Arts at the Crossroads: The Celtic Tiger largely passed by the world of classical music, whose left hand seems not to know what its right is doing, writes Michael Dervan
Imagine a Dublin where full-scale opera productions averaged out at about one a week during the performing season. Where, from October to March, there were twice-weekly chamber-music recitals by leading international performers. Where the music of our time was an unquestioned component of the output of the National Symphony Orchestra. And where access to that orchestral repertoire was largely free.
What I'm describing is actually the situation as it was in Dublin when I left school, more than 30 years ago. There was also an annual festival of what was then branded "20th-century music", which brought leading figures of the contemporary music scene - composers as well as performers - to Dublin. Chamber music was centred at the RDS, which offered its recitals on the afternoon and evening of the same day, and on top of that the Limerick Music Association was in its heyday, scouring Eastern Europe for emerging talent eager to play in the West for the reward of hard currency.
The opera, of course, was concentrated in two seasons - 30 performances of eight works in 1970. And the free orchestral performances took place in the St Francis Xavier Hall (now the SFX), where facilities for players and listeners alike were on the primitive side of basic. One of the city's major music venues in those years was the Exam Hall of Trinity College - that's where the young Irish Chamber Orchestra gave most of its concerts - and a great range of spaces was called into use because there was no concert hall as such.
John Barbirolli conducted the Verdi Requiem and Elgar's Dream of Gerontius at the National Stadium. Kyung-Wha Chung played the Berg Violin Concerto at St Patrick's in Drumcondra. Rostropovich played Bach cello suites at St Patrick's Cathedral. Both the RTÉ String Quartet and the RTÉ Singers performed in the National Gallery of Ireland (two other streams of free concerts).
The announcement of a Government- funded John F Kennedy Memorial Hall sited in Dublin had made front-page news in 1964 and, although the design was completed, the project came to naught. Dublin shared the shame of Oslo, of being a European capital without a concert hall. Oslo got its hall in 1977; Dublin followed just four years later.
The opening of the National Concert Hall transformed the perception of musical life in Dublin. Events that had once been spread across a range of venues - the London Symphony Orchestra played in the main hall of the RDS, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in the members' library, the Berlin Chamber Orchestra in the Round Room of the Mansion House, the Philharmonia Hungarica in Whitefriar Street Church - now all turned up in the NCH. It appeared the new hall had brought about an increase in activity.
A couple of years on, I compared before and after, and the truth was that things weren't on the up. It was just the single- venue concentration creating an illusion.
In the mid 1980s, in a second-hand bookshop, I came across the Radio Éireann annual report for 1947, the first year in which the national broadcaster's symphony orchestra was in full swing. You can imagine my surprise to find the orchestra's level of concert activity was higher in the late 1940s than in the 1980s, and that the early commitment to Irish music - 18 performances in a year - was extraordinary by the standards I was used to.
The number of Irish composers in recent decades has been comfortably 10 times higher than the number in the 1940s. But, as the 1947 report made clear, composers' access to the national orchestra had gone in the opposite direction.
The year 1985 was designated European Music Year, in celebration of the fact that Bach, Handel and Scarlatti had all been born 200 years before. This focused my attention on European activities in a new way and brought flows of information about European activity through my letter box. I discovered that the city of Bonn, with a population of less than 300,000, was spending more on opera and ballet in a year than the Government of Ireland did on all the arts in this country through the Arts Council.
Deaf Ears?, Donald Herron's report on the provision of music education in Irish schools, found our children to be the least well provided for in Europe. The statistics were shocking. There were just four official schools of music here, theoretically leaving each with a population of 850,000 to serve. The Department of Education and Science declined to comment on Herron's findings. This is the same department that still offers schools a grant of €285 towards establishing orchestras and allows secondary-school pupils to be examined in music performance which it does not resource at all.
The sad thing was that most of us took all of this for granted, just as we did the fact that there was no full-time, third-level training for singers or instrumentalists and that most musicians might as well train abroad anyway, as that was where they were going to have to stay to find work.
It's still shocking to realise that, in 1989, when RTÉ announced it would create 22 new posts to turn the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra into the National Symphony Orchestra, these were the first new jobs for musicians in this country since the mid 1950s. Sad to relate, Ray Burke's Broadcasting Act 1990 got in the way of that particular expansion, and it has never been completed.
So here we are in the 21st century, with neither an opera house nor a national opera company - with all that means in lost employment opportunities for singers and musicians - with a system of music education that's still bottom of the league in Europe and a Government that seems to have difficulty with bringing major music projects to fruition. The system of priorities that stymied the Kennedy memorial hall is still around to abandon the Irish Academy for the Performing Arts (IAPA) and obstruct the badly needed rehousing of Cork School of Music. And the official perception of music as a marginal activity is sadly written all over Arts Council decision making, too.
Think about it. This country has just one state-subsidised venue devoted to the performance of classical music: the National Concert Hall. Ten years ago, the first new concert hall to be built here in the 20th century opened its doors - the NCH involved the seriously inadequate renovation of a 19th-century space. Yet in those 10 years, the Arts Council has never found its way to funding a programme of activity in the University Concert Hall in Limerick, in spite of the fact that the city was designated a centre of excellence for music in the first Arts Council Arts Plan. The Helix in Dublin, which seems from a listener's point of view to be the best hall in the country, opened last year and now finds itself in the same situation. The dedicated contemporary music ensemble that was one of the musical pillars in the second Arts Plan suffered a fate even more ignominious than that of IAPA. The abandonment of IAPA was at least formally acknowledged by a public announcement. The contemporary music ensemble has simply never been heard of again.
