Raymond Deane

Raymond Deane (born 27 January 1953) is an Irish composer. Deane was born in Tuam, County Galway and brought up on Achill Island, County Mayo. From 1963 he lived in Dublin, where initially he studied the piano at the then College of Music with Fionn Ó Lochlainn. He studied at University College Dublin, graduating in 1974, and became a founding member of the Association of Young Irish Composers, a predecessor of today's Association of Irish Composers. He won a number of awards as a pianist. In 1974, Deane won a scholarship to study with Gerald Bennett at the Musikakademie in Basle, Switzerland. He moved on to Cologne as a student of Mauricio Kagel but was persuaded to change to studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen, which Deane abandoned after six months "due to Stockhausen's lack of engagement with his students at this period". With a DAAD scholarship, Deane continued his studies with Isang Yun in Berlin. In the 1991 Accents Festival in Dublin, he was the featured composer (with Kurtág), also at the 1999 Sligo New Music Festival (with Roger Doyle). He represented Ireland in several ISCM festivals (Mexico City, Manchester, Hong Kong), and works were performed at the festivals l'Imaginaire irlandais (Paris 1996), Voyages (Montreal 2002), Warsaw Autumn (2004), and more than once at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers (his Ripieno for orchestra winning a special prize in 2000). He was also the artistic director of the first two RTÉ Living Music Festivals (Dublin 2002 and 2004), showcasing the music of Luciano Berio and contemporary French music respectively. In 2010, a portrait concert of his chamber music took place at the Southbank Centre, London. Deane was awarded a Doctorate in Composition by Maynooth University in 2005. He has been a member of Aosdána, the Irish state-supported academy of creative artists, since 1986. Besides his music, Raymond Deane is known for his social commitment and human rights activism, particularly for the Ireland–Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), which he co-founded in 2001, and the Irish Anti-War Movement. He cited early experiences of bullying in his childhood as a potential cause of this commitment: " I have internalised the certainty that this bullying was a defining factor in my personal growth, eventually leading to my sporadic activism on behalf of the downtrodden". Deane has always been active as a writer of essays and critic on music, having published in Irish journals such as "In Dublin", "Soundpost", the "Journal of Music in Ireland" and in some academic books. In 1991, he published a mock-Gothic novel called Death of a Medium. He also wrote an autobiography, covering the years up to about 1987, which was published in 2014 (see Bibliography). Raymond Deane is "one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Irish composition". His work can be divided into three phases, one ending in 1974 before his studies abroad, the second ending in 1988 – a period he described as "a process of learning, assimilating and overcoming that assimilation – and the period since then, which has been described as a "re-gathering" Several works of his middle phase are consciously constructed in a technical manner to avoid the trend towards neo-romanticism that he perceived among many of his contemporaries. According to Fitzgerald, "Deane strives to achieve a dialectical drama without regressing to nineteenth-century norms of developmentalism. The result is a heterogeneous and impure dramatic discourse." Zuk wrote, "Even at first hearing, it is evident that his work is a product of a highly reflective mind, being for the most part intensely serious in tone, though shot through at times with an idiosyncratic humour and on other occasions pervaded by a distinct spirit of playfulness".