B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, JUNE 9 , 2022
obituariesBY JORI FINKELDervla Murphy, an Irish travel
writer who began her prodigious
career with an epic solo bicycle
journey in 1963 across Europe to
India and went on to explore vast
stretches of the developing world
by foot — defying social expecta-
tions of women along the way —
died on May 22 in her home in
Lismore, Ireland. She was 90.
Her London publisher Eland
Books announced the death. She
had recently suffered a series of
strokes.
Decades before Cheryl Strayed
hiked the Pacific Crest Trail with
little preparation and turned it
into her best-selling memoir
“Wild,” Ms. Murphy inspired gen-
erations of readers by embarking
on one trip after another with
minimal equipment but an abun-
dance of grit.
For Ms. Murphy, her serious
traveling started in her 30s after
many years of caring for her
disabled mother. Later, as a single
mother, she supported herself
and her daughter on her travel
writing. She published a total of
26 books.
“She provided a role model for
independence, for freedom of
spirit, for a whole generation of
women when there was no one
else like that in Ireland,” said
fellow travel writer Manchán
Magan in the 2016 documentary
film “Who Is Dervla Murphy?”
Most active from the 1960s to
the 1990 s, Ms. Murphy was
drawn to parts of the world near-
ly untouched by industrializa-
tion, urbanization and consumer
culture, where people lived with-
out access to modern plumbing
or electricity, not to mention the
satellite televisions and cell-
phones to come.
At home in Lismore, where she
lived in a warren of old stone
rooms without central heat, she
never learned to drive a car or use
a computer. She avoided small
talk and regularly declined book
tours and interviews. “Interview-
ing Dervla is like trying to open
an oyster with a wet bus ticket,”
Jock Murray, her first publisher,
once said.
She gave up basic comforts
when she traveled, often sleeping
in a tent and using latrines, and
acknowledged being “impervi-
ous” to discomfort. “It literally
doesn’t matter to me whether I’m
sleeping on the floor or on a
mattress,” she said in the docu-
mentary. “I simply don’t notice
the difference. And that really is a
big plus when you’re traveling.”
She also insisted that it was not
accurate to call her brave. “You’re
only courageous if you do some-
thing you’re afraid of doing. I’m
fearless when it comes to the
physical, and that’s a totally dif-
ferent thing,” she said.
Her debut book, “Full Tilt”
(1965), was billed as a journey
“from Ireland to India” but was
more accurately the story of a trip
from Dunkirk, France, to Delhi.
She conceived of the journey
after receiving a bicycle and an
atlas for her 10th birthday but
kept her plan to herself, she
wrote, “avoiding the tolerant
amusement it would have pro-
voked among my elders. I did not
want to be soothingly assured
that this was a passing whim
because I was quite confident
that one day I would cycle to
India.”
She began the self-funded jour-
ney some two decades later, onJan. 14, 1963, on “Roz,” a 37-
pound man’s bike stripped of its
three-speed derailleur and load-
ed with basic supplies, including
blank notebooks and a compass.
When she reached Delhi after six
months, she had written thou-
sands of words and pedaled for
some 3,000 miles. Her total ex-
penses amounted to £64.
Her journey began in the mid-
dle of a blizzard — which would
go down in British history as the
Big Freeze of 1963 — as she cycled
despite frostbite along icy roads.
Gales on the roads in Slovenia
were strong enough to knock her
off her bike and, when the snow
began to melt, the raging Morava
River separated her from Roz.
She faced down other dangers:
wolves that nipped at her in
Bulgaria, a Serbian man who
entered her bedroom at night
uninvited, and three men carry-
ing spades along a road near
Tabriz, Iran, who tried to steal
Roz. In each case, she used the .25
pistol she brought for the trip toprotect herself, killing a wolf with
a bullet through the skull and
firing warning shots to scare
away the men.
Her adventure took her
through small villages, and she
dedicated “Full Tilt” to her
“hosts” in Afghanistan and Paki-
stan, who often greeted her with
warmth and food despite their
befuddlement over a woman un-
dertaking such a trek. She did not
know their languages but took
time to learn about their cus-
toms, religions and governments.
