The annual Seminar on Contemporary Choral Music at the Cork Choral Festival is a forum for the performance and discussion of choral works that have been specially commissioned for the occasion. The composers have ranged from Milhaud, Walton and Blacher to Tavener, Shchedrin, Ton de Leeuw and Hans Jurgen von Bose, as well as, naturally enough, a long list of Irish names.

One of the key features of the seminars is the presence of the composer and his or her participation in the proceedings. Yet UCC's professor of music, David Harold Cox, whose department hosts the events, found himself at the end of two days last week likening this year's commissioned composers, Micheal O Suilleabhain and Ian Wilson, to "pigs in a bacon factory".

Their critic was Colin Mawby, conductor of the National Chamber Choir, who were visiting Cork to perform the commissioned works. Mawby seemed to base his assaults on a very narrow definition of the craft of choral writing, and on an obligation to point out to composers the difficulties presented by their scores.

Here, Mawby, artistic director of this country's only professional choir, showed himself eager to rubbish most of the major developments in music during the past half century. His publicly-funded choir, supported by RTE and the Arts Council, gives negligible space anywhere in its programmes to the sort of music he condemns. Depriving his singers of the technical and creative stretching of this kind of work may well explain Mawby's declaration that Ian Wilson's undemanding four-minute bluebrighteyes, took the choir some 20 hours of rehearsal to get into a less-than-perfect performing shape. That's more time than the NSO would spend on a full concert with a major new work.

Wilson is a composer who, understandably, finds that texts suitable for setting to music are rare. His approach to Frank Sewell's translation of a love poem by Cathal O Searcaigh is clear and immediate, his response to the text sensitive and exact.

Micheal O Suilleabhain is a far more articulate and wordy speaker. His Advent-inspired Maranatha has a similar expansiveness, but says far less, leaving its best wine until the plainchant and triads of the conclusion.

Neither piece stretches any particular boundaries, except perhaps as Messiaen might for a pianist who'd never gone beyond Brahms. These choral seminars are unique in the Irish musical calendar. To have had so much precious time squandered on technical nit-picking - about the impossibility of things long since actually possible - suggests that some form of mechanism is badly needed to restore the tenor of these seminars to the real world.