The composer Raymond Deane, in an interview with Reuters this week, laid out his thoughts on his musical education, wasted opportunities and his love of ABBA. In the interview, undertaken in the context of the concert staging of Deane’s new opera, The Alma Fetish, in Dublin in September, the composer says that his musical education came mostly listening to BBC Radio 3:

My main musical education really was BBC Radio 3. When we came to Dublin in my early teens I had this old transistor radio that was really my main connection to the outer world and it wasn’t linked up to anything so the reception from the BBC was diabolical. The static was amazing and sometimes it would disappear completely. I would tune in and hear ‘tssshh’ and through this I would hear the music and then ‘tssshhh’. Sometimes it would disappear and I would try to imagine what I was missing. I think a lot of the kind of perverse quality of some of those early pieces of mine stems from that — a distant relationship and a rather distorted relationship to something.

Deane’s opera, about the love affair between Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma and the painter Oskar Kokoschka, will feature, in some form, the life-size doll that Kokoschka had made of Mahler. ‘You couldn’t not have it, because it’s absolutely central,’ says Deane.

And then there is the peculiar mention of late nights listening to ABBA and Rod Stewart with fellow composer Gerald Barry. ‘I was a big fan of ABBA,’ says Deane. ‘I still have a lot of time for ABBA, I have a lot of time for the Beatles, a lot of time for Neil Young… Bruce Springsteen. My CD and record collection has a lot of non-classical stuff in it. I probably draw the line at rap.’

raymonddeane.com