She also sold her pistol in Afghan-
istan, “becoming an arms dealer,”
she joked in the documentary,
and after that carried a knife
instead of a gun, which she feared
would escalate violence.
Her following books, set in
Tibet, Nepal, India, Ethiopia,
Madagascar and Peru, blended
food reviewing, political and reli-
gious reporting, and poetic mus-
ings of the Romantic-sublime va-
riety, for example when the thrust
of a mountain peak or stillness ofa glacial lake overcame her. But
the writing never veered far from
her main subject: everyday en-
counters with the landscape and
its inhabitants, from rowdy chil-
dren to pompous local officials to
semi-domesticated animals.
In “Eight Feet in the Andes”
(1983), she travels far off the grid
with her 9-year-old daughter, Ra-
chel, and the mule who carried
her, Juana (hence the “eight”
feet). A good part of their quest
involves locating alfalfa or oats
for Juana to consume each day. In
“Cameroon With Egbert” (1990),
the most memorable in a near-
Biblical litany of calamities —
including clouds of biting flies,
rainstorms and hailstorms, ma-
laria, mountain paths that
abruptly end in precipices, food
shortages and lack of shelter —
occurs when their trusted pack-
horse Egbert is stolen.
Over time, Ms. Murphy’s writ-
ing grew more politically explicit.
She traveled to Northern Ireland
amid the decades of sectarian
violence known as “The Trou-
bles” to better understand the
militant Irish Republican Army.
Subsequent books focused on the
Rwandan genocide, turmoil in
the Balkans, the legacy of the
Vietnam War in Laos and the
cycle of violence in the Gaza
Strip.
Some readers criticized her
later books as polemics, prefer-
ring the colorful travelogue en-
tries to her anti-capitalist and
sometimes anti-American dia-
tribes. But it was difficult to
separate her deeply held environ-
mentalist convictions and oppo-
sition to globalization from her
joyous discovery of some of the
world’s most remote locations.
As she wrote in “Eight Feet in
the Andes”: “There is much more
to such experiences than visual
beauty; there is also another sort
of beauty, necessary to mankind
yet hard to put in words. It is the
beauty of freedom: freedom from
an ugly, artificial, dehumanizing,
discontented world in which man
has lost his bearings.”
Ms. Murphy began her lengthy
journeys after the death of her
parents, Irish Catholics from
Dublin. The day they married, the
couple moved to Lismore so her
father could take a job as the
county librarian. Dervla Murphy
— their only child, who was
officially named Dervilla Maria
Murphy to appease a priest who
deemed her first name pagan —was born on Nov. 28, 1931.
Her mother suffered from
rheumatoid arthritis. “By my first
birthday she could no longer
walk without the aid of a stick
and by my second she could no
longer walk at all,” Ms. Murphy
wrote in her 1979 memoir,
“Wheels Within Wheels.” After
attending secondary school at the
Ursuline Convent in Waterford,
she dropped out at age 14 to care
for her mother. She did so for the
next decade, until her father died
of influenza complications in
1961 and her mother, of kidney
failure, in 1962.
While her mother’s immobility
helped to inspire her travel, so
did some maternal advice. “She
was the first person who suggest-
ed I travel on my bike,” Ms.
Murphy noted in the documen-
tary. “She thought it would be a
substitute for the education I had
missed.”
In the mid- 1960 s, Ms. Murphy
was romantically involved with
Terence de Vere White, then liter-
ary editor of the Irish Times, who
was married with children. He
was Rachel’s biological father but
by mutual agreement was not
involved in her upbringing, and
for years they kept his paternity a
secret.
Ms. Murphy is survived by her
daughter and three granddaugh-
ters.
As she grew older, Ms. Murphy
was increasingly mistaken for a
man while traveling. Her voice
was deep, her hair short, and she
was brawny enough that ham-
mering down her first on a table,
or taking one swing at someone,
was enough to scatter potential
assailants.
By the time she was 55 and
traveled to West Africa with Ra-
chel, then 18, for “Cameroon With
Egbert,” locals were convinced of
her manhood. Several assumed
she and Rachel were husband
and wife.
