“As I have been losing my hearing, my interest in sound has grown. My curiosity is greater – despite the limitations of my hearing. Whatever I can hear becomes more precious, more interesting and more greatly relied upon.”
Ailís Ní Ríain
Irish composer and playwright Ailís Ní Ríain’s artistic interests are wide, working broadly in the areas of concert music, installation, and music-theatre, and has collaborated with writers, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers and theatre artists. In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers. She has been awarded international fellowships, associate artist positions and residences in the USA and Europe, alongside commissions for the RTE Concert Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Fidelio Trio, London Sinfonietta, Sarah Watts, Evelyn Glennie and the New London Chamber Ensemble, among others. Site-specific music-installations include music installations for a lighthouse, a K6 telephone box, a dis-used former cotton mill, the Brontë Parsonage, a castle keep, and a railway station accumulator tower.
Ailís has hearing impairments and has made work referencing deafness, disability and mental health since 2006, working with DaDaFest, Unlimited, Arts & Disability Ireland, Shape Arts, Drake Music and Outside In.
Her debut portrait disc The Last Time I Died was released by NMC Recordings in 2023 and received considerable acclaim and BBC airplay. Patrick Ellis has been exchanging emails with Ailís over the past six months, talking about the themes of The Last Time I Died, exploring consent, sobriety, deafness, refining textures, and creating “clouds” of sound…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Ailís! First of all, congratulations on the recent release of your debut disc, The Last Time I Died, which has had a great reception from the press and new music fans alike. The disc features a variety of chamber and small-scale works featuring many different ensembles and performers that you have worked with. Could you please tell me if there is a common theme that runs between each of the pieces on the album?
Ailís: Thank you. I am delighted and pleasantly surprised by the response to the album. Having lived with these works for such a long time and knowing them as intimately as I do, it has been both unnerving and exciting to finally send them out into the world. These are a selection of chamber and small-scale works taken from wildly different points in my career; the subject matter, inspiration, musical catalysts and themes vary a great deal throughout. There isn’t a common theme running through the album – at least to my mind – although one reviewer did find their own theme that unites the work and expanded on it considerably in terms of their own listening experience [read here]. I love when that happens, I would always like to think that we, as composers, can offer up a set of sounds within given parameters known only to ourselves and for these to then take on a different life in the head of another listener or experiencer.
I love that too! It’s always interesting to find out the audience and performers’ own interpretations and found meanings in one’s own music. In the review they mention that the music on the disc had a sort of aquatic theme, which makes me wonder whether the cover art for the disc might have had an influence on their own personal interpretation.
They did also mention that the music on the record has “joyful, sometimes jovial voices” with “utterances around illness, death and despair.” I can also observe this with the X Ray of the sea horse, an animal which often symbolises good luck, magic and peace. When deciding on the record cover, was there anything that you wanted to hint at through this imagery?
The male seahorse gives birth, an idea that has always captured my imagination. The colour palette and the transparency of the image makes it difficult to ascertain if we are looking at something which is vividly alive or recently dead. This ambiguity, the otherworldliness and inside-out nature of it appealed to me and I felt it might suit a collection of works spanning 20 years and created as responses to disparate intellectual, philosophical and emotional stimuli.
The image is by Arun Mohanraj and created through the process of diaphonization which is the art of clearing and staining subjects – a process which can take many months. 125 images were stacked together to create this image and it involved using special stains to stain the bones and cartilages.
Was the seahorse imagery something that was amongst other diaphonized animals when selecting the cover art? And if so, was it serendipitous that there was a seahorse?
The visual has always been an important reference point in my work. I have often used place/site, imagery, art and landscape in my work – especially through my site-specific installation work. Indeed, as a deaf/hard of hearing composer and musician, I often rely on the visual to aid my auditory experience of music.
I was immediately struck by this image. I felt it had potential to amplify aspects of the work on the album. It is a usual image but, I hope, also an arresting one. Importantly, it also ties in with the title of the album – for instance; are we looking at a dead creature or does the colouring and positioning suggest vivacious life or even a life beyond life?
