Ailís Ní Ríain is in a good place. The composer’s first album, The Last Time I Died, came out in 2023. She got to work with the world’s busiest solo percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, and the New London Chamber Ensemble, who also appear together on the album. This involved a rare combination of a deaf performer playing music by a deaf/hard-of-hearing composer. And that year Ní Ríain had a piece played by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, “which was a new experience. It was my first time working with a large symphonic orchestra”.
The Cork-born artist, who turned 50 last year, speaks of “lessons learned, wonderful conversations, new ways of approaching things, new ways of needing to do things, given the people in the room, and an openness and an understanding of that from the beginning of the process”.
She’s talking about the complications that follow from her hearing loss, tinnitus and hyperacusis, or noise sensitivity. “So if someone wants to have a conversation about an idea they might want to explore, might want to bring me in on, I need to go to that place very quickly and say, ‘This is how I work.’ It can mean that things develop at a slower pace or, invariably, in just a very different way, one that people are not used to when working in relation to music.
“I’m not able to sit in the back of a concert hall with my score, like other composers. So what I’m doing is sitting at the desks with the musicians and moving around. That’s not easy for every conductor to deal with, the composer literally distracting everybody by moving around within in the orchestra.”
And she needs “a live, listening assistant to help navigate the thing that is an orchestra”. She singles out an experience with David Brophy and the Ulster Orchestra. “I arranged a call with David beforehand, and had very good conversation. He was extremely practical, warm, friendly, enthusiastic. He gave the impression that this is what happened everywhere. So it was a joy and it made things much easier.”
[ Ailís Ní Ríain: The Last Time I Died - Independent, exploratory and quirkyOpens in new window ]
Ní Ríain is one of those composers who provide striking names for their works. Her first work for symphony orchestra was Calling Mutely through Lipless Mouth. And her latest, which gets its Irish premiere this month, is The Land Grows Weary of its Own, a three-way commission from BBC Radio 3, the National Symphony Orchestra and Manchester International Festival.
Calling Mutely through Lipless Mouth took its title from The Glass Essay by the Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson.
“I was rereading it when my mother was dying in August 2022, after six weeks in hospital. She had to experience Covid on her own – I was unable to get to Ireland to be with her. Just before the original lockdown my brother died in tragic circumstances in Thailand. And there were unanswered questions. So she entered lockdown in grief and she came out of it dissipated by grief, completely,” Ní Ríain says.
Because I’m not bringing full hearing or full understanding of audio to any situation, I do rely on other tools, other perspectives, that consciously or unconsciously affect everything I do
“Unhelpfully, I broke my ankle just as restrictions were beginning to lift here. I wasn’t able to fly. And just as that was healing, she was taken into hospital for something else. All connected, you know, the body, the mind breaking. Then, when the next opportunity to fly came, everything was shut down again. So we ended up then in August 2022. I was reading The Glass Essay.
“This is the passage I read the night of my mom’s passing: ‘It is a hard wind slanting from the north. / Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift / and blow away on the wind, leaving / an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle / calling mutely through lipless mouth. / It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person. / But soul is “hewn in a wild workshop” / as Charlotte Brontë says of Wuthering Heights.’”
Ní Ríain remembers “a contortion” of her mother’s mouth. “And it just struck me that you could call mutely. That we’re now beyond the time of that. We’re now in the beginning of the next chapter, or the nothingness, however you believe it to be. And that was the first work I wrote after her passing. For me it’s in the sinews of the thing. But, of course, each listener will also bring their own understanding to everything. Rightfully so.”
Later, she says: “I’ve been so obsessed by the possibilities and the freedom in communicating and creation. That’s what’s held me together, frankly, whether I did it badly or well sometimes. It’s not about quality. It’s about being able to go on, do a bit of the healing.
“And then after all of that you can have a conversation with yourself, ‘Well, if I’m staying in the ring, start working hard.‘ But how you get into this, it’s very different for lots of people. I got into music because I needed it. I needed to be soothed by something in my life. And I made that discovery very young.”
I’m an intrepid rambler. The people I walk with never cease to comment on birdsong and bird activity. I have no idea what they’re referring to, as I don’t hear it
For her, “literature, texts, theatre, visual arts, all of creativity, all of good creativity, it’s very hard to shake it from your own mindset when you set about creating new work. But also, in my case, because I’m not bringing full hearing or full understanding of audio to any situation, I do rely on other tools, other perspectives, that consciously or unconsciously affect everything I do”, she says.
“That isn’t an answer to a question, but it’s important for me to make that point. It’s so easy to be lost in this. So what does it take? Does it take bloody-mindedness? Is it a degree of obsession? Is it a touch of madness? Is it replacing one addiction with another to simply go forward with something?
“I don’t know, but these things always preoccupy me. They’ll always be in there. And why not? We need to keep fertile.”
I ask about the latest orchestral work, The Land Grows Weary of its Own. “Another cheery title,” Ní Ríain says, laughing. “Well, I mean, what really has got me through is my sense of humour. So that is not lost. So we go on. The title is taken from the lyrics of a song by U2, A Sort of Homecoming. I’ve reinterpreted it to mean a world which is wearied by the actions, or indeed inactions, of humanity. I suppose primarily around climate change. And, to my mind, particularly around the demise or change of bird populations.
“I just had this idea of a heaving landscape, one which was wanting to belch out its own, if it possibly could. That was what was in my mind. I knew I was writing for very large orchestral forces. And I wanted to try and create something that starts in a place that seems beyond this time, beyond the Holocene, so to speak. There’s a slightly naive statement and then begins the crumble.
“There is a great deal of percussion, of percussive material, and it’s kind of difficult stuff. It’s got a beat to it. It’s got a groove to it. But it’s very interlocked and very heady. The piece is about 18 minutes long. What I wanted to try and chart is something from the naivety of the statement that might come at the end of existence. And almost work backwards to where we will lead to. So I’m playing with times, experience of time, I guess.”
[ Ailís Ní Ríain: ‘Words and music are things we do against all better judgment’Opens in new window ]
There’s an irony in all of this connected to where she lives in rural Lancashire in northwest England. “I can’t hear birdsong and I’m an intrepid walker, rambler around the moors here. In fact, anywhere where I can ramble, I ramble. But the people I walk with never cease to comment on birdsong and bird activity and all of these things.
“I have no idea what they’re referring to because I don’t hear it. And I had been reading about the effect of climate change on the bird population. For example, birdsong is getting quieter, less varied, and the acoustical properties of natural landscapes themselves changing. For example, springs becoming quieter. You know, we’re looking at a projection of 9 per cent bird-population extinction in the next 20 years.
“And I just thought it’s a slightly perverse thing to do to focus on the one thing in the room that I can’t access myself.
“But part of me remembers the fondness that people have for birds and birdsong. We know that we are losing aspects of this – not all of it, but some things are changing: migration patterns are changing. It doesn’t mean everything is becoming extinct, but there are major changes afoot.
“I can’t witness this anyway. It kind of doesn’t make a difference to me in the sense of the sensory beauty that I’m losing, because I don’t have it to begin with.
“But I kind of started to think, ‘Why are you more worried about it? You love it.’ It’s clearly going. And I guess that it’s not possible. It’s not easy to make the direct link on this, but I realised I’m grieving for something I can’t even hear. And then I thought, ‘Well, you’re usually grieving for things you can’t hear. So what’s the difference?’”
The Irish premiere of The Land Grows Weary of its Own will be given by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jessica Cottis, at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, February 21st. Also on the programme is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill and the tenor Samuel Sakker