She hypothesized that this
misgendering occurred not only
because of her physique but also
because the idea of women travel-
ing by foot alone through the
countryside was unthinkable.
She tried to correct the misper-
ception with limited success, un-
til midway into the Cameroon
journey she tried another ap-
proach: She took to unbuttoning
her shirt in public at the first sign
of misunderstanding. It was, like
her literary voice, frank and per-
suasive.DERVLA MURPHY, 90
Travel writer chronicled international journeys, challenged gender norms
NUTAN/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES
I rish travel author D ervla Murphy in 1990. In her debut book, “Full Tilt,” she described a six-month
trip from Dunkirk, France, to Delhi that began in the middle of a blizzard in January 1963.BY ALLAN KOZINNIngram Marshall, an influen-
tial American composer who
used combinations of electronic
sound and standard orchestral
instruments to create deeply
moving, atmospheric and often
melancholic soundscapes, died
May 31 at a hospital in New
Haven, Conn. He was 80.
He had complications from
Parkinson’s disease, said his wife,
Veronica Tomasic.
Mr. Marshall’s music drew on
a wealth of styles, from 18th-
century hymnody and lush Ro-
manticism to mid-20th-century
electronic composition and min-
imalism — a breadth of influenc-
es that made his music almost
impossible to classify. He was
sometimes called a post-mini-
malist, but he disliked the term,
suggesting postmodernist as an
alternative. But his music also
embraced a time-expanding el-
ement — a sense of slowly un-
folding — born of his fascination
with the Indonesian gamelan, a
traditional percussion ensemble
that he discovered as a college
student in the late 1960s.
Trained in the use of comput-
ers to produce musical sounds,
first at the Columbia-Princeton
Electronic Music Center and lat-
er at the California Institute of
the Arts, he created some pieces
with purely electronic timbres —
“blip and bloop and bleep” tex-
tures, as he once called them —
but generally preferred collect-
ing the sounds of the real world
and modifying them with digital
delays, looping and other tech-
niques, often adding live instru-
ments or vocals, which would be
electronically processed as well.
His best-known work, “Fog
Tropes” (1981), used sounds he
recorded near San Francisco Bay,
including fog horns at different
pitches, ringing buoys, seagulls
and wind. Looped and pro-
cessed, the recordings became a
dark-hued, hauntingly atmos-
pheric score, to which he added
music for a live brass sextet. In
2010, director Martin Scorsese
used a section of the piece in his
film “Shutter Island.”
“I never worship technology
for itself,” Mr. Marshall told the
online music website Perfect
Sound Forever in 2003. “It’s only
a tool and one must avoid the
pitfall of always wanting the
newest, most up to date technol-
ogy in order to realize one’s
music, because that perfect tech-
nology will never exist. It is
better to use what you have, what
you find at your disposal and
make the best of it — then you
are in charge.”
Another of Mr. Marshall’s
most admired scores, “Kingdom
Come” (1997) — a meditation on
the Yugoslavian wars of the mid-
1990s — uses heavily processed
recordings of Christian and Mus-
lim sacred music recorded in
Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia,
wrapped within a rich orchestral
and choral fabric. Mr. Marshall
had collected the music during a
visit to the former Yugoslavia in- When his brother-in-law,
journalist Francis Tomasic, was
killed in Bosnia in 1994, Mr.
Marshall wrote the work as a
kind of requiem for victims of the
conflict.
“'Composers, poets and artists
always feel useless in the wake of
calamity,” he told the New York
Times in 2001. “We are not
firemen; we are not philanthro-
pists or inspirational speakers.
But I think it is the tragic and
calamitous in life that we try to
make sense of, and this is the
stuff of our lives as artists.”
Other works, including “Grad-
ual Requiem” (1978), “Hymnodic
Delays” (1997), “Psalmbook”
(2011) and “Magnificat Strophes”
(2014), also draw on an innate
spirituality.
Mr. Marshall sometimes used
repetition and other minimalist
techniques, but he rejected the
dogma that drove the style, tell-
ing the New York Times in 2007
that where minimalism was con-
cerned, “what was important
was not the process as much as
the expressive use of it.”
