Interviews
Dwyer interviews Irish composer John Buckley
Interview with John Buckley: 12/11/2006
Benjamin Dwyer: In Winter Light for alto flute and guitar is one of your most recent works. It could be seen as representative of your late style.
John Buckley: Well, I think it is. I think it holds within it the ambitions and the directions, the types of stylistic developments I have been working on over a long period of time – a kind of refinement of form, but not loosing any of the exuberance that I think is reasonably characteristic of my music. In about equal balance, that piece matches an introverted lyricism and an exuberant rhythmic-driven context as well, but in a very, very tight formal structure that brings all the strands together. I've tried to have no loosenesses in it, to keep it as tight as possible, and to make almost a classic type contemporary piece.
D: You certainly have tightened the reigns structurally, and in terms of form. Perhaps this was necessary uniquely because you have allowed timbre and colour to play a much more important role.
B: Yes, they are certainly very important here. We also spoke before about the importance of light and the role it has played in my music. Light has been a determining factor in my life, growing up as a child in the country, initially without electricity, and those notions have remained with me all my life - light dictates a huge amount for me. It's not an abstract concept, it's a feeling that I have, and the inspiration for this piece, In Winter Light, is drawn from the shadings and the colours of light. And, of course, the corresponding parameter to light in music is timbre and the combination of sonorities being an integral part and not something that is added in to colour in the picture later, it actually is part of the central core of the picture.
D: Given your fascination with timbre, really from the very early days but even more emphasised in your latter works, where practically every title of a piece has some reference to shade or light, it surprises me that you never really got into electro-acoustic music.
B: It's something that has never greatly interested me. I think that at the time I was going through my formative period the possibility to study that area here in Ireland just was not a real option. It seems that composers either take one or other of two routes – go into electro-acoustic music, or start writing for the orchestra. My fascination with the orchestra and the colours that are possible there is great. It's just an endless kaleidoscope of possibilities. I don't believe that I have even started to touch the surface, to be quite honest. I have now concentrated so much attention and care in developing a style of orchestral writing that to re-start learning electro-acoustic music is, at the moment, not for me. I wouldn't rule it out in the future. I am particularly interested, at least from a listeners point of view, in the live interaction between a performer and electro-acoustics. Tape pieces that are just fixed and performed where you sit in an auditorium and watch two speakers are of no great interest to me because the element of communication is not as strong and powerful as it needs to be to make a strong artistic statement of communication to the audience. I am quite aware that there are composers who feel differently to me but I have always felt that, and I have rarely heard a piece of electro-acoustic music that moved me or touched me in any way. For that reason I haven't been drawn into it. My inspiration and my ideas lie elsewhere.
BD: I have described you elsewhere as being part of a great maturation of Irish art music – I'm thinking of people like Raymond Deane, Gerald Barry, Jane O'Leary, Roger Doyle among others. Where do you think Irish music is today?
JB: Well I think it's a long way ahead of where it was thirty-five years ago. Our generation, the composers you've mentioned and many others since, have put together a body of work that stands for something. There is a conviction now that we are able to take our place, that we are able to work alongside our colleagues in other European countries. When I go to international music festivals the Irish pieces can well hold their own there, and in many cases, surpass a lot of what I have heard there. We are still somewhat in the dark ages with regard to the promotion of the work, of course. Great marked achievements which are noted with great fanfares in the press die rather suddenly, not to be resurrected for another twenty years, if at all. So that kind of support network, while it has undoubtedly improved, is still grossly inadequate in Ireland.
BD: Why is it that there seems to be a lack of awareness of Irish composers as an entity in the general consciousness of the country, even though they exist?
JB: It is very badly serviced by the press for a start. We almost get no coverage whatsoever. A new novel, for example, will typically be given a half page in the Irish Times, and in all the other papers will get huge coverage. A new symphony, on the other hand, will do well to get two or three inches buried in a review on page sixteen. There is no great interest taken by the press. Now that may well be historical. Newspaper editors perhaps don't allow music writers the same space because there's a feeling that anyone can read a novel but who wants to listen to a symphony. I think it's deeply embedded in the past, in the history; it's embedded in the fact that Ireland is seen as a literary country with great names and that our composers are somewhat very, very much to the side. You see it in histories of Ireland when they mention the great writers, and when they mention the great music it will always be the great Irish traditional music and rock and pop manifestations of it in more recent times. Composers in these books are hardly even given a passing mention as playing any kind of central role.
BD: Accept for Seán Ó Riada who still seems to hold for many musicologists a pre-eminent position. But I don't know of any composers who agree with that. The histories that are being written seem to differ somewhat from the reality on the ground.
JB: I would say that in Ó Riada's case, he is placed on that pedestal more by cultural historians. In many senses, he is seen as a cultural icon, a function which he did, in fact, serve. I think that if Seán Ó Riada, like his contemporaries of that period – Brian Boydell, Aloys Fleischmann and so on – had confined himself to the classical genre, he would probably be as little known as any other contemporary Irish composer. Obviously, he played a crucial role in turning around the neglected Irish traditional heritage and bringing that into a vibrant new life where it now has vast commercial potential and well as its inherent musical qualities. I think that one of the drawbacks of contemporary music is that it doesn't have huge commercial clout or potential. Perhaps if it did, it might have a more central role, it might be able to establish itself outside of a historical context. If you look back to Britain and the great revival that took place there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, it established itself at a time that enabled contemporary British composers now to have one hundred and fifty years of history of modern music behind them. Ours was very, very slow getting off the ground and at a time that our concerns were with establishing nationhood, for example, and the literary form and traditional Irish music were the ways through which that was done. In fact, those composers who turned towards a more contemporary European style were sometimes seen as not quite being fully Irish – that unless you were delving into the traditional styles, that somehow you were not fulfilling what was required of you at that historical period. I'm talking about the thirties, forties and fifties. So it is out of that, that we have built our current position, and, in a way, we are historically adrift in a sense. We don't have that backing of the weight of history. The idea is often raised about where is the Irish Bartók, it's a kind of clichéd question and about time we finished with it. If the Irish Bartók was there (and I believe we came close to having an Irish Bartók in composers like Brian Boydell), where are they? They're ignored, that's where they are. It's not that they haven't existed.
