In the mid to late 20th century, the contemporary classical composer was seen as an artist burdened by the rich legacy of the past. After all, how could any mortal realistically hope to match or improve upon the achievements of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms?
Some surely did hope to or, at least, dare. After all, Stravinsky did not die until 1971, while Shostakovich was to survive him by four years. Ireland's leading international classical composer Gerald Barry, who resides at the heart of the European avant garde, is quick to point out that every composer was contemporary in his own day. And anyhow, "I don't like the word `classical', I write music."
No number of encounters with musicians prepares one for the utter difference of meeting a creature as singular as a composer: the supreme example of visionary merged with technician, an artist who dictates rather than interprets. Not only does the composer walk about with other people's music as well as their own in his or her head and heart; they co-exist with the business of creating and shaping music going on in their imaginations. Even when in a lively mood, happy enough with his immediate busy future, Barry of the manic schoolboy smile does not wish to give the impression he lives in a state of constant joy. "I move between content and," he pauses, reaching for the exact word - because exactness is important to him . . . Misery? "Yes misery," he laughs, but makes it clear he is not satisfied with the word, it is not quite what he is looking for.
But he makes no secret of the fact that his personality possesses its own extremes. Now 48, he retains traces of his long-lived student aura but, whether he is smiling or serious, there is no mistaking Barry's deliberate innocence. He lives for music and for music alone. As an artist he seems to be in a hurry. Who is he writing for? "Myself."
He has taken chances and the result is a large body of unpredictable, dramatic and challenging work which is diverse and frenetic, at times even aggressive. It is also intensely cerebral, though he quickly counters this observation with: "I think my work is passionate and emotional." It is. But no one, not even Barry, who says "it's like breathing" could suggest it is easy. Its mood shifts are remarkable. Barry's genius may lie in his extraordinary narrative powers; his is a music of pictures which owes its technical virtuosity to influences as diverse as Bach and Berg. It is important to remember that in common with Bach, Barry also served his time as a church organist.
If any single work among his oeuvre can possibly represent the originality and energy of Barry it is his wonderful skit, The Intelligence Park (1989), an opera about writing an opera, which parades his inventiveness, feel for the image, understanding of the convention and, above all, his rampaging wit. Then again, all of these qualities are evident in the several versions of Sur Les Pointes, whether in its guise as a beautiful little transcription for wind band, to its dazzling metamorphosis as a virtuoso piano piece.
As a composer, Barry is not afraid of silences, although this is more true of the early chamber and instrumental pieces than of his recent work marked as it is by an increased rhythmic vigour. There are spaces left as if to breathe or, perhaps more accurately, to think.
For all the instinct at work, Barry's music is thought - it thinks, as he does, non-stop. Even when speaking, which he does at speed, all vivid images and hand gestures, he gives the impression of having a mind subdivided into various workshops, all of which are simultaneously busy. Keeping track of his facial expressions isn't easy as they flit from absent-minded, to intense, to wary. He would like to be scatty, but he is precise. This precision comes so naturally to him that even when telling a funny story, complete with flamboyant detail, he cuts back those colourful flourishes, albeit afterwards, in the interest of strictest accuracy. Teasing, playful and capricious, he is also demanding - ask any musician who has performed his work.
Having just received an award from the School of Irish Studies Foundation, Barry is pleased, yet well aware of the demands facing him over the next few weeks. Tomorrow night he is the subject of the BBC Radio 3 Composer Portrait, a 90-minute interview. On Saturday Wiener Blut, written for 13 instruments, premieres at the 53rd Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk. Commissioned by the festival, the work is but one of several Barry pieces to be performed as he is also the festival's featured composer.
From June 21st to 25th, Barry's achievement will be celebrated in another festival, this one closer to home, organised and to be broadcast by Lyric FM and including the premiere of 1998, a piece for violin and piano. Curiously for an Irish artist who has been commissioned several times by the BBC, Barry has yet to be commissioned by RTE. Yet, unlike any performer, artist or writer I've ever met, he offers no complaints about anything. Barry is not claiming to be deliriously happy but he is not complaining - even about the fact that he is on his way to send a bank draft for nearly £1,000 to the BBC to cover one day's rehearsal fees, accepting that he has to pay for the use of a practice room.
