Raymond Deane
*27 January 1953
Works by Raymond Deane
Biography
Having spent his childhood in the west of Ireland, Raymond Deane (b.1953) lived in Dublin from 1963. He made his debut as a composer/pianist in January 1969 in the “young composers' concert” at the 1st Dublin Festival of 20th Century Music, and later that year attended the Darmstadt Holiday Courses.
After graduating (B. Mus) from University College Dublin in 1974, he studied composition with Gerald Bennett (Basle 1974-5), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Cologne 1976-7) and Isang Yun (Berlin 1978-9).
He was elected to the Irish academy of artists Aosdána in 1986, and awarded a doctorate in composition (D. Mus) by the National University of Ireland in 2005.
He was artistic director of the first two RTÉ Living Music Festivals, with music by Luciano Berio (2002) and contemporary French music (2004). In 2010 a portrait concert of his chamber music was presented in London's Purcell Room by the Fidelio Trio.
He has composed numerous works for piano solo, chamber works for multiple combinations including eight string quartets, several large-scale orchestral pieces including concertante works with piano, violin, viola and oboe soloists, and four operas.
His works have repeatedly been presented at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, his orchestral Ripieno winning an award in 2000. He was the Irish delegate at the World Music Days of the ISCM in Mexico City, Stockholm and Essen (1993-5).
His works have been performed by (among others) the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Vanbrugh, Callino, Con Tempo, Arditti, Duke and Bozzini String Quartets, the Schubert Ensemble of London, the Rudersdal Chamber Players, the violinists Christine Pryn and Darragh Morgan, the pianists Hugh Tinney, Ian Pace, Mary Dullea and Isabelle O'Connell, and the bass clarinettist Harry Sparnaay.
CDs of his music have been issued by the Black Box, Naxos/Marco Polo, Resonus Classics, LCMS and RTÉ labels.
He has also published a novel (Death of a Medium, 1992) and a memoir (In my Own Light, 2014), as well as numerous articles on aesthetics and politics and their intersection.
Raymond Deane divides his time between Dublin and Fürth (Bavaria).
About the music
If you wanted to point to a key change through the emergence of a new composer, the moment would probably be the appearance of Raymond Deane playing his own music at the young composers' concert of the first Dublin Festival of 20th Century Music in 1969. Deane was the first of a new breed to make a splash.
Michael Dervan: Introduction to The Invisible Art, New Island 2016
Schoenberg, Boulez, and Stockhausen were early influences on me. Darmstadt 1969 introduced me to Minimalism. I tried to replace a dualist opposition between these trends with a dialectical negotiation between them – this has characterised my music ever since. Unlike tonality (a centre + harmonic hierarchy), or atonality (no centre, no hierarchy), my music establishes provisional centres and hierarchies and dismantles them again. Between 1975-1988 I sought to expand the premises of my work and to reintegrate “avant-garde” elements. Since then I have continued to resist the various dogmatic “isms” in which contemporary music is trapped, while seeking to avoid reactionary nostalgia. I have always liked to quote Stockhausen's phrase “it would be more interesting to find an apple on the moon than a moonstone”. The concept of dialectic remains vital for me – my music lets the static and the developmental, the atonal and tonal, negotiate and sometimes conflict with one another. Flat surfaces and homogeneity are avoided.