Michael Dervan reports from the Cork International Choral Festival.

Cork International Choral Festival is many things to many people. With 134 choirs and nearly 5,000 participants, that's bound to be the case. Choirs from around Europe compete for the €2,500 top prize in the Fleischmann International Trophy Competition (only one of this year's 11 entrants was from Ireland), and the programme of performances by visiting groups (including choirs not involved in the competitions) stretches out not only into Co Cork but also into Co Kerry.

The festival's annual seminar on contemporary choral music is a forum for new work, with performances and discussion of specially commissioned additions to the choral repertoire. In the days when Aloys Fleischmann, the festival's founder, was still in charge, the seminar was built around his particular style of music analysis. Today, the discussion is more general, and largely driven by the inclinations and openness of the composers involved.

There was a time when the festival reached out to composers of the calibre of Darius Milhaud, William Walton, Rodion Shchedrin and John Tavener, three at a time. These days there are just two, one Irish - this year Gráinne Mulvey (born 1966) - and one from abroad. The visitor this time was Javier Busto (born 1949), from the Basque country. The third seminar session was an informative talk by Finnish music publisher Reijo Kekkonen.

Mulvey produced a Stabat Mater setting that, she said, largely treated the words for their phonetic value, taking their meaning (and, presumably, their familiarity) as providing the strength to permit such an approach. The piece, her first work for choir, was written for the 17 voices of the National Chamber Choir (the seminar's choir-in-residence) and makes much use of cluster effects ("chromatic saturation", in the composer's words) and quarter tones, for melodic inflection.

The style leans heavily on 1960s avant-garde gestures, a fact explained by Mulvey's fondness for music of that period. There is much more of that kind of exploration to be done, she explained as she dismissed the concerns of minimalism and New Age music.

Mulvey's piece, which is of a performing difficulty that would place it out of the range of many amateur choirs, is the sort of music that has often taken a drubbing at Cork seminars. The strongest criticism on this occasion was suggested by Busto, for whom sacred texts remain sacred and who in his own work shows deep concern for the practices and values of his culture.

His Ametsetan attempts to imagine an annual festivity in honour of the Virgin Mary from the village of his birth, Hondarribia, as it might be if transposed to Ireland - Busto declared a long-standing affinity, developed at a distance, with Irish music and culture.

With its evocation of Basque festivities, through song and dance, as well as the imitation of local instruments, Ametsetan is as bluntly programmatic as, say, one of the Biblical Sonatas of Kuhnau, which brings simple musical pictorialism to bear on incidents such as the battle between David and Goliath. Busto's style has the repetitive habits of Carl Orff, but not the charm of Carmina Burana, and the folk-referential taste of Bartók and Kodály, but not their individuality or sensitivity in transforming such material. The result on this occasion (and I have heard no other pieces by this composer, who limits himself to writing for choirs) is a form of kitsch that tends to get choral music a bad name in the wider musical community.

The National Chamber Choir, under Celso Antunes, performed both works with an impressive resourcefulness, not only with technical savoir faire but also with a finely gauged adaptability of musical and imaginative response. Busto, using the Brazilian-born Antunes as interpreter, went into great detail about the references in Ametstetan as well as some of his wider musical concerns. Mulvey was rather less forthcoming, but was quietly robust and patient in the face of some not altogether straightforward lines of inquiry.

Oh, and by the way, the Irish connection that Busto revealed, when asked by a chorister, was the music of The Dubliners.