Belfast composer Stephen Gardner seems bemused that his string quartet, A Dream Thaw, has been selected by the Parisii Quartet to take around Ireland on its forthcoming, 12-concert Music Network tour. He was still a student when he wrote the work and it has only ever been heard in a workshop with the Brindisi Quartet. Talking about the piece, he sounds as though he had quite forgotten about it, and hasn't really come to terms with the idea of someone else wanting to give it such a high profile.
Gardner, 40 this year, was in his mid20s before he became interested in composition. Until then, he seems to have done anything and everything: "loads of jobs, anything that was going, labouring, manual work. I was a postman for a year. I worked in Amsterdam for a year, sort of bummed about. Alright, my Da was an organist and piano teacher. My brother was a bit of a whizz-kid at the piano. But I wasn't interested then. I played in a pop band, guitar, bass and trumpet."
His real interest was sparked by listening to Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring, a piece he decided to check out after finding it on the list of favourite pieces of session player Tommy Tedesco in a guitar magazine. "I listened to it and it knocked me out. I didn't know classical music could be like that. I can still smell the gas fire that was on when I hear it, the wee gas fire in my room. And then I started listening to other classical stuff. I'd a mate who was obsessed with Requiems and he got me into Requiems."
Studying music was a copycat decision, when his friend Bill Campbell announced he was going to the Poly, as Gardner still calls it (it has since become the University of Ulster). At the start it was a nightmare of uphill struggle, "But, I suppose if you're keen on anything . . . I was a hard worker. I had to be." By his third year, he knew he wanted to be a composer. After he got his degree, he took a year out, "really brushed up, listened to loads of scores and that, and then I went and did a post-grad in Wales under a guy called Geoffrey Lewis".
The NSO will be taking Gardner's Wallop on tour to Amsterdam this summer. Andrew Selinsky, a British pianist he met at Dartington last year, liked his My Dog's Got No Nose so much that he immediately commissioned a piano piece, which will be heard at the Cork Contemporary Music Festival in March. But Gardner sounds despondent when he talks of the commissioning scheme in Northern Ireland, which he feels has been messed up with red tape by the arrival of the British National Lottery.
The wit that informs his music hasn't left him, however. Wrapping up our interview, I ask him for any final comments. "I'll go for England to win the World Cup. And United to win the European Cup."
Between Friday next and Friday, February 13th, the Parisii Quartet tours Stephen Gardner's A Dream Thaw with works by Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy, to Bantry, Knocktopher Abbey, Dublin, Castlebar, Skerries, Newtownards, Armagh, Carlingford, Emo Court, Co Laois, Listowel, Omagh and Portstewart.
