 You're very welcome back and that was Colin Kill's Lament from the new CD by Vincent Kelly and the RTE Concert Orchestra with Mark Redmond on Ellen Pipe's Music of People and Place and it was just launched there at the beginning of the month and joining me in the studio this evening, I have got Vincent Kelly, the man himself, a busy man, Vincent, you're very welcome. Thank you, Jane. You should be here. And you've just come from the RCC for you did a concert with the Donnie Goldchamber Orchestra. You're their conductor as well. Well, it's Donnie Goldchamber. Oh, Donnie Goldchamber, Chris of Vega Parton, yes. It was a Christmas concert, yeah, and we had wonderful guests from Glenty's Choir, a marvellous group of young people and their teachers were fantastic and a group of Ukrainian students, of a Ukrainian guitarist who only started in May to play and they were fabulous and then there was a classical guitar guy, Manus, who was moved here, I think, from London or Scotland, I'm not sure, and lovely harping as well from the Column Kill, I think they're called Column Kill Harpists and then the orchestra in the second half, so it was wonderful and then some communal singing at the end of favourite Christmas pieces. Yeah, so it was a great night. Well, you're a native of Dublin, but you're no stranger to Donnie Gold because, as I say, you're the conductor of the Donnie Gold Youth Orchestra and you've also commissioned a number of pieces for Donnie Gold to celebrate the 1500th anniversary of Column Kill and that little piece would be played there is taken from that composition. That's right, yeah. I was very lucky to be commissioned to write a piece and it turns out it's almost two hours long, so there's 20 parts to it. It includes a narration in Irish and English, a solo album pipe-ist, a harpist, Irish harpist singer, that's Nulligo Brolich, who's just brought a CD herself, the Donnie Gold Youth Orchestra at the time, the Donnie Gold Youth Choir and Megan Armitage then was the narrator and then we had also a tenor soloist whose name just escapes me at the moment, it'll come to me and it was performed first in March, just after Covid, finished in March of 2022 and then also was the closing part of the Aragile Festival that year. So on the CD I think I've put five pieces from that and three of them are written on pipes. So the connections to Donnie Gold go way back to 2007, I think, when I first came here. I want to commission to write piece and music part of the piece process for young people from Donnie Gold, Derry and London Derry, so they were coming from and we all went out to Garten and one of the pieces from that, which is a jazzy piece, is on the CD as well. And then the following year I was asked to come up and do the Donnie Gold help out with the do orchestral and other instruments on the Donnie Gold Summer Music School and while I was up there I was approached by the manager of the Donnie Gold Music Education Partnership at the time was Evald Ferguson, who's now the head of the Contemporary Music Center, about doing the rehearsals with the youth orchestra for a couple of months in preparation for a visit with them from the National Symphony Orchestra. So I came for a couple of months and then she asked me would I do Christmas and then it began to run on me well they don't really seem to have someone so we put in place an arrangement and I love coming up so much and I'm really lucky that my wife comes with me and she does the driving so that helps usually and we come up every two weeks and rehearse and the orchestra's just gone from strength to strength and it's wonderful and it's great because in Donnie Gold it seems that everybody gets put on a Donnie Gold shirt you know and so we have everyone coming together and the orchestra's done wonderful concerts with on our own but with Alton and with others that are Manus Lonnie and people like that and in the in on Greenon and the Cultural Center out in Aramore Island a number of times with the Aramore Pipeman and in the National Concert Hall so it's been great and it's just wonderful to be here and Donnie Gold is very special to us and to me and I find a lot of inspiration here for the music and especially for that piece. And where did the interest and the love for music spring from? Was it by accident or was it by design? Well my very first experience of music was when I was three years old and I remember this very clearly I come from a very small house in Dublin City a place called Smith's Cottages and there were only three rooms and I shared a room at that time with my sister one of my sisters and one of my brothers and an uncle we were all packed in tight and there was a radio in our room on top of a wardrobe and my mother used to come in in the morning turned it on and one morning she turned it on and this piece of music came on and it just filled me and I was three years of age it just affected every part of my being and then I just I went to school in the Christian Brothers in Western Roan the inner city of Dublin and it just so happened that when I went there a teacher came and started teaching music so that's how I started so it was completely accidental and I was 14 or 15 before I realized that that piece of music was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony you know and so it kind of there was something there all of that time in me and then when I was about 14 15 I think I wrote my first piece of music and that was very harrowing because you when you I think any creative person when you create it's like taking your heart and putting it in front of you and then anybody with daggers or anything because it's pieces you know so it takes a lot of confidence you know and the the life of an artist a creative artist can be quite lonely in the sense of you spend a lot of time in your own head working out stuff and working out ideas and and then having to put it all down in place you know yeah and that I just I'm fascinated by how just a melody may come into your head and how that then evolves into a full orchestral arrangement like how does how does the process start for you Vincent? Well usually it's it's I'm just an inspiration comes into my head like I give you an example one of the pieces we did tonight was a piece I wrote just six months ago called the Lennon County walls and I remember exactly when it happened I was coming back from rehearsal here we're from the regional cultural center and I was going down a hill and this tune came into my head and I went back to where I was staying and I wrote it down in pencil and then over the next week I orchestrated it and the tune actually is the easiest part of it because you know the tune is just the one line it's what you then have to add to that the harmony is on the bass and the rhythm and all of that stuff that's the bit that takes most of the time and I still I begin the process by hand because the sort of I feel a kind of spiritual connection to me when I'm writing that stuff by hand in hand and that's why so my melodies are usually written in a book and then I transpose them into computer then and that helps then to to actually score it because a lot of this is repetitive but just in different clefs and different places for the different instruments and then the more instruments you have available then the more scope you have for making it bigger and bigger and so it's it's a it's a process that kind of is like a well the big orchestral pieces and and this album is full of the mirror is are kind of like you start off with a little chestnut or an oak nut and it grows down to be this big rooted blossom or you know that birds and all sorts of things come into your mind and into people's minds and the CD now I have a copy of it here music of people in place and it's with the RTE concert orchestra and also with Mark Redmond that we just heard on that piece we played on Ellen Pipes and so that piece was just a beautiful haunting piece but there are 18 tracks on the album and there's a wee story nearly with all of them Vincent. Yes there is and that's why I call the music of people placed because all of the pieces are inspired by people or places you know there's one that that was played a little while recently because it's John F. Kennedy John John Fitzgerald the torch still burns brightly you know and I'm a Kennedy too and assertive but there's no actual connection that I know of you know it goes way back although sometimes people think there is and and that was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of his assassination so this was a chance now to record that for coming up to the time of the 60th anniversary you know so and that was first performed in New Ross where his family came from and a lot of people don't realize that John F. Kennedy came to Ireland in 1947 came in 45 as well to interview devil there and came 47 specifically himself to look for his family roots so he went to county Wexford with letters and he went knocking on doors and eventually found the family and he took pictures at the time so his you know often the 63 visit you know where he's eating or having tea with his cousins there you know but he'd actually been there before and if you go to the center there you'll see the photographs that he took at the time himself you know so that's one piece the the original the opening pieces of peace call where north the north willing blows and again that was a peace commission piece across border into the generational project which originally involved a pipe band from Breedy and Derry and brass band from Straban and people from Donegal as well and was performing on both sides of the border it's actually dedicated to my mother but she got sick the week before we performed it and died as quickly and then wasn't you know before the second performance actually the second performance was at our funeral you know but it's also interesting because it Markin on that particular track plays the B flat in on pipes and he reckons he's a lecturer now also in the conservatory of music at Technic University of Dublin that it's the only piece he concert music piece he knows in the whole world that's written for B flat pipes you know and the people pipes are less strident than the D pipes you know and so it's very very very suited to that that sort of playing but then it has the whole full orchestral treatment all around it and you were telling me that uh one of the tracks that the birth clothes that I was going to play tonight because it's lovely as well it's dedicated to sister sister concept yeah so and she uh was a nun that came from Kinsale