The final track on the album is entitled The Last Time I Died and to that end this image somehow seemed ‘right’ and perhaps even becomes revelatory for the listener. That work was written after my eldest brother took his life and it includes spoken text. The line between life and death is often finer than we might imagine.
Onto the compositions on the record, you mentioned that these works span over a 20-year period. What is the earliest work and what is the latest? Between the completion of the two works, what would you say were your main developments as a composer?
The earliest work is Don’t! from 2000 for bass clarinet and cello, this is a very early work of mine. The most recent work on the album is Revelling/Reckoning for wind quintet and percussion played here by Dame Evelyn Glennie and the New London Chamber Ensemble. During those 20 years, I’ve worked in many different areas of music during that time – opera, music-theatre, electroacoustic, installation, film, concert music and music for dance. I imagine some elements of my style or voice have remained similar, however, I think there is now a greater interest in instrumental sonority, dexterity, silence, time and space.
As I have been losing my hearing, my interest in sound has grown. My curiosity is greater – despite the limitations of my hearing. Whatever I can hear becomes more precious, more interesting and more greatly relied upon.
Many of my older works have a programmatic element, some of my more recent works are less interested in this and more specifically interested in the shape of the sound, how it is approached and how we, as listeners, navigate it in time.
Starting with Don’t! – which I find has a lot of dramaturgy and strong interplay between the bass clarinet and the cello, with several contrasting instances of material throughout the work. Casting your mind back to then, could you please tell me about the background of the piece? Was this composed whilst you were a student or was it an early professional commission?
Don’t! was composed in 2001 while I was a student on the Advanced Composer Course at Dartington Summer School. The impetus came from a piece of writing in which the opening lines asked the reader whether we believed someone’s story. The next line, in stark bold was ‘Don’t!’. It caught my imagination and propelled me to approach this in sound as a musical conversation. I had a strong sense of the ‘narrative’ between both instruments; who they were to each other and the dynamics of their relationship.
I always find it interesting when composers [and other artists] find inspiration and source material from unlikely places. Are there any other works on the record that are inspired from surprising places?
Soberado is a play on the word ‘desperado’ which itself is a pseudo-Spanish alteration of ‘desperate’. I was approaching my sixth year of sobriety and wanted to acknowledge what I saw as the two primary facets of sobriety – the lightness of ‘freedom’ versus the suffocation of obsessive restriction.
Consent #7 was written in response to the #metoo movement. Defining what constitutes ‘consent’ in the area of relationships is a key issue of our day. For me, the piece is an attempt to envision a scenario, through music, where two people who wish to engage in some form of relationship find themselves weighed down and confronted by a host of expectations, customs, rules, judgements, and ultimately, guesses as to others’ motives and expectations.
The Last Time I Died was composed in response to the death of my brother by suicide. I was interested in creating a ‘cloud’ of sound; lots of resonance from a relatively limited tonal and pitch palette and to ‘puncture’ this from time to time with off-kilter ‘tweaks’ in sound. A shifting cloud of sprawling, intemperate memory, punctuated by the severe reality of morning and life beyond loss. In his darkest hour, I wish I would have been able to help him; “to offer my breath, give him my pulse”.
You mention there with The Last Time I Died about wanting to create a cloud of sound. For Consent #7 and Soberado, how did you take the themes of consent and sobriety and use those to form the basis of musical ideas? Did you have any parameters that were derived or inspired from those topics?
For Consent #7 I had written a series of interactions between two people in prose form around the theme of consent – a dramatic scene of sorts. This was informed by what I was reading in the media in connection with the #metoo narrative. This psychological swirl drip-fed into musical gestures which then became the basis for material which I interrogated for its scope within a purely musical setting. After a great deal of honing and stripping away, I finally arrived at the fundamental musical material for the piece.
