Irish clarinettist Carol McGonnell on the music of Ann Cleare: ‘It’s like pieces of puzzle that can be moved around to create a journey’

This year’s Dublin International Chamber Music Festival opens with a concert at Richmond Barracks in Inchicore. What’s left of the barracks, just a ghost of its former self, is now an attractive cultural centre. But in 1916 it was where the leaders of the Rising were court-martialled, and where some 3,000 suspected insurgents were also held.

Mary McAuliffe and Liz Gillis have written a book about the 77 women who were among their number. And, by coincidence, the festival programme that will soon be played by the Irish clarinettist Carol McGonnell and the US new-music specialists the Jack Quartet is entirely of music by women.

McGonnell, whom the Los Angeles Times has called an “elastic, exacting, stupendous soloist”, plays in Meridians, a new clarinet quintet by the Irish composer Ann Cleare, and Duft, a solo piece by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died last year at the age of 70. “I really, really wanted to programme Saariaho, because it’s the anniversary of her death. And I thought Duft would be a very nice pairing with Ann’s music, which I’ve been playing for more than a decade.”

She calls Cleare “an extremely philosophical composer” who has “a very, very interesting way of using sound”. And she describes the composer’s approach in a way that evokes a kind of musical pointillism, saying that “it’s like pieces of puzzle that can be moved around and placed at different points to create a kind of journey. And I also think Ann has really found a personal way of creating form in her pieces.”

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The new work takes its inspiration from the barracks itself; Cleare says it “treats this storied place as a force field of sonorous energies and vectors with a form that mirrors the architecture of the space”.

‘... my impression is that she really set out to somehow capture the essence of the clarinet, the smell of the sound world of the clarinet, a kind of visceral essence of the instrument’

—  Carol McGonnell on Duft, a piece for solo clarinet by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho

McGonnell describes Saariaho as “using sound and harmony in a very, very different way”, likening the effect to “living worlds or universes that move, transmute and transform their way through a piece”. The composer, she says, has “spoken about having had almost a complete synaesthesia, not just seeing sound as colour but also as a physical feeling, and with a smell.

“Interestingly, ‘duft’ means ‘scent’ in German. She was asked to write the piece by Jörg Widmann [the clarinettist and former principal conductor of the Irish Chamber Orchestra] in 2012 for the International Clarinet Competition in Freiburg. And my impression is that she really set out to somehow capture the essence of the clarinet, the smell of the sound world of the clarinet, a kind of visceral essence of the instrument. Which I don’t think anyone else done in such a sensory way.”

When McGonnell programmed the Saariaho she was thinking of it as a stark contrast to the then not yet written work by Cleare, whose style, it turns out, has been going through a transformation. “The new work has been conceived specifically with the space at Richmond Barracks in mind. There’s going to be quite a lot of physical movement, and for the majority of the piece I’ll be moving from station to station around and through the space before I finally join the quartet at the end. I’m really looking forward to putting it together with the Jack Quartet, because what I’m finding so far, working on my own part, is that it’s quite a new departure for Ann.”

McGonnell and the quartet players have worked together for many years in New York; this is the first time they will come together as a quintet. And, as Jack’s viola player John Pickford Richards explains, Cleare is no stranger to them, either. “We worked with her before, when she was at Harvard. We’ve also played a quartet which she wrote for the Diotima Quartet – and, now that I think about it, that piece was also sort of spatialised, with the viola separated far away from the other three. But it was quite complicated. And I have seen what exists of the score so far for the new piece. And it looks, yeah, very different, but very beautiful. Ann made a nice video for us of the space where we’ll be playing and pointed out where everyone will be.”

‘I think futuristic is a good word to describe her music. So far ahead of her time. And she was working with a lot of interesting preserial techniques with rhythm and dynamics and pitches’

—  John Pickford Richards, violist from the Jack Quartet, on 20th century US composer Ruth Crawford Seeger

The Jack Quartet, which the New York Times has praised as “one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles”, are also playing the sole string quartet by American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53), who was stepmother of the folk singer Pete Seeger. She wrote her string quartet in 1931. “I think futuristic is a good word to describe her music,” says Pickford Richards. “So far ahead of her time. And she was working with a lot of interesting preserial techniques with rhythm and dynamics and pitches. It’s so interesting, because when I first heard the piece I thought about it as coming from the later part of the century. I’m amazed that she was doing it so, so much earlier and that people don’t really realise that. This quartet really stands out as the pinnacle of her output.”

The other work on the programme is Three Imaginary Chansons, by the Korean-American composer Juri Seo. “We’ve known her for quite a while, and she’s gotten interested in extended just intonation, which is kind of like a hobby of ours, a really passionate interest.” The quartet is part of Jack’s Modern Medieval Project, which “explores the connections of musicality and thought between European composers of the past and the voices of American music today”.

The composers back then, says Pickford Richards, “were writing so virtuosically and complexly, I think because they were experimenting with notation, and that allowed them to do all these really strange, weird things. And it sounds a lot like what composers are doing now. She has taken the possibilities of notation to an extreme. It’s cool that these Three Imaginary Chansons are so emotional, so much fun and so energetic. And they have this really peculiar and beautiful resonant harmony.”

Carol McGonnell and the Jack Quartet play Ruth Crawford Seeger, Kaija Saariaho, Juri Seo and Ann Cleare at Richmond Barracks on Tuesday, June 4th, at 7.30pm, as the opening concert of this year’s Dublin International Chamber Music Festival, which runs until Sunday, June 9th