Five Questions from 
ideealisme
1. Would you see yourself as less passionate than most people, or more so?
I guess I think this is pretty hard to judge. People can jump around more or less than others - I probably jump and laugh and so on much more than average - but whether it is a show, or excitability, or whatever, is hard to tell. In writing music or prose, I think I tend to the clear and unexaggerated and steady, and I like to think of myself that I'm moderate in many respects (e.g., politics). Certainly I suspect that my intellectualist or academic dispositions make me tend toward the understated: in life and in the music I write. But I don't know if I am any of these things. It's again hard to tell: I don't know if the academics I know are any less silly or ebullient than anyone else. I am prone to occasionally get my self-concept phenomenally wrong, and whether I am passionate or not is probably an area where I'm prone to this.
If I was to say something general and committed, I'd say something like: We all have a similar capacity to be passionate about something. Different people will be less or more obviously passionate, but that's no more than a surface difference.
2. Do you ever feel frustrated with the path you have chosen for yourself, and if so, how do you express that frustration?
Well, the word on the academic street is that only the insanely good have any hope of getting a job as an academic, and so I do occasionally feel that I'm mad to be pursuing this: I'm undoubtedly not good enough to get a good job, and probably not good enough to get any job. (It's pretty unlikely I'll even get a funded Ph.D. place.) And so I wonder if I'd've been better off devoting all my energies to music. But I don't really believe this. Whatever about the future, I certainly value my time with philosophy so far. As well as a general outlook that's wiser than it was, my understanding of art and music is much better, and I think this is really important to my relationship to music. So even if I change path, my time in philosophy will have been a good investment.
If I imagine myself in the future as a full-time philosophy who no longer has any time for music, or a full-time music teacher who no longer has any time for philosophy... Then I can imagine myself feeling incomplete or unfulfilled or something. It will be sad if it turns out that it's only because I'm young and partially supported by my parents that I can maintain a life with both, and this may end up the case. But I've not abandoned half my life yet. I think I'm a bit uncommitted yet to regret the path I've taken.
3. For you, are philosophy and music two sides of the same coin?
As I've said before, for many people philosophy is a very scientific affair, and has little connection with the deep questions of life and so on that music can have. If philosophy is that when it's at its best, then, for me, that will be very sad, because I don't know how I can do philosophy like that. But many people think it can also be a way of looking at issues of importance directly. This is what it is for me: a way of looking at the question, "What is so important about art?", say, and getting an answer to it, or showing that it doesn't need an answer, or whatever. Then I can with a clear head go about the business of creating art. So philosophy sort of makes music possible, and in that sense they're very closely related, and insofar as music gives philosophy its point, they're as necessary to each other as the two sides of a coin.
But it's more complicated than this, of course: I have other philosophical interests, and more interest in music than in writing art. But this captures a large part of my attraction to philosophy, and certainly to the philosophy of art.
4. What do you think of the idea of attachment to home and property in general?
I've actually just read a really good book by Sebastian Barry, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, which deals with issues of exile and homesickness and the peculiar feeling of hating one's home while acknowledging that it is part of who you are and so feeling that love for it in the same emotion. And this has made me think about my relation to Ireland (and to certain people in Ireland, e.g., my family) again. I don't know what to think about it now, except that I'm more aware than I was of the importance of one's home, and of the impossibility of renouncing it to any great extent.
Of property in general: it seems to me a totally different question. But anyway, I don't have much time for mine-and-thine: it strikes me as petty and mean. I think an attitude of reciprocal generosity is much more beautiful. I understand that it's not always possible, given how distant we are from each other, and given the problem of free riders, and given that different people have different needs that others might not appreciate, and so on. But in my own life I try to be generous, and I know I have a tendency to presume that I can use others' property.
5. What would you like to be remembered for?
I'm not sure I would like to be remembered particularly! If I were to be remembered as a philosopher, I'd like to be remembered for sorting out the sorry state of the discipline of aesthetics, perhaps by making everyone read their Collingwood again. (How often I have read articles riddled with stupid conceptual confusions and philistine attitudes that were thoroughly dealt with 75 years ago by that man.) But I don't think I have the capacity to do that, and in any case I think the problems of aesthetics as it stands are deeper than can be fixed by argument.
If remembered as a man by grandchildren or whoever at a funeral service, I think I would like to be known as friendly, honest, a talented composer, a good listener... uh, I guess I'd like to be thought of as intelligent too... to have had fine and delicate taste in non-art things. Dunno. A mixed bag of things. None of them are especially important.
