Hello and welcome to Make Art Not War, a podcast in which we talk to amazing artists from all fields and explore how their work resonates within our global society and the world we live in.
For our first episode, we're meeting with composer Michael Gallen, who's a rising voice in contemporary Irish music. He was born in Castleblayney, a small town right next to the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. I met Michael working with the Orchestre de Bretagne here in France, playing his newly commissioned work for orchestra and folk ensemble Bòd on Altar.
It's a pretty ambitious work based on early myths of the creation of Ireland. Devilishly hard to play at first, it's a really interesting and innovative blend of folk music and a wide array of pretty crazy contemporary techniques for all instruments of the symphony orchestra. The concerts were amazing and the audience loved the music, and we in the orchestra had lovely moments of rest during which we could just kind of sit back and drift into the enchanting sounds of the folk band.
I was immediately drawn to the sounds, harmonies and textures of Bòd on Altar. It's totally listenable and relatable music, a multifaceted patchwork of musical influence that speak of our world today. I find that Michael's work is a testament to the blending of musical genres, coming as he does from a historically complicated and conflict-ridden part of the world, whilst using his art as a means to communicate in a way that inspires us to travel back in time to our world of myths and stories.
We'll be exploring exactly how he feels his music is linked to all of that, and how he sometimes feels the need to avoid cliche associations with Irish politics. Michael founded an opera and musical theatre company called Straymaker in 2019, which premiered Gallen's opera Elsewhere at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2021. The opera is about this incredible true story of how the staff of the Monaghan Asylum barricaded the hospital gates and declared themselves an independent Soviet commune in 1919.
Since we recorded this podcast back in March 2024, Straymaker took Elsewhere on tour throughout Ireland with an all-star cast conducted by Fiona Monbet. Straymaker also has a new multi-platform music theatre production lined up called The Curing Line which will premiere at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2025 and go on to the Copenhagen Opera Festival, and has also been shortlisted for the Fedora Opera Prize 2025. An operatic feature film called Ways of Disappearing is also in the works, so watch out for those.
David : We met here at the orchestra just after rehearsal and had a quick chat, and within less than five minutes you said about five things that got all my bells dinging. You talked about how you also do folk music and…not really rock?
Michael : Kind of borderline rock folk. Yeah, I guess with my old band it was kind of Indie, sometimes a bit proggy, often acoustic instruments. I've never been good at putting a label on any of the music that I've made.
David : We were talking about how that aspect of your music making and contemporary music, how they were kind of blending together as you progress, I suppose, in your music and your art and how you were managing to bring those two sides of you together.
Michael : Yeah, I think the two things have happened. I think one is that I find as my career progresses, my sense of the sanctity of institutions has changed. I would always have felt when I was studying music that there were certain hallowed places, that if you got a commission from a certain orchestra or a certain opera house or whatever would be the Holy Grail.
And when you get into the messy middle game of being a musician or being an artist in general, I think you realise that opportunities are so much less clear cut than that. And so from one point of view, I think that there were some devils sitting on my shoulder. When I was composing music in the first sort of five to 10 years after having studied composition, I was always kind of second guessing, wondering if this is contemporary enough? Is it experimental enough? Am I using enough extended techniques or whatever in order for people to feel that this is justifiably a piece of music that is correct for 2020, for 2015 or whatever the year would be.
I used to always feel that those were two very different musical worlds that I was in. There was one that was expressive and just happened. I would realise in retrospect I had very little respect for writing songs with bands and that kind of thing. I just felt, well, that's just that's just what I do in the same way as I eat food and breathe. And then there's this sort of much more intellectual path that's composition and where I'm kind of planning experiences for audiences. And I'm also planning my own trajectory. And over time, I've realised that the best projects that I've done have been the ones where I have been as little in my head in that way as possible.
Concurrently with that, there has definitely been a shift in the wider art world since I did my Masters in composition in 2013. I think at that stage, people wanted to know who you had studied with, where you'd studied, you’d feel kind of pigeon-holed. As if you had a certain birthright then to be listened to. And I've never been really at the center of anything in that way. I've always been drifting on the borders of different styles of music and, just following my guts in terms of music that interests me.
David : Do you feel there is some pressure as a composer, the sense that in order to make music that will be validated, you need those extended techniques and so on? After all, we've had Cage and we've had Reich - we’ve had very sparse music as well. And that's perfectly accepted.
