We're delighted to present an extract from The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916–2016.
The book, edited by Michael Dervan and published as a central part of the recent landmark Composing the Island event, sheds light on music composition, commissioning and performance in Ireland across the last century, via an array of specially commissioned essays and pen pictures, interviews, chronologies, illustrations, an extensive index, photographs and biographies. The book also highlights the major role played by RTÉ in commissioning and broadcasting music, as well as contracting so many musicians and singers to RTÉ‘s various music ensembles across the decades.
Here, acclaimed composer Jennifer Walshe offers her own Notes on Being an Irish Composer.
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Performance artist Marina Abramovic describes reading about Chris Burden crucifying himself on the bonnet of a VW Beetle in 1974. There was no proper documentation, there was no internet. She misunderstood the article and thought that Burden had people drive around L.A. with him fixed to the bonnet. Abramovic thought something along the lines of ‘if he’s going that far, well, hell, I better raise my game.’ Years later, she found out the engine was simply revved for two minutes. When I was growing up in Dublin it was difficult to access information about, let alone listen to, experimental music. So I tried to imagine it, and in some ways I am still chasing after those imagined sounds, so rich in their total gonzo weirdness and shimmering vibrancy.
Literature was easier to access. Beckett, in particular Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I; Flann O’Brien — these formed models for what I wanted to do with music. I regard them as compositions rather than plays. Not music theatre — compositions. Directed as well as written by the composer.
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In 2002 Cremaster 3, the final instalment in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster film series is released. The entire series is shown over the course of a week in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar (there’s five in total; the numbering system is out of order). Securing this screening is considered a coup — it’s the first time all five films have been screened together.
Cremaster 3 is loaded with references to Ireland and Irish figures and performers. Aimee Mullins slicing potatoes using modified prosthetic legs; Paul Brady singing; the Giant’s Causeway; Fionn Mac Cumhaill. In my favourite section from the film — ‘The Order’ — Matthew Barney scales the inside of the Guggenheim, ascending through a gauntlet of chorus girls, hardcore punk bands and bagpipes to Richard Serra. There are no stuntmen, no safety ropes, Barney climbs the Guggenheim himself and it is beautiful and touching and profound.
I go to every screening with Donnacha Dennehy. We spend the whole week either watching, thinking or talking about Cremaster. One afternoon we go out to Kevin Volans’s house and lie on the floor listening to Feldman, but I can’t concentrate because I’m in the world of Cremaster. I’m finally feeling what I was supposed to feel when I saw the Ring cycle but didn’t. That something huge is at stake. That a language is evolving in front of us. And that this level of commitment is what should be demanded of opera, of the performer, of music. This level of world-building, imagination, symbolism, abstraction. It’s challenging. You have to be awake and confused and paying attention. And in all this there is no choice other than that the composer function as auteur.
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Something shifted during the crash, after the crash. I felt it first and most strongly playing a Kaleidoscope gig at the Odessa Club in 2010. A beautiful beauty was born. Gorgeousness became an option. And who could blame anyone for this? For coming in from the cold? Hadn’t we been told to be less difficult for years? I admire beauty, but it’s not for me. I want lipstick on the teeth, drunken confidences and complications. Chris Kraus and Mykki Blanco.
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James Joyce wrote: ‘No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.’ He also wrote: ‘When I die, Dublin will be written in my heart.’ I’m watching Vivienne Dick’s work for the first time, at a weekend festival dedicated to her films at the Tate Modern. There is an abrupt cut, between a scene filmed at a party in the Lower East Side to people hiking in the west of Ireland. We see NYC No Wave artists partying in dresses, then we see an ad for Blue Band margarine on an Irish TV. Something makes sense to me in a way no Irish art I’ve seen has up to this point and I am brought to tears.
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Bob Gilmore is irreplaceable.
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In 2015 I launched a project called Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde. For this project, I worked in collaboration with a wide number of people to create a fictional history of Irish avant-garde music, stretching from the mid 1830s to the 1980s. All the materials related to this project are housed at aisteach.org, the website of the Aisteach Foundation, a fictional organisation which is positioned as ‘the avant-garde archive of Ireland.’ The site contains hours of music, numerous articles, scores, documents and historical ephemera. Every detail of this project was composed, written and designed with the utmost care and attention to detail. It’s a serious exercise in speculative composition, fiction and worldbuilding.
In Aisteach, Irishness becomes a medium. Two of Aisteach’s most respected fellow travellers include Afrofuturism and Hauntology. The latter in particular seems like an obvious native choice for Irish-based art, embedded as we are in ghosts, superstition and nostalgia. But Hauntology functions differently in Ireland—Aisteach is haunted by a past which suppressed, marginalised and erased many voices. Aisteach is not interested in fetishising this past. The crackle on the recordings is not there for cosy retro warmth or nostalgia for the rare oul times— it’s sand on the lens, grit between the tape heads, violently hacking history to urge us to create a better future. And a better future means being alert and responsible to the present.
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In the nineteenth century, the King family built a folly on Castle Island in what is now Lough Key Forest Park in Roscommon. You can admire the ruin from the shore or rent a boat and picnic there. Or you can drive around and look at real ruins—the ghost estates where we witness temporally confused spectres from the future. All sci-fi is ostensibly about the future, but in reality about the present. I am for a music which is more sci-fi. I am for a music which is dedicated to grappling with the times we live in. As William Gibson points out, in 2016 we live in the most sci-fi of scenarios—we Western Europeans, dressed in athleisure, quantising our steps, mired in debt, wracked by fundamentalism, AIDS and the Zika virus, we content- and data-providers for the Stacks, thrilled, oblivious and terrified in equal measure by the super-fresh tech and changing world of the Anthropocene.
Roscommon, Easter Monday 2016
