Click here to read a review from the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of The Journal Of Music In Ireland

Baby Grand I studied piano from the age of nine but gave it up at sixteen when my teacher terminated my studies, since I had become interested in jazz and wasn't doing enough practice. The ‘here are the classics' approach had served me well for several years, but it gradually represented too much of a world gone by for my teenage ears.
“What an awful shame”, my music teacher wrote in her report.
I felt slightly embarrassed. It's an all-too-typical story.

After I left school I was sleeping till lunchtime and wondering what to do with my life. I used to sit at the piano improvising and gradually I began to compose a piece. I wrote it out in manuscript and showed it to the professor of composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (where I had studied piano). He took me on and thus began three years of composition studies where I had to have something composed for every Monday afternoon. I won a scholarship after my first year to enable me to continue my studies. ‘I am a composer', I thought to myself..
My piano technique began to change and be moulded into my piano  compositions and vice versa.
Among my first piano compositions was Six Pieces for Pupils who Don't  Like Exams. Baby Grand is the sixth of these and is composed for 4 hands (in this version I multitracked myself and used some double-speed recording techniques).
I was discovering how to use the recording studio as a musical  instrument and became intruiged by the possibilities offered by integrating technology into musical thought. I won a Dutch Government scholarship in 1974 and came to study in Utrecht at the Institute of Sonology. My interest in electro-acoustic music took over my life then and my piano playing only continued as an underground stream for many years.

Then in the 1980s I received two once-in-a-lifetime commissions, if  that isn't a contradiction in terms. The first was to compose music for a film by Irish film-maker Bob Quinn, called Budawanny. The music (which had to be piano music) was to play a central role in this film, which was shot as a silent movie in black and white with captions appearing when people spoke. It required seventy minutes of music to be composed for it - uninterrupted by anyone talking over it (a composer's dream). Set in the west of Ireland the film tells the story of a priest and a woman who fall in love and the tragic events that follow.
Budawanny appeared in 1987 and a forty two minute soundtrack suite was released at the same time. The strange thing is that I continued to compose the Budawanny music even after the film was finished – I kept finding new ways of arranging the main theme. Thus on this CD I have included recordings of three Budawanny variations taken from live concerts in 1990 and 2003.

The second commission was from Dublin's Gate Theatre to compose music for a production of Oscar Wilde's play Salome, directed by Steven Berkoff, which required a piano player on-stage thoughout the show, playing non-stop for almost two hours in a 1920s dinner party style setting. The role of the music this time was to be the water in which the actors swam, the incense surrounding stage and audience.
This was in 1988. The show went on three world tours, played in London's West End and kept being revived until 2000. In those intervening years I kept working on the music, which kept changing, evolving and mutating, and pieces would break off and become independent pieces, like children moving away from home. Ten Themes is one of these, gradually coming into existance during and after the final few performances of the Salome run in 2000.
A one hour Salome suite was released in 2000 by the Gate Theatre. For this Baby Grand CD I have included five pieces from that suite, but have replaced Salome's Dance with a new version recorded in concert in 2003.
Mansard is from a 5-CD set called Babel which took me ten years to compose (1989-1999). Babel makes use of a wide range of music technologies and is a celebration of the multiplicity of musical language. Each track corresponds to a room within an imagined giant Babel tower. Mansard is a childhood memory room.

In 2000 I was awarded the Marten Toonder Award by the Irish Arts Council (the Dutch cartoonist lived in Ireland for many years and set up a fund to help Irish artists). With this grant I finally bought myself a baby grand piano from Tynan pianos in Dublin.

Around this time I met my old piano teacher by chance who I hadn't seen for thirty five years. I told her I had become a composer. She said she'd heard that and then asked me: “was it the Brahms or the Beethoven you couldn't get right”?

Roger Doyle
Autumn 2005