John Kinsella is unusual among Irish composers for his concentration on writing symphonies. He was, however, something of a late beginner, not completing his First Symphony until 1984, when he was 52. On the other hand, you could argue he was exactly the opposite: as a teenager in the late 1940s, one of his first works was a symphony which he valiantly submitted as an entry for RTE's Carolan Prize.
"The adjudicator was Sir Arnold Bax that year. I remember when I got my score back that the pages were turned up to about half-way through, after which I think he lost interest. I remember I gave that score to Eamonn O Gallchobhair at one stage. I'm not quite sure where it is now. Just as well."
Kinsella is essentially self-taught as a composer, and O Gallchobhair's is the only name he mentions in connection with tuition. "I had a couple of composition lessons with him. He used to spend a lot of his time denouncing people like Beethoven for writing in short, motivic style. He said that long, flowing melodies are the essence of what music should be all about." When he was at the period in his life when he might have devoted himself to formal compositional study, Kinsella didn't really know who to study with. "I think I always secretly said to myself, you really have to make your own way in this area; it's not a subject you can study."
The work and the study became as one. And he was fortunate that his early passion for music evoked a very sympathetic response within his family. "I'm very grateful to my father for the fact that he used to buy me scores. I was always interested in listening to music. Even before the age of 10, I was always heavily affected by certain pieces of music. I built up a library of scores very quickly and I got into the habit of always having the score, if possible, when I was listening to something." This is where he got his schooling, soaking in, as he puts it, anything he could lay his hands on.
His early aspiration - and it sounds strange coming from a man so consistently soft-spoken and undemonstrative of gesture - was to cultivate a sense of the dramatic. "How far I went down that road or how much I achieved is, I suppose, open to debate. I like drama in music. I wouldn't say I prefer Handel to Bach, but I see characteristics in Handel that I would very much aspire to, if I could possibly get anywhere near them. Whereas Bach I just stand back from, and more or less wave the white flag."
He was stirred by Beethoven, too, and by Sibelius, whose name recurs more than that of any other composer. "You could hardly call him a dramatic composer, but there were certain things about the sounds he makes, the melodic turns and the kind of harmonic language he uses that I stuck to like a limpet straight away. I just loved it. It's an unquestioning kind of love that I have for his music, even though you can see the seamy sides at times. I don't mind about that. I didn't consciously model myself on anybody, but the influences are bound to show through."
The period of "apprenticeship" composition extended for a decade or more. The earliest work of Kinsella's that I've seen mentioned dates from 1959, and he talks musingly of deleting some of the earliest entries from his current work-list. By the mid-Sixties he found himself drawn by the attractions of serial composition, and some years later music became the centre of his career, when he moved from Player Wills (where he'd been a computer programmer) to the music department of RTE as a senior assistant. He rose through the ranks to become head of music in 1983, a post he held for five years before taking early retirement to concentrate on composition.
His work with RTE brought him exposure to a wide range of contemporary composition. "I was involved in going to the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers on behalf of RTE. I used to go to that every year in Paris for a week. On certain years you'd hear maybe up to 85 or 90 pieces of music. I had a surfeit of the `international' style that was coming through there; you weren't quite sure after a while whether you were listening to a North Korean composer or a Brazilian. And I began to lose an interest in the international style which was emerging from serialism. I tried to find my own path after that."
He sees his large-scale choral and orchestral work A Selected Life (1973, setting words by his brother, the poet Thomas Kinsella) as the last big work of his serial period. "In writing A Selected Life, there were certain techniques which I'd acquired which made it very easy to build up textures which seemed to work quite well. But I was always drawn to softening the edges of the music and asking it to say something simple. You'll even find in that work there are moments like that - which I regard as the more successful ones. I saw it as a very easy style to create works in, which maybe didn't draw out anything from yourself. The problem was to try and find a language where you were actually saying something individual, or you were actually giving something of yourself to it, rather than simply writing music. "I think the first work in my turnaround was a commission from the Arts Council to write something for the Pearse centenary in 1979. I wrote a piece based on the poem The Wayfarer. It was a 15-minute, orchestral dissertation on the poem, which was guided by the shape of the poem itself. I suppose I understood the nature of the commission to indicate that perhaps the style shouldn't be too way-out; and it just came at the moment when I was looking for something else. It was at a fortunate moment. That was the start of the more melodic style."
It was the conductor Albert Rosen who pointed out that an orchestral work called Essay was symphonic enough to work as the first movement of a symphony. The composer took the hint and finished his First Symphony in 1984 and his Second in 1988, reaching his Seventh last month (a commission from the Cork School of Music Symphony Orchestra) and is already raring to go on his Eighth.
He clearly feels at home with symphonies and quotes the American doyen Elliott Carter's alignment with the baroque for clarification. "I was reading Carter recently, who says he's more of a concerto grosso man than a symphonist - not that I would bracket myself with Carter, by a long shot. But I could see myself as more of a symphonist than a concerto grosso type."
The traditional symphonic crafts of motivic development and tonal tension are high among Kinsella's concerns. "The Fourth Symphony is based on one five-note motif, which is just a little turn. I tried to keep it going for 46 minutes, based on this little turn. The work is out on a Marco Polo CD now, so if anybody wants to follow it up, they can see what I'm talking about."
The Third Symphony, also on the CD, is being heard at the National Concert Hall tonight. "The Third fell into what I think is a kind of unique structure - two movements framed by an epilogue and prologue with an intermezzo binding the whole thing together, commenting on what's happening, summing up what's happened and setting out the pattern before it happens. The unfortunate person there is the first bassoon; all the weight falls on him to do all that. That particular symphony was written very quickly, which seems to be a good sign."
Since leaving RTE, Kinsella has been largely out of the public eye, although he has served on the board of the NCH and was a member of the group which produced the PIANO Report. He often sounds pessimistic about the state of musical life in Ireland, particularly as regards education, but he's more upbeat about the outcome of PIANO. "I think it's gotten somewhere, certainly in the orchestral end of things, insofar as the standing of music and the orchestras in RTE will be upped. That's some achievement, which I suppose is a kind of compromise game. You're not going to publish a report and have everything implemented and end up either in Valhalla - or wish you hadn't written it. I think a lot of it has been taken on board by RTE."
The members of the PIANO review body went on a fact-finding mission to Finland, a country of comparable population and period of independence to Ireland. "On a three-day visit there it was quite a sobering experience to find the standing that music had in the society at large." He lists the activity in schools, the Sibelius Academy, the choirs, and the fact of "finding 25 symphony orchestras in a country of five million people - and everything else in proportion to that! One could see straight away that in Ireland we hadn't even left the starting block as regards music."
The National Symphony Orchestra under Kasper de Roo plays John Kinsella's Third Symphony at the National Concert Hall tonight in a programme that also includes Berlioz, Mozart and Beethoven. His chamber work, Symphony for Five, features in a lunchtime concert by Concorde.