Michael : I suppose when you get older and a peer with the people who would have been your mentors, you can then see what their vested interests are. And I think a lot of the time, certainly in France, with Arvo Pärt or Steve Reich or whatever, in certain circles, there's a bit of a sort of a snobbery about that music. And when you're a student, you can just sometimes pick that up as gospel truth. Like there's a certain validity to what Helmut Lachenman proposes that isn't there for Arvo Pärt. And when you become a fully fledged adult and you understand the degree of genius that has to go into simplicity in order for an audience to feel something that they haven't felt before.
The way I would understand it is that for a long period of time, there was distrust in Europe, probably coming from a post-war place of populism and therefore distrust in things that are too popular. And so within this sort of art music world, that began to flip on its side into a valorising of small expert audiences - and the smaller the audience and the more their understanding of what they're experiencing, the higher the art.
I think that's had its moment in history, and it's also a very conservative way to think about what art can do. At the same time, I would say that there is there is music that I don't like because I feel that it panders too much, and that's definitely something that I don't enjoy as a listening experience. But I do think that if you're not setting out to make an impact when you begin a compositional process, then I kind of feel like you really have to ask yourself, why is it important for people to listen to this? And if it's important for people to listen to it, why do I not want as many people as possible to listen to it? And then be guided by that into whatever it is you make. And I find, you know, it's not I start off every process with this sort of, you know, who's the audience and why do I want to do it?
I have worked hard to rid myself of those sort of negative critical voices that would make you need to sort of second guess all of your musical decisions. The music that I write now is probably a lot more contemporary in a genuine sense, for it being gut felt and for it being part of a wider creative voice.
David : I studied at Guildhall in London - I wasn't a composition student myself, but I was always hanging out with composers. And there was lots of really interesting creative stuff going on. I felt that things were shifting, that emotion was guiding creativity rather than the need to break musical barriers. Like we've kind of done that, and now we need to speak to one another. Cross border so to speak - you’ve actually got this whole thing about borders… We had a lot of musicians from Eastern Europe, and there was a lot of that movement going on. It was totally listenable music. Really well crafted, but also totally relatable even on a first listening.
Michael : There is a there is a point on the journey that is learning all of the extended techniques and the beautiful, unusual timbres that instruments can make outside of what the classical romantic repertoire. But I think that that is only a point in the journey. Sometimes it can be forgotten that music is a vehicle that travels through an auditory sphere. And ultimately, what you're trying to get your audience to do is to listen actively and to meet the music at a halfway point.
And so there are pieces of music that I respect massively for the experimentation that they've done, the sounds that they've found, but at the same time feeling that they're not necessarily a strong musical experience for an audience. And I think it's an important differentiation to make. There there is no part of me that wants Lachenman type music to stop being created, because it's a fairground of research for someone like me.
At the same time, especially since they moved into composing stuff for stage, like opera and music theatre, you realise that timbres and that wide palette of sounds is a really useful way to bring people into different realms. Whether it's in a story or just in terms of their own emotional journey, you're trying to bring something to life in the room that's at the midpoint between audience and the thing that you've created. I think that there are several further steps, aside from the score being expertly created. And if those aren't considered, I think that ultimately the music can fail. So I think it's funny then going back to the roots of songwriting, playing in bands and stuff.
There is one thing that has always given me a very strong sense of whether the music works or not. You know, when you're playing on a tour and you have a new song that you put into the set list and it doesn't work, you can feel the energy in the room change. And even sometimes it's a question of where songs are put in set lists. Where you realise the energy was there but we tried to keep the energy high for too long and it didn't work. And we lost the audience.
And in student pieces, on a master's curriculum in composition, that's very rarely one of the benchmarks of whether the whether the piece is a good one or not. But ultimately I think it needs to be part of the equation, regardless of how brilliantly written it is, how well orchestrated, how deeply it plunges into a new timbrel univers. But does it work? Does something happen when it's put in front of an audience? I think that has to be considered as part of the benchmark of the quality of the piece of music.
David : So I'm missing a little bit of history : how did you actually go from folk music to writing contemporary music? I know you came to study in Paris. What did you do in between?
Michael : I grew up playing the classical piano and the trad fiddle initially. And then picked up the guitar when it was about 10 or 11. And after I'd finished the grades on piano, which I did quite young, I was like, I never want to do that yet again. It really felt like something my parents wanted me to do.