The process was similar, but more straightforward with Soberado. I wrote it when I was on a residency in France in deep Winter. My mood was low and two ideas were occupying me. One was restriction [partly informed by the instrument I was writing for – the toy piano], the other was trying to find something which teetered between a slightly volatile ‘lightheartedness’ and an incessant, driving intensity. The piece very much came from how I was feeling and what I was struggling with at the time – reflecting on both the intensity of sobriety and its freedom.
Would you say that most of your own compositions have a clear narrative or structure in mind before you start a piece?
I have composed music for a very wide number of performative settings. The structure of my work can depend greatly on a number of factors; the forces I’m composing for, the theme, any given variables in the performative context and if text is involved. However, more often than not, the theme [non-musical] suggests a structure and I might use that as a starting point. Ultimately, the piece needs to be driven by its inner workings rather than a subject or theme and that is something I develop and hone as I’m working on a composition.
Touching on each piece being driven by its own inner workings, is there something that you particularly obsess over when tweaking and refining a new work that is consistent in most of your pieces? For example, being vigilant on what roles each instrument does during different points in the piece.
I obsess and tweak everything. There isn’t anything in particular that guides this, it usually bows to the needs of the piece itself. By that point, it has become its own thing and my job is only to refine.
On that note, I wanted to ask about Seahorse [Long Snouted] which you are credited on as the performer. Was this a work that you devised and composed in the studio especially for the album? Or was this work that you had written prior? Did you use full notation for this piece, or was it in more of an open notation? If the latter, how did you tweak and refine the piece?
Seahorse [long snouted] is a work I devised and developed in the studio when I was on a residency in the USA. I had spent one month altering a grand piano – little tweaks day by day – in response to various textual and visual stimuli. The work is not notated and it was recorded in one take. I originally trained as a pianist and spent most of my time dedicated to that until I was in my twenties, then composition became my main focus. Live composition within the context of restriction appeals to me as a way to generate ideas, think musically “on my feet” and to stretch the notion of what the instrument and I are capable of.
As a deaf/hard of hearing composer and musician, seeing the vibrations and movement within the instrument – being “under the bonnet” as it were, enables me to work more effectively and crucially, more confidently. The alterations are changed as the performance develops. Sometimes this is in response to compositional/musical need – for example, I might feel like a sound has been exhausted in its current configuration. The immediacy, need and scope for an ‘on the spot’ imaginative response is something that might not take place if purely working in a notational form. Working in this way forces an extension of my voice and a reconsideration of sound and gesture in time. Sometimes, I surprise myself and often take aspects of these recordings back into purely notated work. I would encourage any composer to consider improvisation/live composition within the development of their practice.
What pieces (including ones not on this album) have you taken ideas from these live compositions and implemented into a purely notated work?
A recent piece for London Sinfonietta for cello, vibrating object and altered piano would be one example. The ideas are often tiny cells of material, sometimes they can be gestures of movement in time – where the pacing is operating differently to how I might approach it if by notation alone. My approach tends not to be strictly systematic – at least not at first. Once I establish material which to my mind has scope for development, I sit with it and consider its possible manifestations within whatever parameters I’ve set myself. Ultimately, the finished notated works bear little resemblance to the live compositional fragments as everything still needs to go through the process of composition.
With that piece for the London Sinfonietta, what was the original live composition like in comparison to its final, developed and notated counterpart?
To my mind, there is very little perceivable likeness between them. By the time the work has evolved to the rehearsal and performance stage it has become an entirely new entity.
Live compositions often will have more of an instinctive feel to them and like you said will have a different sort of pacing to them. Would you say that you used systems when adapting/transforming the live composition into a notated work as a means to “make sense” of or formalise the live composition?
This is interesting. I have found that some ‘live compositions’ have an innate sensibility to them. By that I mean that they appear to be present on their own terms. They often make more sense than what I might labour over for weeks in a notated capacity. There is something here about instinct and the filtration process of notation. What really happens when we notate music? Whose system are we adopting to express ourselves? How does it limit us? Can it stifle originality? Does it inevitably lead to compositional orthodoxy?
On Revelling/Reckoning you work closely with Evelyn Glennie – how did you find the experience of working with a fellow deaf artist and how do you see representation of deaf artists in classical music developing?
