Next month's New Music Dublin Festival at The National Concert Hall features a range of Irish and world premieres from modern composers; one of the artists taking part is Linda Buckley, who writes for RTÉ Culture from New York about process, passion and the power of music.
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
This quote is taken from a poem by the thirteenth century Persian poet Rumi, whose text I set for a song cycle for the great singer Michelle O’Rourke, to be heard soon at New Music Dublin. It comes to mind at the moment, as I immerse myself in the community and ‘noise’ that is New York, here on a Fulbright scholarship for a year. It also connects to the ethos of a festival like New Music Dublin, embracing musical immersion, and becoming part of that special relationship between composer, performer and listener.
Another work of mine featured at the festival is very recent - Haza, composed for the RTÉ Contempo String Quartet. I always loved watching the quartet in performance, there’s a wildness and emotion to the way they play that is so captivating. Haza is the Hungarian word for 'home' or 'motherland', and the piece is inspired by Bartok. While composing I imagined Bartok in the last years of his life spent in exile in New York, walking the same streets where he walked. He always wished to return home, and was finally granted permission to go back to Hungary, but never made the journey, falling ill and dying of leukemia in 1945. His legacy lives on, and somehow within Haza I wished for his return home, to the peace, happiness and nature he had so longed for.
Why it is that we do what we do, why do we compose? There are many differing answers to this question, but for me, perhaps it is to give voice to expression and feeling that cannot be conveyed in words. I was reminded of the power of music here last night at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where orchestral musicians and choral singers from all over New York came together in a show of solidarity for immigrants in the U.S. I thought about why I first became a composer, while singing as a soprano in choirs, the sound filling the space all around me, being lost in it - wishing to feel that again, and somehow translate that feeling through my own music. This is all part of that shared experience we have, the joy of discovery and of catching a glimpse into another world, of feeling something beyond words.
The wonderful writer Bob Gilmore certainly understood this, and gave a unique insight from his article 'All Collisions End in Static - the Music of Linda Buckley':
"Buckley engages with an area of experience that new music is generally shy of, which, simplified and reduced to a single word, I'd call ecstasy. Not the drug-induced euphoria of dance music, but exultant, heightened states of being that are the product of an excitable sensibility, of an emotional response to the world that sees the bright places of life as clearly as the dark."
Linda Buckley's work will be performed as part of New Music Dublin 2017, which runs at The National Concert Hall, Dublin, from 2-4 March - view the full NMD programme here.