I guess I think this is pretty hard to judge. People can jump around more or less than others - I probably jump and laugh and so on much more than average - but whether it is a show, or excitability, or whatever, is hard to tell. In writing music or prose, I think I tend to the clear and unexaggerated and steady, and I like to think of myself that I'm moderate in many respects (e.g., politics). Certainly I suspect that my intellectualist or academic dispositions make me tend toward the understated: in life and in the music I write. But I don't know if I am any of these things. It's again hard to tell: I don't know if the academics I know are any less silly or ebullient than anyone else. I am prone to occasionally get my self-concept phenomenally wrong, and whether I am passionate or not is probably an area where I'm prone to this.
If I was to say something general and committed, I'd say something like: We all have a similar capacity to be passionate about something. Different people will be less or more obviously passionate, but that's no more than a surface difference.
2. Do you ever feel frustrated with the path you have chosen for yourself, and if so, how do you express that frustration?
Well, the word on the academic street is that only the insanely good have any hope of getting a job as an academic, and so I do occasionally feel that I'm mad to be pursuing this: I'm undoubtedly not good enough to get a good job, and probably not good enough to get any job. (It's pretty unlikely I'll even get a funded Ph.D. place.) And so I wonder if I'd've been better off devoting all my energies to music. But I don't really believe this. Whatever about the future, I certainly value my time with philosophy so far. As well as a general outlook that's wiser than it was, my understanding of art and music is much better, and I think this is really important to my relationship to music. So even if I change path, my time in philosophy will have been a good investment.
If I imagine myself in the future as a full-time philosophy who no longer has any time for music, or a full-time music teacher who no longer has any time for philosophy... Then I can imagine myself feeling incomplete or unfulfilled or something. It will be sad if it turns out that it's only because I'm young and partially supported by my parents that I can maintain a life with both, and this may end up the case. But I've not abandoned half my life yet. I think I'm a bit uncommitted yet to regret the path I've taken.
3. For you, are philosophy and music two sides of the same coin?
As I've said before, for many people philosophy is a very scientific affair, and has little connection with the deep questions of life and so on that music can have. If philosophy is that when it's at its best, then, for me, that will be very sad, because I don't know how I can do philosophy like that. But many people think it can also be a way of looking at issues of importance directly. This is what it is for me: a way of looking at the question, "What is so important about art?", say, and getting an answer to it, or showing that it doesn't need an answer, or whatever. Then I can with a clear head go about the business of creating art. So philosophy sort of makes music possible, and in that sense they're very closely related, and insofar as music gives philosophy its point, they're as necessary to each other as the two sides of a coin.
But it's more complicated than this, of course: I have other philosophical interests, and more interest in music than in writing art. But this captures a large part of my attraction to philosophy, and certainly to the philosophy of art.
4. What do you think of the idea of attachment to home and property in general?
I've actually just read a really good book by Sebastian Barry, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, which deals with issues of exile and homesickness and the peculiar feeling of hating one's home while acknowledging that it is part of who you are and so feeling that love for it in the same emotion. And this has made me think about my relation to Ireland (and to certain people in Ireland, e.g., my family) again. I don't know what to think about it now, except that I'm more aware than I was of the importance of one's home, and of the impossibility of renouncing it to any great extent.
Of property in general: it seems to me a totally different question. But anyway, I don't have much time for mine-and-thine: it strikes me as petty and mean. I think an attitude of reciprocal generosity is much more beautiful. I understand that it's not always possible, given how distant we are from each other, and given the problem of free riders, and given that different people have different needs that others might not appreciate, and so on. But in my own life I try to be generous, and I know I have a tendency to presume that I can use others' property.
5. What would you like to be remembered for?
I'm not sure I would like to be remembered particularly! If I were to be remembered as a philosopher, I'd like to be remembered for sorting out the sorry state of the discipline of aesthetics, perhaps by making everyone read their Collingwood again. (How often I have read articles riddled with stupid conceptual confusions and philistine attitudes that were thoroughly dealt with 75 years ago by that man.) But I don't think I have the capacity to do that, and in any case I think the problems of aesthetics as it stands are deeper than can be fixed by argument.
If remembered as a man by grandchildren or whoever at a funeral service, I think I would like to be known as friendly, honest, a talented composer, a good listener... uh, I guess I'd like to be thought of as intelligent too... to have had fine and delicate taste in non-art things. Dunno. A mixed bag of things. None of them are especially important.