If you were told that Dublin hosts one of the best festivals of contemporary music in Europe, how would you react? With astonishment? With pensive acknowledgement ("Must look into that")? With polite boredom? And what about those enthusiasts who know that Dublin, under RTÉ auspices, does indeed host such a festival?
Music-lovers, players and composers have made the pilgrimage to the Helix for two years running to hear the world's best performers play some of the most exciting music now being written. The third RTÉ Living Music Festival takes place next weekend.
A cause for celebration, then. Or is it? The festival is an inverse tribute to a concert life that still undervalues the new. But it must be admitted that there are aspects of the events themselves that can be off-putting. Ten or more years ago I reacted against the "New Music" scene with an allergic rash whose effects are with me still. The incestuousness - composers listening to composers - was off-putting; and the composers who thrived in this fish tank appeared all to be middle-class rebels in the Mick Jagger mode. I really came to hate it.
Inclusions and exclusions have always interested me. Growing up in the North has something to do with it. When I started out as a composer in the 1980s I didn't meet other Catholics. Quite simply. And as far as some of those in positions of influence were concerned, this state of affairs was not going to change soon (it has since changed). There was an excellent BBC department under the composer David Byers, with whose encouragement I got going, and eventually thrived.
RTÉ asks a composer to curate the Living Music Festival, and this year they have asked me. So I have tried to do just what the above paragraph suggests: to plan a festival that might mean something to people who don't like New Music Festivals. This has forced me to be as honest as I can about what moves and touches me, and to pass over things that are there because they look good. Build-your-own-festival is a game all composers probably play, at least in their minds. I have been given the delightful and frightening opportunity to inflict my personal tastes on the paying public, who should address complaints to me.
Our main focus is on German music since 1945, and our guest composer is the distinguished Hans Werner Henze (b.1926), who plans to be here for the whole weekend. Henze himself rebelled in the 1950s, but in unorthodox fashion: he was a traditionalist in an era of doctrinaire modernism. Not that he has wanted for recognition - he has attracted success the way other composers attract utility bills. But he did not enjoy the cachet that Boulez and Stockhausen did.
It would be wrong to say that during my student years Henze was talked about derisively; he wasn't talked about at all. His famous contemporaries early learned the key avant-garde tactic: make as much noise as possible, and then keep making it. And a public with little time for the nuances took things at face value. If these people say they are the thing, they must be. Henze would have to wait his turn. He more than waited, producing a catalogue which is staggering in its ambition. He is a composer on the 19th-century scale, a new Mendelssohn or Verdi.
I admire Henze's humanist bias; I like his feeling for literature and art; I like his unpretentious sense of himself as a world citizen. He has said that his career has been more about people than music. It is my hope that the Festival will help younger composers in particular to get to know his music and his way of being in the world. In some of his work he has risked being a political composer, with mixed results for the music. But the unevenness is part of his scale. Treasurers of the small, minutely crafted oeuvre will have to look elsewhere.
Other Germans will be plentifully represented, going back to and including Paul Hindemith (1895-1964). The youngest German is the precocious Matthias Pintscher (b.1971). But the Irishwoman Rachel Holstead is the Festival's youngest composer of all (b.1978). The new generation need encouragement in the form of commissions with decent money attached to them, and it has been good, thanks to three RTÉ commissions, to help them. But I feel a pang of conscience in this matter. The English composer Michael Finnisey, now almost 60, recently estimated his annual income at £16,000. It's not a lot for a lifetime's work, is it? Composing with persistence and integrity stubbornly refuses to translate into money.
Another commissioned composer is Fergus Johnston (b.1959). Composers need to be lucky in their contemporaries. Mine include not only Fergus but Stephen Gardner and Ian Wilson. A peer group like this helps keep you up to the mark: I sometimes feel I would be betraying the guild by turning in a bad piece. A book should be written on the beneficial effects of artistic rivalry. Someone said of Randall Jarrell that if you wrote a bad poem, he looked at you not only as if you'd written a bad poem, but as if your taste in ties and socks wasn't everything it should be. Jarrell, of course, was a poet as well as critic, and it's from a fellow practitioner that this kind of admonishment must come to do much good. When making art is not lonely it's social, often intensely so. I believe in collegiality and the idea of the Common Pursuit. The isolated genius filling a drawer with unperformed scores is probably deluding himself.
Nothing composes like composition, Robert Frost wonderfully says. And composing has been a wonderful life because music is. I never take a break from it. It is the hours of quiet industry that I treasure, and getting to know what Shelley called "the tender sense of my own inner process". Those hours can seem too few in your forties. There is life to be lived, festivals to organise. A composer's dying words: I wish I'd spent more time at the office.
The RTÉ Living Music Festival takes place at the Helix from Friday, February 18th to Sunday 20th, in association with the Goethe-Institut and the British Council.