You could divide the career of John Buckley, who turned 73 last December, into four periods.
In the 1970s he worked as a primary-school teacher as well as a composer. Then, for about 20 years, most of it with the benefit of the annual cnuas stipend that’s open to members of Aosdána, he focused solely on composition.
In 2001 he realised that, although he was working with “five or six different organisations, many of which had the word ‘national’ attached to their name – National Chamber Choir, National Concert Hall – at the end of it all I was just getting a relatively modest amount of money with no pension benefits.”
The light-bulb moment was his realisation that “all of those various jobs that I had been undertaking could be put into one basket, so to speak. And so I took up the university position.”
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Instead of research that could be published as an academic paper, “I was having a piece played in the concert hall or the Hugh Lane Gallery. That was acceptable not as an alternative but as a parallel with having something published in a scholarly journal.”
A position was open at his alma mater, St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, which in 2016 became part of Dublin City University’s institute of education. “I was able to teach composition as part of my work there. So it all kind of tied into my situation at the time.”
Now, as he has retired, he can devote as much time to composition as he wishes.
Buckley sees differences in the amount and scale of the work he was able to take on at different times, but not in the nature of it. And he’s in the happy position of being able to say that, “certainly, nowadays, any commission that I’ve taken on has always been something I’ve wanted to do”.
His new Clarinet Concerto, which will be premiered by Carol McGonnell with the National Symphony Orchestra under Olari Elts this week, as part of the New Music Dublin festival, is a case in point. “I take the same approach whether it’s a commissioned work or something that I really want to write. I make no distinction at all – except you get paid for the commissions of course.”
His motivation, he says, “has always just sprung from an absolute urge to want to create. I’m very interested that everything I write at least gets performed. I’m not interested in writing for the bottom shelf. So I normally have a performance or a performer in mind while writing.
“Even if it’s not commissioned, I tend to check beforehand with players and say, ‘Would you be interested if I were to do a piece?’ And if they say yes, then I can write it without commission. But if they say, ‘I’m sorry, that wouldn’t interest me at the moment,’ then I move on and do something different. I think that every single piece I’ve written – and there’s about 150 of them now – have all actually been performed.”
When he’s composing, Buckley begins with big-picture issues: the character of the piece, how he will use the forces involved and, for a concerto, the number of movements he will write. The new work is only the second of his six concertos to have the standard three movements.
For him, the clarinet is “a flexible, fluent instrument capable of more or less anything you can imagine. I had three separate notions or three separate musical concepts, so to speak, and they are what determined that it was going to be in three movements – I couldn’t really gel them into one continuous movement.”
Another big concern in the case of a concerto “is creating some kind of balance between the soloist and the orchestra. The nature of this interaction is a consideration very much from the beginning. Is it going to be a battle like Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was often described? Is it going to be just accompaniment? What is the relationship of the soloist and the orchestra going to be?”
Buckley is anything but shy in the technical demands he makes of performers. “I’ve been working with some fantastic musicians both in Ireland and abroad who have been able to play these pieces that I’ve written. And I’ve written many of them for specific players – saxophone music for Kenneth Edge, for example, a real virtuoso player; flute music for William Dowdall, another great virtuoso player; and Peter Sweeney’s virtuosity as an organist inspired the Organ Concerto. I don’t think it would have turned out the way it did had it not been written for him.”
The virtuosity, says Buckley, “is just the way the music comes out. I never try to write music that’s difficult to play. It’s just the way that it emerges. I can’t seem to put two notes together without putting 15 notes in between them to join them together. And it’s the way that the music grows.
“It’s been part of my language from as early as I can remember. I mean, the very first pieces I wrote, their virtuosity was rather restricted in comparison to what I ended up doing as I became more mature as a composer. But it’s always interested me in pushing instruments and players somewhat.”
Buckley studied flute with the renowned Doris Keogh. “Certainly, the virtuosity did not come out from my own playing of the flute as a student,” he says. “Because I could never play anything I wrote, even the most straightforward of the early pieces.”
The virtuosity, which extends to his orchestral writing, too, “grows out of my relationship with the players as much as with the instrument and with the actual quality of the music.”
John Cage’s way of thinking about music was so strange and so alien to me
Although he has often explored the unorthodox sounds of extended instrumental techniques, the new concerto gives them a miss. “There are no technical devices. There are no multiphonics. There is no whispering into the instrument. There are no key clicks. There are just simply notes.
“I hope that the innovation occurs in the relationship of the solo part to the orchestra. So it’s a relatively straightforward piece in that sense. I’ve been very fortunate in that I have really great performers for almost everything I write nowadays and there’s almost no restriction in terms of what they can play.”
Back in 1981 Buckley attended a course with the American composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. He found Cage to be “a wonderful man, incredibly pleasant, full of unexpected twists and turns in his mentality, full of imagination, and with a great interest in everything Irish, of course. His connection with Joyce, I’m sure, gave us a nice little link.
“But, of course, his way of thinking about music was so strange and so alien to me – and, I think, to the other young composers who were with him at the time. We found it a little bit strange that you could spend all day writing a piece in detail and then that evening it was going to be played with another piece simultaneously where five gongs were played as loudly as possible so that not a single note was heard of your piece.”
That was the fate of a flute piece he wrote. “And Cage thought that was just wonderful. That’s what he wanted. When I asked him about this he said, ‘But look at all the beauty of cathedrals, the gargoyles. They’re not meant to be seen. They’re for the heavens.’
“I think I learned as much from Merce Cunningham as I did from John Cage. The choreographers created ballet pieces each day. The musicians created compositions each day. And, in the evening, two hats held out. One composition was pulled out of one hat and one choreography out of the other hat. And they just danced to whatever the music was. There was no co-ordination between them.
“That was part of Cage’s and Cunningham’s ethos, that randomness, the aleatorism – I suppose indeterminacy is the term that he would have used. It was the key to what they were seeking and searching for, to try to remove your own personality and your own wishes from the music. Which seems to be totally the opposite of what composers really want to spend their life doing.”
The premiere of John Buckley’s Clarinet Concert is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, April 4th, in a programme that also includes Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No 3 and Unsuk Chin’s Piano Concerto, with Andrew Zolinsky as soloist. New Music Dublin runs Wednesday-Sunday, April 2nd-6th
