Letters: RTÉ Living Music Festival

Dear Editor,Barra Ó Séaghdha says that the 2005 RTÉ Living Music Festival was not really a Henze festival (JMI, March-April). The short answer to this is that it was not exclusively meant to be. The long answer is to ask another question:...

Dear Editor,

Barra Ó Séaghdha says that the 2005 RTÉ Living Music Festival was not really a Henze festival (JMI, March-April). The short answer to this is that it was not exclusively meant to be. The long answer is to ask another question: what would a Henze festival be? According to my rough reckoning, there was more than twice as much music by Henze in the 2005 Festival as there was by Boulez in the 2004 ‘Boulez festival’.

Ó Séaghdha talks about ‘audience psychology’. What exactly does this condescending term refer to? Does an audience get together like a political party to agree a ‘line’? I received an email from a member of the 2005 audience expressing his delight with the NCC concert, including the Henze work, dismay at the Ensemble Modern (Henze had in a few hours changed into a purveyor of modernist noise), and disgust at the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, after which he handed me his remaining tickets. Who does one ‘plan for’ here? And this is one audience member. The plain fact is (and now I speak as a composer, no longer Artistic Director of the RTÉ Living Music Festival), there is no such thing as ‘audience psychology’, and trying to plan on the basis of it is riskier than planning on the basis of the Irish weather.

As to ‘focus’, Ó Séaghdha will be surprised to learn that I have a very definite idea of what an Artistic Director’s principal focus is: to put on performances of good pieces. I admit that ‘focus’ in Ó Séaghdha’s sense does not in theory have to mean resort to the geography book; but the examples he cites show that this is what it too often in practice does mean. To have kicked at some borders, including the most disputed one (60 miles north of here, on which I grew up) is one of many aspects of the RTÉ Living Music 2005 of which I feel proud.

Beneath Ó Séaghdha’s facile internationalism there lurks still, I’m afraid, the chilly grip of the nation-state mentality and its attendant ugliness, in this country and elsewhere.

Against such views let me assert the unchanging values of good music. Let us have it, and more abundantly.

Kevin O’Connell
Dublin

Published on 1 May 2005

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