David : Are your parents musicians?
Michael : My mother is, she's a choral director at home. She loves community-based music projects. I am the youngest of six and there's an eight year gap between myself and the nearest sibling. They all would have been involved in musicals that my mother would have put on localy. And then I would do the same. So there was a lot of music around and my siblings were playing a lot of music at home. So I got a huge amount of music in at a very young age.
When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was be in a band and I started writing songs and piano pieces. Then I went to do an undergrad in music and English. And I met my band called Ana Gog. And that was the main focus for a period.
I did a master's in philosophy after I finished the degree. And then during the time of the master's in philosophy, I had received a few commissions to write choral pieces. So my major was in composition.
David : Where was this?
Michael : This was at the National University of Ireland in Manouth. It was very free. We wouldn't have done a lot of classes around the skills of composition. The degree was more focused on people that were going on to become music teachers. But I majored in composition and the composition teacher gave us a huge amount of space to just experiment basically. And I definitely felt at that point that it was something I might be good at. I felt that the ideas were sort of strong, maybe in comparison to the class mates or that kind of thing.
David : Did you bring some of that into your band with Ana Gog?
Michael : One of my other band mates was in my music class and another was in a music technology class. We definitely were a band of music students.
We would have been using a lot of Ableton and synths. I guess the band was a bit more “out there" than your average college band. It was my main musical vehicle for about 10 years from that point on. In that completely unanalysed way, I was like, that's what I do, I write songs and I bring it to rehearsal and we play them.
For a year I was teaching piano and then I did the masters in philosophy. During the masters in philosophy, I had a few choral commissions that went well. I felt again, okay, this is something that I'm really enjoying doing, but I'd like to be able to dig my teeth into more.
Then the masters that I did in Paris, part of it was the study, but part of it was just carving out space in my life where I said, this is what my focus is now. So I was in Paris for two years at the University of Paris-8, José Manuel Lopèz Lopèz was the composition professor. He was great. I discovered a huge amount of spectral music and composers like Sciarrino, who I absolutely adored.
I had this feeling that I don't think I'd had before, of there being poetic possibility in non-harmonic music. And feeling that with somebody like Sciarrino, even though the music is in a totally different universe to the music that I compose, every decision is made with the listening experience in mind, engaging with the emotional world as well as the intellectual world. I found that a huge opening.
I should say as well that when I was at secondary school, there was a physics teacher who gave me a mini disc of John Adams, Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass. At the time, aside from what was on our school curriculum, the idea of being a composer and alive hadn't really occurred to me! When I was at college, I obsessed over Björk and Radiohead and anything that was making me feel things that I wasn't aware I could feel through sound, and all the different modes of storytelling that can be within a song. It was very, very influenced by that.
David : So what's going on with Ana Gog now? Is there still space for that or are you just too taken up with your composition?
Michael : No, it broke up about maybe six or seven years ago. With bands, I think you can maintain them up to a point, until people have relationships or you want to get married or settle down. There was a period around about 2013-2014, where we were full time in the band but living off the seat of our pants - our tours were us all sharing hotel rooms. We kind of were able to maintain that for a period. And then when it didn't move up to the next level where we actually earn an income from it, that's when things began to fray.
And I think part of the tension in that was that I was a full time musician already at that time between sort of composition projects and all of the different things that I could cobble together. Whereas two of the other guys had full time non-music jobs. For me it was about trying to do as much as we possibly could. And same certainly one of the other guys, but then for the others, it was sort of like, well, this needs to fit in around holidays and work and there's a huge pressure on them for that.
Yeah, it was a difficult thing to let go of. And I definitely was the one selling the snake oil for the years that we were together, saying we can really make this happen.
David : I don't know if I'm right about this, but there’s a kind of sentiment of something extremely gentle and sweet. Maybe it's also the way you sing, which is quite soft. You're not a screamer. I was just interested in that, trying to tie that in with other Irish musicians I know, like Sinead O’Connor, you talked about her and her incredible voice. I was just trying to see if there was any correlation between that and Irish history. In Ireland, by default, you were born into a really hefty political situation. It's just there. You talked about that a bit, about borders, maybe because you were born very close to a border, the one with Northern Ireland. How does all that kind of work out in your psyche, in your brain, but also in your heart? And how is that part of your inspiration? Does that go into your music consciously or unconsciously?
