Gerry Murphy, an Irish music teacher and composer, has just returned from the Czech Republic, where his new piano concerto was played for the first time in public - and recorded - by the young pianist Finghin Collins, a former pupil of Mr Murphy's.
I asked Mr Murphy, for public consumption, to respond to the question: "Who is Gerry Murphy?" He replied: "He was born in Limerick. He has finally lifted his head over the past few years and thought there might be more to this music-making than mere teaching, and maybe the approaching end of one career might be the beginning of another.
"He is a product of the music department of UCD. Insofar as people listen to his music, they seem to like it. He has written school operas over 25 years. He thinks music should have a melodic or harmonic structure if it is going to work, but that doesn't say that it has to be like Three Blind Mice, of course."
"Brutal and direct"
Mr Murphy has high hopes for Finghin Collins, a winner of the Clara Heskil Piano Competition, which has earned him two years' worth of engagements all over the world. Speaking of his new concerto, Mr Murphy says: "The first movement is hard-edged, brutal and direct - uncomfortable, I suppose. The second movement is elegiac. The final movement might be called a romp - light-hearted, joyful."
Mr Murphy's recent visit to the Czech Republic was not his first. Three years ago, Vienna Modern Masters recorded Dialects, his concerto for uilleann pipes and orchestra, premiered in the National Concert Hall, and a sell-out there and in Cork and Waterford.
Last summer, Mr Murphy was in the Czech Republic again with his concert overture Good Friday: Belfast - 10-4- 98. This work was inspired by the Good Friday Agreement. It had its first public performance at the Fourth International Festival of New Music for Orchestra in Olomouc, where it was played by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded for Vienna Modern Masters.
The Czechs, who have had their own cross-border problems, were quite tickled to find that a piece of music which touches on the Irish north-south imbroglio had its first performance in their own republic. The Irish Embassy in Prague cocked its ears at the approaching sound of Mr Murphy's music, and it sent its first secretary to Olomouc, in Moravia, to attend the concert and the reception that accompanied it. Moravia is just across the hills from Bohemia, the home ground of Smetana, best known as composer of Ma Vlast (My Country), and regarded by many as the father of Czech music.
Chaotic opening
Good Friday: Belfast is an overture for full orchestra with double timpani. It has a chaotic opening, which subsides to usher in the first tune, The Sash My Father Wore, going down through the orchestra in different keys and petering out uncertainly, leading to a return of chaos. It does the same for Who Fears to Speak of 98? That does not get far, either, and it is followed by some passage work for strings. A long adagio follows, with a heartfelt cello solo.
Then comes a passage with snatches of God Save the Queen, Lillibulero, A Nation Once Again, and a return of the adagio passage. Another long string passage leads to a very large climax. The penultimate part incorporates A Soldier's Song and The Sash My Father Wore.
"Oddly enough, both of those songs work together," Mr Murphy says wryly. "Maybe not perfectly. Perhaps 90 per cent or so. Just like the average working marriage, I suppose."
The work concludes loudly - crash-bang music in a very bright key of E Major - with a return to the opening, but the opening looked at, this time, in a different way, an optimistic way. And it all finishes with trumpets and drums, very loud music indeed.
Quoting from other musical works is a common habit of composers. Aaron Copland does it in the Billy the Kid suite, an endearing hymn to the old American West and one of the glories of modern music. Its treatment of old melodies is the work of a greatly skilled composer whose creative personality shines through the material he borrows and turns to his own uses.
20th-century music
Vienna Modern Masters is now the foremost recording company in the world of 20th century classical music for orchestra with notes on staves, as opposed to improvised music. In the past four or five years, each of its discs has included about a half-dozen pieces, one of which has been written by an Irish composer.
Launching the CD of Mr Murphy's overture on the Irish market, Commissioner David Byrne said, in the course of a musically literate speech: "In the Good Friday Overture, we are returned to the tense and dramatic atmospherics which have animated the peace process. . .the music replicates the rhythm and tone of those memorable hours. . .in the tense passage from dark night to a new dawn, we all aged a little, I think."
Some of those who taught with Gerry Murphy in the past remember him as one of the more engaging persons in his staffroom, where he told good stories and was valued for his ironic view of the world - both immediate and remote.