I think to Bali Shannon um and and people tell of her coming because it was very unusual and that she drove a sports car with no top on it and she had a big scarf around her neck that was flowing out the back of her but she had a huge influence on music classical music in Donegal and uh and setting up of the Donegal music school and the Donegal music education partnership and uh you know inspiring a lot of young people to take up music and the story of the birth cloak then with column kill is that the the story goes as I understand that before his birth his mother had a vision of uh was visited by an angel and had a vision of this cloak spread a beautiful cloak spreading out before her across the land and then eventually it goes away from her and then she's sad and the angel says to her well don't be sad because your the son will have many many followers and the image of of the cloak spreading out like it's uh very much stuck with me in terms of consistency because she passed away uh during COVID um and but that influence of spreading out all across the county and bringing classical music you know Donegal is full of every type of music and it's fantastic and it I love the way it all intermixes and and and builds on on each element uh and like that notion of the music spreading across and her influences is one inspired a piece and it's it's also very meditative piece I think you know and you were saying just before we went on an era that this is not your first CD but it's your first CD with the RTE concert concert orchestra yeah yeah as it is they have played some of my music before um I was commissioned by them to write a piece called Dublin Overture to My City and they played and they played one of the other pieces of Arbor Hill that's um about 1916 on there as well uh but no this in this this CD is is all my own doing in the sense that I've I've I've done all uh and I hired the orchestra you know I went down to talk to the manager and hired the studio out there and then conducted them and produced it um all I must say with the great help and love of my wife who who um one of the pieces uh Graw is dedicated to uh and um it's been it was a mammoth task you know I didn't realize it when I took it on that how big it would be I didn't expect that in two days recording we'd get 18 we actually recorded 19 tracks and I'll tell you about at the moment I thought if we get 10 or 12 that'll be doing great but we actually got 18 and I think that's down to the organization we put into it and checking all the music beforehand a thousand pages of music a hundred thousand notes you know make sure they were all right uh so that you don't get stuck in in rehearsal and recording with trying to fix things you know there was nothing to fix we just got in and did it uh so there's 18 tracks on the that's the CD but on the it's been issued digitally and there's 19 tracks because we had the opportunity to record the column kills lament separately with just Mark Redmond playing the Ilum Pipes and in that setting he was able to use all the drones and everything like that so that's kind of the bonus track at the end of it um there's another one there that's um it's called the first steam train in Ireland and it's about a journey on steam train that first steam train that ran between Dunleary and Dublin which is actually the first commuter train in the world and we were in Japan earlier this year my daughter-in-law is from Japan originally an Irish mother and Japanese father with our grandchildren and we went to the Kyoto train museum and I actually recorded the the sound of a steam engine and it's on the track as well you know and that my our little grandson uh and that just loves trains you know and he actually falls asleep to that piece of music every night and it's such a noisy piece it's amazing that he does but it's amazing to see how he does do that you know well the the CD was just launched there at the beginning of the month and it will make a lovely Christmas present uh for people who like classical music and who know your work Vincent uh it's available digitally but uh you can I'm sure buy the the hard copy of it as well well no no it's not out in hard copy yeah so the it's an American classical music label Navona that released it and they released the digitally but they sent me a hundred um CDs just sort of for my own use or for to give to wonderful people like you you know uh so I I I may bring out a hard copy of of CDs I'm not sure you know the last CD that I brought out so this is my 10th CD of music but the last one arrived the two weeks after a week after COVID started all the CDs arrived into the house and sure and then when I it was a it was a that was a project that was a public art project so I couldn't give the CDs away because people were telling me they don't have CDs so many people don't have CDs anymore but it's available in all the digital platforms the Spotify's the iTunes all of that sort of thing yeah well thank you so much for taking time out I said it's fascinating talking to you I couldn't go on for another half hour but I see the clocks just going to beat me and uh every success with the the CD and uh with the future career and and and composing I'm sure we'll hear lots of new pieces from you in the future thank you so much Gene