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The Royal Irish Academy Of Music\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Over a period of months I gradually composed a four-page piano piece and showed it to my former piano teacher. She suggested I contact Dr. A.J. Potter in the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I played my four-page piece for him; he had a vacancy and the following week I started composition studies with him \u2013 once a week for an hour. From then on I had to have something composed for every Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n Dr. Potter never said \u2018you can\u2019t do that\u2019. On the other hand he never told me exactly what to do. Maybe this was his approach. We talked about life and art and he gave me the musical space I needed. He said you could read all the books you liked about instrumentation but if you really wanted to know how a trombone works you should buy a trombonist a drink after the concert. He never encouraged me and I needed a little.<\/p>\n After a year at the Academy I submitted my compositions for the Junior Composition Scholarship which would mean a year\u2019s free tuition. At the beginning of the next term I received a phone-call from the office of the Academy: \u2018With regard to your recent application for the Junior Scholarship in Composition we wish to inform you that you have been successful in\u2026\u2019. I had never planned on being a composer; necessity was the mother of my invention.<\/p>\n I wanted to write a piece for orchestra in my first scholarship term. Dr. Potter said: \u2018Well go ahead!’. I had a drawing of the highest and lowest notes of each instrument in front of me as I composed Four Sketches<\/em> for orchestra. It took me five months and was later performed, when I was twenty two, by the Dublin Symphony Orchestra (because it won second prize in its competition for composers), and the RT\u00c9 Symphony Orchestra (the National Radio\/Television orchestra).<\/p>\n The first radio broadcast of any work of mine was of Four Sketches<\/em>. In 1969 at the end of my second year at the Academy I was awarded the Vandeleur Scholarship in Composition. During my third year I began experimenting with my tape recorder at home in my search for new sounds and compositional approaches. I took to tape music like a duck to water without ever being bothered about the \u2018do you call this music?\u2019 syndrome.\u00a0 I never stopped and thought too much \u2013 I just did it.<\/p>\n When I first heard tape music (loosely termed electronic music) on record, it was as though it had been brought back to me as a memory. It was strangely familiar. It was what I was looking for.<\/p>\n The next time I submitted taped works to the Academy, I wasn\u2019t awarded the scholarship. Since the Academy only had a cheap mono tape recorder and I needed a recording studio I thought: \u2019Three years is enough\u2019, and so I left. The Academy is not a University so there was no degree to get even if I had stayed I was twenty one and still sleeping till lunchtime.<\/p>\n Utrecht<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Soon after, a small record company in Dublin promised to bring out a record of my music, recorded some of my pieces, and then went bust. Then in 1974 I was awarded a Dutch Government Scholarship to enable me to study electronic music at the Institute Of Sonology at the University of Utrecht. This changed everything. In Holland I had the chance to come in out of the cold and join the stream of European avant-garde music. I attended three weeks of the World Music Days Festival in five Dutch cities.<\/p>\n