There was a time when hardly a note of music by composers such as Gerald Barry and Raymond Deane was to be heard in their native land. The same fate has befallen Belfast-born Deirdre Gribbin. She turned 30 last year, and, like Deane and Barry at a similar age, has spent most of her composing life abroad.
International recognition, however, has not been lacking. Her work has featured in major festivals. Last summer brought the much-praised premiere of her first opera, Hey Persephone!, a joint Aldeburgh Festival/Almeida Opera commission to a libretto by Sharman Macdonald. She is one of the composers commissioned in Faber Music's Millennium Series, and she has just been appointed Northern Arts Composing Fellow.
Things are finally looking up in Ireland, too. Jane O'Leary's Concorde has taken her up. The Music Network has commissioned a new work, A Fabled Kingdom of Poets and Fiddlers, for London Brass, to be premiered in Bantry on Saturday. And she has just won the Irish section of the New Music for Sligo competition. Her winning piece, How to Make the Water Sound, will be heard at the end of the Sligo Contemporary Music Festival on Sunday afternoon.
Gribbin came to composition late, as a music student at Queen's in Belfast, where Kevin Volans was her mentor. The flute had been her instrument, but once she started composing, there was to be no looking back. In London she studied under Buxton Orr and Robert Saxton, but the most important decision she made as a composer was to pursue her studies in Denmark, a country whose music and musical life have left an indelible impression. She recalls the attitude of Poul Ruders, who insisted on absolute imaginative precision in the choice of sounds. "Why that note on that instrument?" he would ask. "Exactly how do you think it will sound?" (The effect of his probing can be clearly heard in her work.) She tells of being on a course with Hans Abrahamsen, working until 4 a.m. to sort out a problem in the orchestration of one of her pieces. The sense of community, she says, is really strong. "They all go and hear each other's pieces. If anybody had a premiere, they'd all be there, and they'd all discuss - it would be a really critical discussion afterwards.
"I found that so totally different from anything I'd encountered in London. I miss that camaraderie. My piece, Tribe, was played in Copenhagen last year. One of my colleagues came up and said: `I really hated that. I didn't get it at all.' " She describes this experience as "really good", adding, "I was able to ask him why he felt that. Poul Ruders phoned me up after the concert, he'd heard it on the radio, and told me he really liked it. They all stopped, because this piece was being done, and went to the premiere.
"Per Nrgard was there, and Karl Aage Rasmussen, who said, `You left us as a student, and you've come back a composer'. I've always been quite fearful of him, because he's so blunt. So that made me feel I'd crossed a threshold."
Her responses to Danish music are very positive. "There's a real sense of the north, and of open spaces. It's quite austere music, as well: blocks of colour, blocks of sound, and often, not narrative, but some sort of extra-musical idea."
She talks in particular of Per Nrgard, "one of the best living composers", with whom she studied, and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, whose concepts she describes as academic - "you would need a degree to find out what his programme notes mean. They're exploring a language that really interests me, an expressive tonal language between chromaticism and tonality." It's Nrgard's music with its "big broad sweeps and unpredictability" that seems to mean the most to her.
She doesn't draw any major distinctions between her pre and post-Denmark music. "I always see the places that I go to as a progression of what I'm doing, not a stopping to change everything. You only notice later what new things you've absorbed. I was 25 and I just went. I didn't know anybody. I don't know if I'd have the guts to do it now. It was the first time I experienced the being-on-your-own bit of being a composer.
"All these things are there to prepare you for other things. That really prepared me for the experience of writing the opera, which was quite horrific at times." The time-scale was tight, and completing a full-length opera in a matter of months turned her into a temporary recluse.
The starting point for most of her pieces, she says, is the title. "I've got books of titles, books and books of titles. I maybe read something, or hear something on the radio out of context, or a conversation, someone will say something, and I'll write it down." Very often the titles have visual references - Gribbin paints a lot, as well as composing. "There's a lot of artistic, visual arts influence, the surroundings, the environment. I can't really begin a piece if I haven't got a title." She describes a commission for a solo clarinet work. She knows it's going to be "a really strident piece", but just "can't get it going, because I have to find out what it's called first".
How to Make the Water Sound, one of a series of water pieces, was inspired by "the sound of sound when your head is under water". She's never really known what the fascination was, but lately has begun to think it's because that was "the first sound I ever heard". The Music Network commission is to commemorate the 1798 Rebellion. "Initially it was going to be called The Man with the Green Umbrella, because I'd been reading about this French man who'd been going around the country documenting a lot of stuff and he'd carried a green umbrella. But then, I thought, what's this all about?" Rejecting the idea of a narrative or story, she focused on "the idea of oral tradition and passing things down".
"We're all very good at telling stories and then suddenly they become embroiled with myths. You catch a fish, and suddenly it's this big. There's this lovely feeling that there's a potential for everybody to be a writer or a poet or a musician. The Muse is really strong. That's where the idea for A Fabled Kingdom of Poets and Fiddlers came from. It's to do with the commemoration of a history, of a tradition of history, of the telling of these events that had such a big impact on history and lives and generations."
Music Network's two 1798 commissions, Deirdre Gribbin's A Fabled Kingdom of Poets and Fiddlers and Donnacha Dennehy's The Traces of a Revolutionary Song are premiered in Bantry by London Brass on Saturday. The touring programme, which includes works by Strauss, Dowland, Paul Hart and Duke Ellington, can also be heard in Tralee (Sunday), New Ross (Monday), Castlebar (Wednesday), Drogheda (Thursday 3rd), and Dublin Castle (Saturday 5th). Phone 01-6719429 for details.
There is an open rehearsal of How to Make the Water Sound at the Model Arts Centre, Sligo, on Sunday at 11 a.m., with a performance at 3 p.m. For festival details phone 071-41405.