Working with Evelyn was a rewarding, enlightening and encouraging experience. We established contact early on in the project and liaised closely about the development of her part throughout. I visited her percussion collection where we selected the most suitable instruments for the work which is scored for percussion and wind quintet. I knew what percussive materials I wanted in advance but was very keen to see what she had before confirming the final instrumentation. Percussion can be tricky for me as metals play havoc with my ears – whether I can hear them or not. Evelyn understood this and reflected this in the selection of instruments to experiment with.
As with most deaf people, our hearing experiences are very different. Evelyn is very ‘deaf-aware’ and a strong communicator – she knows how to communicate within deaf settings. This is a rarity in my experience, it shouldn’t be, it doesn’t need to be, it costs nothing to become deaf aware.
I was not open about my deafness earlier in my career and ultimately only began to speak about it because it was becoming impossible to work professionally and not be open and upfront about it.
Ultimately, I am encouraged by more artists speaking up for better representation of disability in classical music. We know that contemporary classical music is currently being challenged as never before, the sector is struggling, artists are struggling. There is a shortage of money and opportunities and the world is in a very precarious position.
Yes, those of us working the sector have a responsibility to each other and our future audiences to authentically improve disabled representation and access while bearing in mind that it is almost impossible to make every environment fully accessible for all users. Disabled/deaf people know this – simply ask us what we need. We all should want to work towards an equitable solution and be willing to look outside that inner circle and ask “how accessible is this work to people who understand and access the world differently?”
Reflecting on the whole record and each of the works featured, what elements have you kept or developed in more recent, subsequent works? And what are the new things you are currently exploring as a composer?
I have been taking my work in a different direction more recently. There is a renewed and almost obsessive interest in instrumentation and timbre, a differently nuanced approach to the rhythmical and a refinement in the area of pacing and shape. This is always in development, I do try to not repeat myself in my music. Each new work is a new challenge, a sort of existential impulsion, sometimes a crippling one. The challenge remains: how to express one’s self in sound.
In some ways it is similar to playwriting [ed. Ailís is also a published writer for stage]. As the playwright Simon Stephens says, the noun ‘wright’ in the compound noun play-wright stems instead from the verb, ‘wright’, or in the past tense ‘wrought’. “We are not writers–we don’t write plays, we wrought them.” I think the same is true of music composition.
With your renewed interest in instrumentation and timbre, would you say that there are perhaps parameters that you are less interested in, or at least less concerned/obsessed with when composing that were perhaps more at the forefront with the works on The Last Time I Died?
The works on the album span a long period of time and are stylistically varied. While there are approaches I would be less likely to return to in the immediate future there are others I may not have explored to their full potential and on my own terms. To some extent, some of the more overt connections to outside stimulus (such as an artwork, philosophy, poetry, politic) is lessening to focus more particularly on sound. As I am losing my hearing and the hearing I have is compromised, perhaps it is natural to now be considering the precise composition of sound and its effect physically, psychologically, perhaps even physiologically as never before.
I just wanted to touch upon your point earlier about you consciously trying not to repeat yourself with each new composition… in the preparation/planning stages, do you analyse your recent pieces and then almost plot what to actively pursue and avoid when writing? And when you are struggling with new methods, do you ever feel the temptation to revert back to more familiar processes or approaches to move the piece forward?
To simply repeat what we feel you can already do well seems to me to be an unnecessarily limiting exercise. However, in practical terms, many factors enter this equation: the brief for the commission, the time-scale – to truly stretch yourself can mean tripling the amount of time it can take to compose a work, maybe even longer if you consider the research required, time to sit and think, time to experiment and finally, time to write – to try and get it down on paper in some comprehensible fashion for an interpreting artist. Often these things are achieved incrementally. It is only interesting to me if I am stretching my experience of sound and instrumentation in some way and offering something I hope might resonate with interpreters and listeners.
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Ailís Ní Ríain’s album The Last Time I Died is out now on NMC Recordings – you can check out the record at:
Learn more about Ailís and her work at:
