Finding a Voice, in Clonmel, is an annual five-day festival celebrating music by women composers, from the 12th-century work of Hildegard of Bingen to specially commissioned new compositions. One of this year’s commissions is by Gráinne Mulvey, who, in addition to her creative output, shapes an upcoming generation of composers as a professor at TU Dublin.
Her new piece, …Until the Women Are Free, for mezzo-soprano, flute, cello, piano and tape, is not just a work by a woman but a work about women. She describes it as “a follow-on, another thread from a piece called Great Women, which I wrote for the soprano Elizabeth Hilliard”. That work, she says, “concentrated on texts by Countess Markievicz, Rosie Hackett – a founder of the Irish Women Workers’ Union – and the two former presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese”.
The new piece uses extracts from speeches by Margaret Hinchey (1870-1944), the Irish-born suffragist who was active in New York, and Harriet Morison (1862-1925), the Irish-born founder of New Zealand’s first trade union for women; it also includes two later activists, the MEP Clare Daly and Elizabeth Coppin, the survivor of three Magdalene laundries.
“I found Harriet Morison very interesting,” says Mulvey, “because she lived in Dunedin, in New Zealand, and she managed to be one of the women who garnered support for the suffrage movement there. New Zealand became the first true democracy, because it was the first country to give the vote to women.” That was back in 1893. “That’s so significant,” says Mulvey, ”to think that an Irishwoman born in Ulster could present a speech that mobilises people and garners support through reportage in the press in New Zealand”.
She talks about the source of the work’s title. “It was Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, who said ‘Until the women of Ireland are free, the men will not achieve emancipation.’ I think that statement is wonderful. It was such a strong statement, and she was such a strong advocate for non-conscription and for women’s rights through the Franchise League.”
Hinchey was “a laundrywoman who became an activist and gave speeches to do with working rights for women. It’s absolutely remarkable. Modernist thinking at that time was so incredible, with these women making huge strides.”
Mulvey jumps to the present, to the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. “Clare Daly’s speech in the Dáil afterwards,” she explains, “is part of the text as well. And Elizabeth Coppin’s harrowing account of the Magdalene laundries – she spent 18 years being incarcerated, in a State school and then in the laundries. Just horrific accounts. It’s still quite despairing. That’s part of the discourse for the main piece that will be performed.”
The other work of hers featured in the festival is called Entry and Exit Wound. “That’s based on a piece by Edward Denniston, who is a poet, and wrote a piece about the Civil War. The texts are culled from his poem Text for a Civil War.”
Mulvey has a grá for electronic processing and soundscapes, though her earliest encounters with the world of programming were fraught. “I had the opportunity to take a course with Ambrose Field and Tony Myatt at the University of York – they were the two people over the electronics department at the time. I was disastrous. Really bad, actually. I would do something unorthodox and end up with the wrong idea, even though it was something that might be interesting.”
In spite of that, she didn’t lose heart. “I really liked the idea that electronics would be part of my discourse in some way, part of my language. So I looked at CSound for a start, and then at other software. I was interested because you can transform any sound electronically. You can make something that’s unpitched pitched. You can do a huge amount of filtering; you can explore the anomalies that happen with sound. I’m not a specialist in electronics. I use it as a composition tool. I like to have the choice.” She talks about the possibilities of virtual reality with the same kind of enthusiasm.
Mulvey grew up with the expectation of becoming a music teacher. The shift into composition, she says, “actually happened quite by accident. I had a tutorial with the late Eric Sweeney. I happened to be on my own at the time – other members of the class were sick. We went and had a few discussions about contemporary music. He was showing me the 12-tone system, the various techniques. And from then I really loved it. I produced a lot of work, and he was quite encouraging. It’s from those beginnings that I decided to become a composer.”
Her teachers included the Bolivian composer Agustín Fernández at Queen’s University Belfast, when he was composer-in-residence there. His concentration was on rhythmic techniques. With Nicola LeFanu in York, Mulvey explored pacing within pieces, extending motifs and motivic development. “As you know,” she says, “young composers are inclined to have a lot of ideas. But sometimes they can’t always follow through that well. What they write is quite terse. They end some kind of a discourse at a point when you feel they could have extended it. Or they’re not maybe looking at the material, to expand more on the ideas that they’ve actually started. These were issues that Nicola really addressed.”
She also took lessons with the late Persian composer Hormoz Farhat while he was professor of music at Trinity College Dublin – Farhat always preferred the description Persian to Iranian. “Farhat concentrated on variation with me. He wanted me to write variation after variation. I think that was illuminating, really, though I didn’t quite understand it at the time. But when I think about it, varying your material and getting the most from everything, it was brilliant. He just wanted to extract and extrapolate the most that’s possible from material.”
Sweeney seems to have had the kind of enthusiasm that helped to erase the perception of creative boundaries. Mulvey’s first work while at college at Waterford Institute of Technology (now South East Technological University) was a brass quintet as incidental music for a play, but the second was a fully fledged symphony for the student orchestra to play. “It was just a really great ethos to have. With Eric we had a lot of practical experience as well as the theoretical.”
Given that Mulvey is a teacher herself, a question about teaching is inevitable: what can and can’t you teach about composition? “You can teach techniques,” she says. “That’s a very fundamental part of it. You can’t teach inspiration. You can inspire, maybe, by pointing to different things. It doesn’t matter whether it’s to do directly with the craft or whether it’s outside the craft – poetry or dance, or anything else: sculpture, painting, art.”
“You can point,” she adds. “But you don’t know if they’re going to actually think of different ways to work with this particular material, or this artefact, or whatever. Either way, they’re going to have the technique. Without techniques you can’t really apply different perspectives on material. But the well has to be fairly worked on for ideas to emerge. That takes a good bit of time. "
Mulvey managed to keep composing during the lockdowns; her greatest regret seems to have been the loss of public performances. At the live event, she points out, “you can hear all the nuances, and that’s completely different.”
Is there any work she sees as an ugly duckling in her output? “There are a few. There are some pieces that have never been performed, so I’d definitely like to hear them.” She singles out an unheard piece she wrote for Chamber Choir Ireland. “I’d like to hear that at some point. That would be nice.”
Mulvey answers the question about her favourite in a flash. “Probably Akanos, because it brought me to World Music Days, where it got a great performance by the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. A lot of opportunities opened then, and just kept opening after that.” She becomes ruminative, “But then it’s always your last work … and your next work as well.”
Finding a Voice runs in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, from Wednesday, March 8th, to Sunday, March 12th. Gráinne Mulvey’s works feature in the 7.30pm concert on Friday, March 10th
