'Scuse the silence in this neck of the blogosphere over the past few days. I've been in the seemingly wi-fi-less far reaches of the far west of Ireland for Music Matters, reporting on the musical scene there, from Dublin to Limerick.
I've always thought of the Emerald Isle as a place of ancient myth and musical tradition, rather than a source of cutting-edge new classical music. Still, it turns out that one of the consequences of the Celtic Tiger economy over the past couple of decades is a real burgeoning of musical institutions and creativity.
A new opera house opens in Wexford next week – and spectacular it is too, for those lucky enough to make it over for this year's festival of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden, Pedrotti's Tutti in Maschera, and Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur. The Irish Chamber Orchestra, who are cresting a wave of artistic excitement at the moment with artistic director Anthony Marwood, have just moved into flash new premises in the University of Limerick.
Best of all, though, is what's happening at the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin. The building, in one of those magnificent twists of serendipity, is next door to the site of the most famous musical performance in Ireland's history: Tuesday 13 April 1742, when Handel's Messiah was given its first performance on Fishamble Street. At the CMC, young Irish composers have taken the future into their own hands. Instead of relying on the government's tax breaks for artists (whether you're Bono or you have just graduated from music college, you're eligible for tax deductions in Ireland), they have set up the Irish Composers' Collective. Founded in the wake of Ireland's most successful new music ensemble – Donnacha Dennehy's Crash Ensemble – the collective is a pool of 36 composers, and membership is growing by the month, according to one of its most articulate advocates, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly. (He's a good composer, too, based on the quiescent intensity of a work for three strings I heard in Dublin.) The ICC is a ready-made community of creators, performers, and listeners, and they are blazing a trail for 21st-century music in Ireland.
They also have one of the most inspired, and democratic, programming strategies I've ever comes across. Themes? Composer portraits? Not a bit of it. Their method is much more random and adventurous: every ICC concert is chosen by plucking pieces out of a hat. That means their concerts are hugely diverse, with everything from tape-based electro-acoustica and live electronics to works for string ensemble and fusions of Irish traditional music with the avant garde.
I think it's a model that young British composers could follow. Instead of relying on the existing institutions to help them out, the ICC have found strength, support, and – more importantly – artistic independence by creating their own community. The Camberwell Composers Collective is the closest that any young composers have come in Britain to setting up something similar, but they have a smaller pool of artists who curate their events. I just hope, now that the Celtic Tiger has turned into more of a tomcat as Ireland sinks into recession, that there is enough momentum in the Irish Composers' Collective to sustain them through the downtimes.