Currently looking both exhausted and euphoric, Barry is a nervy character with the resonant speaking voice of a stage actor. His richly bewildering accent is a mixture of Co Clare crossed with lengthy periods in Germany speaking German and four years teaching composition at University College Cork from 1982, until he was elected to Aosdana.
Music began to lasso him at an early age. "My uncle, Paddy Murphy, was a famous concertina player. I was always aware of music." He appears to have experienced several magic moments before becoming fully engaged by it.
As a small boy attending the local church, he recalls the effects the harmony changing had on him. Then there was the day he was experimenting with an old radio, "the family wireless", and a random twist of the knob introduced him to a beautiful sound he now knows as Handel's Largo. Unlike many composers, Barry does not seem to have first been committed to life as a performer. For him his future as a composer was decided the day he came across a harmonium in a church.
"Right then and there I knew with an absolute certainty that music would be my life, and it is. I live it utterly." The practical difficulties facing the contemporary composer are obvious; concert promoters are wary of including pieces concert-goers are not familiar with and opt for the traditional and well-loved repertoire.
Born the youngest of four children, Barry grew up in Clarecastle, Co Clare, a couple of miles outside Ennis, "of which it has now become a suburb". His childhood was wonderful. He enjoys speaking about his father, a merchant marine radio officer with a talent for impersonation. "He was particularly good at imitating the patois of the dock workers in Lagos," says Barry, who seems to believe this could help explain his own odd accent. "My mother had a good ear as well," he adds.
The young Barry seems to have known his mind very early in life. From the local Clarecastle school, he went on to St Flannan's in Ennis, "I was the only boy interested in music", and he also took piano lessons in the town. By then he realised a world of musical riches was ready to be experienced among his piano teacher's record collection. The Barry family at that time did not have a record player so he made a deal with the teacher to spend the first half of his lesson being taught; the second half was devoted to learning by listening to her records.
"The first record I ever bought was Beethoven's Emperor Concerto." Beethoven remains his definitive musical hero and while Barry's piano career was brief, he obviously thinks and composes as a keyboard player. The piano is central to his sound. All of his composing is done at it. "If I didn't have a piano, I wouldn't compose anything," he says.
Although he passed the first parts of his piano exams, the young Barry then set off for Limerick, to study the violin at the school of music there. But he encountered non-musical difficulties. For one, it was too far to cycle. Alternative transport had to be found and he discovered a tendency towards motion sickness. Arriving for his lessons already queasy, his nausea was intensified by the foul smells drifting into the school from the tanning factory across the road. So playing the violin became associated with feeling sick. He pawned it to buy records.
On leaving school, he arrived at UCD in 1969 to study music and was to study piano under Elizabeth Huban. Barry, having created an atmosphere of colourful memoir, seems to have now reached a chapter called "my college adventures" but proves succinct on the subject of university. "I was bored; it was very boring the way music was taught. Passionless. I didn't like it."
Still, he didn't waste his time. Having collected a first-class honours degree, he then cycled off to Ailesbury Road where he knocked at the doors of the various embassies, looking for grants and scholarships. He laughs outright when asked was he a supporter of the European Union. "I'm brilliant at finding out about grants," he says with the same candour he later admits to being "a champion sleeper. I love sleeping. But I am a night person. I tend to stay up working all night and then sleep late." This love of sleeping surfaces later.
The first government to take up the opportunity of sponsoring Gerald Barry was that of the Netherlands. In 1973 he found himself studying composition in Amsterdam with Peter Schat and studied organ with Piet Kee. He returned to Ireland and completed a master's degree at UCD.