Things may be changing in Merrion Square. I inquired about the concert-halls issue and was told that, "while there may have been some sort of history down the years, there should be no reason why music programmes should not take place there and be supported by the Arts Council". The same, it seems, applies to the support of independently promoted chamber music in Dublin - long a black spot in Arts Council funding - in both cases, of course, subject to conformity with the current Arts Plan.
Of course, many things have been getting better. Opera Theatre Company, Co-Opera, the Irish Chamber Orchestra and Music Network have transformed the opportunities and musical experiences of audiences around the country. Dedicated teachers and committed parents continue to work against the odds in music education, and music schools continue to sprout up to fill the yawning gaps in state provision. Anyone who wants to see what official structures can do to provide musical tuition to children across a wide social spectrum just needs to look across the border to Northern Ireland.
Whatever way you view at it, the National Concert Hall is a strange anomaly. It's an institution that defines its national role as that of a receiving venue, which accepts bookings from anyone willing to pay its hiring charges, and puts on a series of celebrity and international orchestral concerts that's comparable to what you'll find in many a regional British city. In recent years it's added a Composers' Choice series, but the amazing thing about this is that it took all of 19 years for the NCH to establish any sort of relationship with new Irish music and, however welcome, that relationship actually takes the form of a low-budget concert series in Holy Week, traditionally one of the deadest times for concert activity. The NCH's programming perpetuates the official state attitudes that have left new music in Ireland ghettoised for so long.
With two orchestras, a string quartet, a number of amateur choirs and a heavy investment in the professional National Chamber Choir, RTÉ is the major player in Irish musical life. It pats itself on the back - as well it might, given the level of its investment - but it behaves as a monopolist, just as Aer Lingus used to and Eircom still wants to. It dictates to most everybody it deals with, with pretty sorry results in recent years through friction with Wexford Festival Opera, the NCH and the loss of the proposed residency by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at the Helix. Its handling of the National Symphony Orchestra was so uncertain that a ministerial review group, PIANO, recommended that the NSO be put under independent management.
RTÉ sees its problems in terms of money and structure. But the biggest issue it faces in the area of music is actually about artistic issues - its management imperative is about adequacy, not excellence. Alternative ways of working are easy to find, even in the history of RTÉ. Bryden Thomson transformed the artistic fortunes of the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra in the mid-1980s. Celso Antunes has just done the same with the National Chamber Choir. And the Irish Chamber Orchestra has done it twice, by its relocation to Limerick as a year-round, independent ensemble in 1995 and by the appointment of Nicholas McGegan as music director, last year. Its success is a perfect example of the power of direct intervention, in this case, and against all the odds, by the Arts Council.
That council has now, in its wisdom, cut funding to the orchestra, the only one of its kind in the country, by 19 per cent, because it's classified as a "non venue-based production company". But then, last year, the Arts Council gave €341,000 to the Contemporary Music Centre - classified as a "resource organisation" - in a year when the commissioning of the raw material of that resource organisation, new music, was cut by 75 per cent, to €23,000. It's not hard to work out how many composers can be supported through such a small sum.
Sometimes, it seems, wherever I look in the musical world, I see a form of madness. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and they never knew how to clap together anyway. Planning and development seem more a matter of individual enterprise than long-term institutional care. Yet progress has been made, and on a wider range of fronts than I am able to touch on here. But the extent of that progress comes to seem extremely limited when viewed in the context of the developments that can be taken for granted in other European countries. And, as licence problems in RTÉ and Government cuts have shown, that progress is precarious. The ground-breaking policy statement that RTÉ's music director promised four years ago has never materialised. An 8 per cent cut in Arts Council funding led to a 19 per cent cut for the Irish Chamber Orchestra, which led to a 30 per cent loss in guaranteed work for the only orchestral musicians on long-term contracts outside RTÉ.
Look at it another way. Maybe we'll reach a viable and nurturing solution for music in Ireland when we finally solve the Zen riddle of the sound of one hand clapping.Ireland has long been a net exporter of musicians. There are fewer than 200 jobs at home, and the freelance scene is heavily skewed by those who do have posts making up for low salaries by taking on extra work.
David Adams, who studied music at Trinity College in Dublin and later trained as an organist and harpsichordist in Freiburg and Amsterdam, looked like someone who was destined to stay abroad. He left Amsterdam for family reasons. "We had three kids, and we realised we didn't want to raise them in a foreign culture."
His work is as varied as you could imagine. He teaches harpsichord at DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, plays contemporary music in the Crash Ensemble and early music in Christ Church Baroque, has worked with Opera Theatre Company (including their current Ariodante) and has played in the National Symphony Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. His wife, Mary, works too, and they've managed to get a mortgage on "a tiny council house", onto which they're putting an extension "to last us for the rest of our lives".
At the moment, he says, "we're doing fine, basically because we both work so hard". And there are no serious regrets about coming back. "The only thing I really miss is that they have fantastic old organs over there, and they're inspiring to play. Over here there are very few organs of that standard."
Tomorrow: Hugh Linehan asks if Irish film-making has lived up to its early promise
Thursday: Aidan Dunne on the coming of age of the visual arts in Ireland
Friday: Karen Fricker on how a changing Ireland is changing Irish theatre
