I have just received a CD recording of the wonderful Kantika Korala. This choir, under the directorship of Basilio Astulez Duque, come from Bilbao in the Basque Country in Spain. This is an equal-voice choir with a sweet-tone and it was the first time I have been commissioned to write a work by a choir in this region. The remit was for a spiritual work based on movements of the Christian mass, something I relish doing. Spiritual texts seem to gel with my own style of composition in a way that I find hard to explain. Working on the composition is sporadic, as my home and my office [and my children] are constantly at war with each other, but I wouldn’t have it any other way at the moment. I have never found it easy to create in isolation of the realities of life, and often find that simple things spark off a thought that I carry with me for weeks and months before writing anything down.

I compose of an upright Challen piano when I can get access to it. Its very out of tune which doesn’t really disturb me at all. I don’t hear tempered tuning very well, and I find it very hard to explain to the singers in Anuna how to achieve the consonance of sound that I am trying to attain. Often when we sing diatonic chords I show them how the sound I want doesn’t actually match the tempered tuning of a piano. When a choir sing “in tune” with a tempered instrument it can be, well, wrong to my ear. This often causes problems with professional choral people I have worked with, but thats the way I hear it.

The way I compose something is to sit at the piano and doodle, then leave it and do some office work or go out and do something completely unrelated. After a while the doodles form into clumps and ideas come together slowly. I can’t really hear any of the music I write. I can see the structure of it without hearing the sound, if that makes any sense.Once the long process of structuring music is complete, or nearly complete, it is time to think about recording.

I listen with envy to other musicians talking about the recording process they experience. Their primary issues are related to the actual quality of the songs that they record and whether they have managed to capture some or all of the intent that they went into studio with. In contrast, recording with Anuna is always difficult, always a struggle and the atmosphere veers from exhilaration to terror.

People involved in choral music internationally are amazed at the lack of interest in Anúna from Irish educational establishments. I think this isn’t something deliberate. Ireland is a very small country, and music education here is struggling for survival on every level, largely because the Department of Education simply don’t see music as a core subject for life. Some of the difficulties we experience in recording show up the consequences of this. It is very, very hard to work with a situation where many singers join Anuna with a lack of basic musical and recording skills. If they came to us with more experience and technical vocal ability it would make my life considerably easier.

The innovative nature of Anuna is not disliked, rather it is simply ignored in hopes that it will go away and stop bothering the establishment. That said, every cloud has a silver lining, and I believe that it is the sense of Anuna being a band of mavericks (thank you Sarah and John for bringing this word back) that spurs many of the singers and myself to do the best we can with the resources we have. These resources are not insubstantial, just different to those I might have in another more musically inclusive culture. What is a fact is that Anuna produce some of the most beautiful choral music in the world.

Gathering the group together to make a new CD is a process that has to start with the recording date being on everyone’s calendar even before most of the music is written or arranged. Sometimes there simply is no time. In the case of “Behind the Closed Eye” (1997) I was given a month to compose and score the orchestral parts for a three hour recording session in Belfast. When the recording was finished and edited I began the process of writing the choral sections to fit on top of them which, you will agree, is a very odd way to compose. The solos, bar “Ave Maria” and “Where All Roses Go”, went on last. Both of those were recorded live with the orchestra. Despite the odd nature of the session the album is beautiful. My complete lack of experience with (a) scoring for an orchestra and (b) working with one was an advantage in the end, because if I had any inkling of how hard it would be I would never have recorded the album.

My favourite recording story is that of “The Rising of the Sun”. The piece uses alternating rhythms, and some of them are pretty complex. I went into Windmill Lane in 1991 and did my first session. I insisted, it appears, on recording this piece the wrong way around. How this was achieved was that we recorded the choral parts first, and then brought in Noel Eccles on percussion to add the rhythm. That would have been fine, but the choir don’t naturally sing in time. No choir can because we are, after all, only human. Noel had to play out of time to accommodate the choral singing and you can hear this on the recording. It was only at the end of the session that Brian Masterson realised that I had no idea what I was doing technically. All I had was a sense of what the end product should sound like.

The longest period I had to work on an album was for “Sensation” in 2006. The choral pieces on this record were moulded in studio after the recording. Large chunks of the songs were recorded and then constructed into coherent pieces on ProTools. For me the composition process begins with the pencil on the page and ends when the last edit is complete on any album ( I hasten to add that this is only in relation to works I write for Anuna). I will only then re-write the score to fit the piece. As I shape the songs on the computer, I have to be constantly aware of the fact that these pieces will have to be performable by Anuna and other choirs when the album is complete. This keeps me very much focused on the musical structure of each of the songs, and allows me the flexibility to create a work like “O Maria”. The powerful ending of this piece was largely a result of fiddling around with bits of information on a screen rather than inspiration gained on a wet Irish mountain.

Few of our singers record elsewhere as there are no other choral groups producing professional recordings in Ireland anywhere close to the standard of Anuna. This means that the singers take about three hours to warm up to the task facing them. Tempers can be very short and there is always an unreasonable time constraint  (or a lawn-mower, or helicopter, or a fly, or a bird, or a car…just add your own noise-generating item).  What can result from recording in these circumstances is what has become the essence of the Anuna recorded sound. An energy is generated that is human, honest, immediate, strong and yet sometimes achingly fragile.