The next European government to help Barry was Germany's. In late 1975 he went to Cologne to the Hochschule fur Musick to study under one of the most formidable figures of 20th-century music, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Did Barry like Stockhausen? "He's the not the kind of person you like. He's the master and that's what you get."
For Barry, Stockhausen created an atmosphere comparable to the effect of motion sickness. The old nausea returned, this time from tension, but while Barry did not like the master's methods, he did learn from him. Far warmer impressions are evoked by the mention of another of his famous former teachers, the Argentinean composer Mauricio Kagel. He enjoyed his time with Kagel and remembers sharing a concert programme with him years later. "I admitted I was feeling so nervous, and Kagel said, `let's pretend we are both dead and are looking back 300 years on a performance of our work'. "
With grants finally running out, Barry spent a year as an organist for a small church outside Cologne. There was a catch. "You had to be Protestant. I'm not. But . . . " his face brightening " . . . I lied."
A series of evasive stories delayed the time when he would finally have to show documents confirming he was indeed a Protestant. He was found out. Aside from the matter of religion, there was another problem: Barry is not good at getting up early. "I think the pastor got fed up with me always rushing in late."
In 1977 the Austrian government provided a grant for which the recipient was obliged to be resident in Vienna. Barry was lucky in that Friedrich Cerha, under whom he was studying composition, gave him freedom, requiring him to stay there only long enough to collect his cheques.
His first work, Things that Gain by Being Painted, written for soprano, speaker, cello and piano, with the cello part supervised by the understanding Cerha, dates from this time. During the next year he was to record two pieces, "------------" (a graphical representation of the title "solid line") and "0", both written for two pianos and both inspired by the artist Rothko. It is interesting that Barry, in many ways the musical equivalent of painter Sean Scully, should be so impressed with Rothko's work, which he says he has to stare at for hours. The same thought process is central to Barry's work, which tests and teases both listener and performer. Barry's is physical music. The sheer physical work of composing it is often exhausting and even destructive. He refers to a section of the ceiling at his home in Arbour Hill, Dublin, which has become loose from the constant pounding of the piano. Playing into the night and early morning could prove problematic, but he has been fortunate in his neighbour.
Barry's parents feature throughout his conversation. It seems he has remained their child. He says he does not feel like an adult. It may come from having no responsibilities aside from himself and his work. At one point, this self-contained character says "I'm very mean" then immediately adds, "but I'm also very generous".
When his mother was dying, she asked "has Gerald's opera been premiered yet?" The Intelligence Park, with its clever libretto by Vincent Deane, premiered at the Almedia Theatre in London in July 1990. It was nine years in the making. The pleasure of its finally making the stage was partly diminished by Mrs Barry's death hours later.
Set in 1753, it is a cunning piece of work. At the time it opened, Barry made it clear he did not care for texts which are literal and bound by plot. "Qualities which attract me are coolness and a bizarre artificiality which allow extreme careering at tangents." As unpredictable and daring as anything he has written, its title alone could well describe Barry's strange, shining art with its roots in the harmonies of the organ.
But then the spiky Chevaux-de-frise, composed in 1988 to mark the 400th anniversary of the Armada, with its strident, dissonant harmonies and aggressive defensiveness, will surely in time be recognised as a classic. This is despite the reaction of the Proms audience, a traditionally jolly lot, at its premiere when it was greeted with initial silence and then outrage, complete with cries of "rubbish".
Nowadays he divides his time between Fanore in Co Clare and Dublin. "I'm a country person; I grew up in Clare. But I'm really a city type. In the country I get oppressed after a while by the isolation. The people down there know I'm from there but I also make sure they know I'm this strange individual that writes music."
All of Barry's angst comes from within. He is totally driven by one ambition: "To make wonderful music. That's all I want."
The Lyric FM Gerald Barry Festival will run at various Dublin venues from June 21st to 26th. Tickets: Tower Records, Wicklow Street, Dublin 2 (01- 6713250). Further information: 1850-212506. Web: www.lyricfm.ie
