JANE O'Leary's contemporary music ensemble is currently celebrating its 21st birthday. A CD was launched last week and tomorrow, in the Hugh Lane Gallery's Sunday's At Noon series, the group is presenting a platform concert of music by younger Irish composers - David Fennessy's Is, Siobhan Cleary's Luna, Marian Ingoldsby's Walking on Water, Deirdre McKay's The Fly, Gerard Power's At First Light and Andrew Hamilton's Tree.
Some of these people are relatively well known. Marian Ingoldsby has had commissions from Opera Theatre Company and the National Symphony Orchestra, and Siobhan Cleary will be having an orchestral work recorded for CD release in the Vienna Modern Masters series.
But the one work commissioned for the concert and receiving its premiere tomorrow is by one of the youngest of the composers, 20 year old Andrew Hamilton, who is currently studying at Worcester College, Oxford. He started composing at the age of 10, three years after taking up the violin. As he puts it, "I just started playing around and then started writing down what I'd been playing".
He started studying composition with Michael Ball, an English composer living in Dublin, at the age of 15, and a year later he went to the specialised music school Chetham's in Manchester. He was 17 before he started listening seriously to contemporary music, sparked off by attending the Summer Composition School in Ennis. He's already had pieces performed by the National Chamber Choir, Concorde, the BBC Philharmonic (within the composition section of the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition) and by Sli Nua (when he won the Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern composition competition last year).
At the moment he's not studying composition in any formal way - he says he only manages to compose between terms - though he has found time to have lessons with both Gerald Barry and Kevin Volans, both of whom he cites as influences along with Birtwistle and Xenakis. Most of the works he's written have been based on complex textures and the new Concorde commission, he says, marks a change of direction. Tree, for flute, clarinet, marimba, violin, cello and piano, is "more focused than many of my other pieces, with a smaller amount of material, and transparent textures".