BD: Given that lack of presence that we seem to have in the consciousness of the nation, do you think that the composer has a role at all?
JB: Well, it's a very interesting question. If you are a composer, what you do is write music. The music is performed, but it should be performed and broadcast more frequently. Convincing broadcasters and journalist to give it that central function that it ought to have is the nub of the question. It has nothing to do with the quality of the music, it has nothing to do with the aspirations and abilities of the composers. We need to somehow convince the mechanisms of diffusion to put more emphasis and weight behind it, but it gets more difficult by the day because of competing strands from so many genres of music now.
BD: The whole consumerist environment that we live in at the moment would seem to place huge influence and pressure on those elements of diffusion to have a market mentality.
JB: Well, I think classical music in (its broadest implications) has always been a minority interest in any case. When you take contemporary music, that's a minority within a minority, and when you take Irish contemporary music, that's a minority within a minority within a minority. So the composer has at his or her disposal no mechanism other than writing music. The only role that I can see that a composer has is to keep writing music to the best of his or her ability. This is what we do, we put it out there for people to listen to in the expectation and the hope that it will be diffused to the widest possible number of people. But our primary role is the actual composition of the music. I believe that I would remain a composer and stay writing music even if the audience dwindled down to just a few people, because it's a inner drive to want to write the music. There's a most extraordinary statement made by Michael Tippett where he says that the role of the composer is to create images, to draw them from the depth of the imagination and to give expression, not usually to what is happening in society, but often to counter-balance that. He says that at a time of great violence, you need images of gentleness, and at a time of hypocrisy and fallen values, that you need images of exuberance and energy. That's the function of a composer – to create this music, and to let it go where it will. In a sense, once you've written the music, it has to take a life of its own; the composer no longer owns it or controls it.
BD: Having come to the end of a very long catalogue of works and having refined your compositional method, where do you see your music going stylistically from this point?
JB: That is always the most difficult question. It's relatively easy to look back and see where you've come from, but to predict where you are going is, for me, a very difficult one to answer. With regard to the type of work I want to do, over the past number of years the path has narrowed in, away from what might be called functional pieces, many of which I wrote in the eighties and nineties, in particular, as they were part of my being a journeyman, learning the craft, and they were providing me with an income at a time when I took whatever work happened to be available. I don't apologise for any of those pieces, I'm glad to have written them, but I will probably, from now on, write fewer such pieces; pieces that serve a specific function, say, for amateur groups and so on. I have reached the point where I want to concentrate and make each work really tell, and move my own approach to music making far ahead each time. I want no diversions or sideways moves – I want to focus now on each piece. I think I have been doing that for that past five or six years.
With regard to stylistic developments, it is always very hard to tell. I think that if you look back at the broad history of music, styles and periods change. When all the expressive potential of a particular style has been explored, composers who insist on holding on to it after its sell-by date usually tend to write dry and rather academic music that has no real heart and no real truth in it. When I find, and it may happen soon, that the approach that I've been taking has reached the limit of my expressive ability, I hope I will have the imagination to turn elsewhere, but I'm not sure where that elsewhere would be. There is nothing staring me in the face at the moment. I would say, however, that I do endeavour in each piece to try not just to remain where I am but to try to re-invent material or discover a slightly new way of looking at it. I feel that in the style I'm writing now that I've just about got there and that hopefully it will see me through another handful of pieces. Over the years, looking back on what I have done, I have never taken right angles or U-turns; everything has fed into the style I'm working in now, so I would hope that I can continue moving forward in the direction I've been aiming at over the last while which is a further refinement of style, with developments in further tightening formal cohesion.
With regard to genres, I have become very attached to the concerto in particular, as it pulls together two aspects that have defined a certain amount of my work, namely, writing for orchestra and writing for solo instruments. Pulling these together suggests a kind of direction. I'm particularly interested in writing sets of works from now on, which might seem like an old Baroque or classical invention. The concept, for example, of writing five or six concertos appeals to me. I certainly want to write a set of string quartets – but I don't feel that I'm old enough for that yet.
BD: It seems to me that your work is somewhat at arm's length to John Buckley, the person. Scanning your works I don't get a scan of your biographical self. In that sense you have kept the music away from your personal life. Is that something that you would, first of all, agree with, and secondly, do you think that there is a possibility that you are missing out on something by not allowing your music to be autobiographical?
JB: Well, that's a very interesting comment and I think I know the point you are getting at in that my music perhaps does not reflect big events that happen in society. On the other hand I would say that almost every single note I have written is autobiographical, because it does spring out from the deepest images I can find. These images might be reflections, for example, on how light has informed my life. Perhaps that sounds a bit abstract, but to me it's not at all abstract. Of course, though I have tried to get as close as I can to a perfection of form and material, as close to writing the strongest and most coherent music that I can, everything, nonetheless, does spring out from my own sensitivity, my own imagination, my own response to every aspect of life from the smallest to the largest events. So in that sense, it's entirely autobiographical. However, I do agree with you in the sense that I am not giving a description of my journey to Morocco or South America or something like that – my works are not postcards or souvenirs of Spain as Chabrier might have written, for example. But they are stamps of the deepest images I can manage to create and it is through music that I manage to express any ideas that I have.