin. They greet the President, Mrs McAleese, who has come to open the new resource and archive centre. They've left their solitary lives of creativity to stand in the sunshine and enjoy a party to celebrate the opening of the centre. This is the site where Handel's Messiah was first performed in April 1742. Now history is being made again.
"We're not crazy," says composer Oliver Hynes, from Carlow. "We just feel crazy and isolated writing music," he says. "It's a lonely job really." His last piece, inspired by the Cathal O Searcaigh poem, Fothrach Ti i Min na Craoibhe, which won the Sean O Riada Memorial Trophy last year, will be available on CD soon, he says. Vincent Kennedy, a Dublin composer, says the difference between today's classical composers and rock stars or, say, boybands, is "they're rich while we're poor. And they're famous when they're alive". He's currently working on a new piece which will be performed by the Rathfarnham Concert Band in the National Concert Hall in November. Fanfare, played by a brass quintet from the RTE Concert Orchestra under the baton of Proinsias O Duinn outside on the footpath in honour of the occasion, is the work of Irish composer James Wilson. He expects his next composition, Trio, to be played in Copenhagan next year.
The latest piece from composer Rhona Clarke, called Jealous Pursuit, for viola and piano, is later performed at the National Concert Hall in the John Field Room. She high-tails it up there after the speeches at the CMC, watching out for her sisters, Cepta White and Avine Morton, and brothers, John Clarke and Fintan Clarke, to arrive.
Also on the green-eyed monster theme is Grainne Mulvey's newest composition, Jealous Moon. It will be premiered at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Sunday, May 6th by the Concorde Ensemble. Cork-born composer Bernard Geary also attends the launch. Leonora Geary, his wife, plans to go to the 171st annual exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Ely Place later on.
Other composers spotted at the opening include Eric Sweeney, head of music at Waterford Institute of Technology, and Michael Holohan. According to Eve O'Kelly, the centre's director, there are more than 120 living Irish composers.