Michael : For sure, yeah. More recently, it's a conscious thing. The company that I run, Straymaker, is based in my hometown on the border. And that began as a practical decision around a place where we could accommodate as many musicians as possible. Because of the way the projects work, a lot of the time we kind of work in residency for a period of five, six weeks. On top of that, I started to realise that there was a quality that came from having people come to a small town on the border and be really immersed in that world.
As it turns out, all of the projects that I'm working on now are coming back to themes around, as you say, borders or points where there are arbitrary divisions between different populations. The story of Elsewhere is set in a psychiatric hospital, at a point where despite the tensions between Protestants and Catholics, the border hasn't yet been drawn. It’s 1919 and there's this Soviet commune that's set up by the asylum workers because their pay and conditions are so ludicrously bad.
What interested me in terms of that story was that it presented a completely alternative vision for what unity could look like, a society where people from these different backgrounds, both in terms of the religious backgrounds of the staff, and in terms of neurodivergent people who were locked away in Irish society.
And so the subsequent projects that I work on all seem to come back to that world. I feel like there's a underneath there's a deeper theme around the possibility of the impossible occurring, the possibility of an identity that isn't the one that comes from the dialectical clash between things. I think that that's definitely me trying to work out the divided world that was normalised for me when I grew up.
David : I was thinking about that because last week, there was a Palestinian film festival here and I met a wonderful filmmaker from Palestine called Rachid Masharawi. He grew up in Gaza. Ireland is obviously less of a place of conflict now, you kind of grew up at the tail end of that period. If you're an artist and you come from these places, is everything you make tainted by that? And is that a useful thing or do you try to get away from it? Do you get fed up with being labelled, do you talk about this in your music?
Michael : I didn’t use to, it’s more a recent thing. I tried to get away from not just that world, but also the sense of the smallness of the place that I came from, and what it was possible to become.
Sometimes I do think in terms of the unlikeliness of having the career that I have now. When I was at school I discovered music through whatever CDs other people's older siblings happened to have, that we kind of made into tapes and stuff. There was no record store anywhere near where I lived. So I had a huge education through like Death Metal and Heavy Metal and stuff, because that was what was popular in the school. One of the first music projects I was involved in was a Pantera tribute band. There was a sense for me that when I moved to Dublin to a small extent, but certainly when I moved abroad, that that was where I was going to spread my wings, find who I was and be international in my outlook. I always was very politically engaged.
David : You mean outside your music or?
Michael : Outside my music. As a teenager, I would have devoured stories about anything from Bolìvar and Che Guevara. I was always very interested in left-wing political movements and right-wing political movements, in terms of how these kinds of things kind of occur in the world, but I never really applied it to home. And then there was just a point where I started finding that the projects that I was interested in making all brought me back to borders again.
I do remember being on tour in India and a woman coming up after the gig and saying how every time she heard an Irish singer she could hear the pain of Irish history in their voices. We laughed at the time - like, is it not possible to do anything else? But all of those experiences, whether they're personal ones, or what you're seeing on the news every day, they do become a part of you and they come out somehow. I think it's the mystery of the artistic process - you take in all these things and then there's a sort of a blind period where it's not really clear where the work is coming from or why the work is coming out in the way that it does. And then sometimes I think if you're lucky, when you're coming near the end of a project, you have this moment of affirmation of the process, where you see, oh, I can see now that actually I was creating something about the way that I was feeling about this or that.
I composed a piece earlier on this year, commissioned by Radio France and I was interviewed beforehand. In part because of the interest of the interviewer, but also just because of what I felt the music was doing, actually I do feel that this is related to this idea that conflict is the centrepiece of how a society is built, and about a desire in me to search for a different cornerstone that could begin with care and grow out in a different direction.
If there's something that makes me feel that it's worth going back to pick up the pen, begin the next project, it's that you achieve an iota of that, of having people think about something differently. The most amazing thing is when people come up to you and talk about some form of healing that's occurred, that through your work you've helped somebody surmount a barrier that seemed insurmountable to them before that. I do think that with music, we're working in that kind of invisible realm where sometimes the impossible does happen. Sometimes somebody's sitting in an audience and they feel something in a certain way and it just opens up a doorway in their lives, that they weren't aware was there.
We will continue our conversation with Michael Gallen next month.
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