And although his music em-
braced dissonance when he
needed it to communicate an
idea or a particular atmosphere,
he was as apt to write a graceful
melody supported with a lush
Romantic texture, as he did in
“Authentic Presence” (2002), for
solo piano, or “Dark Waters”
(1995), for English horn and
tape.
“Ingram Marshall is the great
poet of the indistinct,” Village
Voice critic Kyle Gann wrote in- “His music is filmy, nebu-
lous. It melts. It enters unobtru-
sively and dies by slowly slipping
away. In between the drama can
be gripping, but it sneaks up on
you.”
Ingram Douglass Marshall
was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y.,
on May 10, 1942. His father was a
banker, and his mother was a
homemaker who was also a tal-
ented amateur pianist and singer
and encouraged her son’s inter-
est in music.
Mr. Marshall pursued his mu-
sical studies at Lake Forest Col-
lege in Illinois, where he earned
a bachelor’s degree in 1964, and
at Columbia University, where he
studied musicology with Paul
Henry Lang and composition
with Vladimir Ussachevsky and
Mario Davidovsky, two pioneers
of electronic composition.
In 1966, Mr. Marshall contin-
ued his work in electronic music
at the California Institute of the
Arts, where he was a graduate
assistant to the composer Mor-
ton Subotnick. In addition to
studies of electronic music, Mr.
Marshall discovered the Indone-
sian gamelan at Cal Arts and
studied with K.R.T. Wasitodipura
before traveling to Indonesia and
Bali on a Fulbright fellowship to
investigate further. He complet-
ed his master of fine arts degree
in 1971 and remained at Cal Arts
to teach.
Mr. Marshall was in the San
Francisco area from 1973 until
1985, composing works such as
“Fragility Cycles” (1978) for gam-
buh (a Balinese bamboo flute)
and synthesizer, and “Fog
Tropes,” which began as a contri-
bution to another composer’s
evening-long work about San
Francisco’s weather. For a while,
Mr. Marshall used the electronic
component of the piece, then
called “Fog,” as a prelude to
performances of his “Fragility
Cycles” (1978). But in 1981, John
Adams — then the composer-in-
residence at the San FranciscoSymphony — invited Mr. Mar-
shall to present a concert of his
music and suggested he add
brass to “Fog,” an idea that
yielded “Fog Tropes” in its final
form.
In 1985, Mr. Marshall married
Veronica Tomasic, who survives
him, along with their son, Clem-
ent Marshall; a daughter from an
earlier relationship, Juliet Si-
mon; and four grandchildren.
After teaching at the Ever-green State College in Olympia,
Wash., Mr. Marshall joined the
faculty at Yale University in 1989
and settled in Hamden, Conn. He
was a visiting professor and
senior fellow at the Brooklyn
College Institute for Studies in
American Music in 1990 and
1991.
Several of Mr. Marshall’s stu-
dents — including Timo Andres,
Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Coo-
per, Armando Bayolo and Tyon-
dai Braxton — became respected
composers.
Among the musicians who
commissioned and performed
Mr. Marshall’s music were the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, the
Kronos Quartet, the American
Composers Orchestra, the Bang
on a Can All-Stars, the guitarist
Benjamin Verdery and the pia-
nist Sarah Cahill. He composed a
concerto for classical and elec-
tric guitars, “Dark Florescence”
(2004) that was given its pre-
miere at Carnegie Hall by Verd-
ery and Andy Summers, the
guitarist for the Police. He also
collaborated with the photogra-
pher Jim Bengston on the multi-
media works, “Alcatraz” (1982),
about the California prison, and
“Eberbach” (1985), about a Ger-
man monastery.
“I have to confess,” Mr. Mar-
shall told the online New Music
Box in 2001, “I’m not prolific. I
don’t write a lot of music and it
takes me a long time to finish
things and it used to worry me. I
used to think ‘Oh, God, my
career, it’s not gonna go any-
where unless I have four or five
symphonies,’ you know, and
more of this and more of that.
But I always think of poets who
maybe every five years publish a
very slim volume of poetry... I
think of my work as a little like
that, you know there’s a certain
essence, there’s a certain concen-
trated quality to my work and
that well, it’s the old thing quali-
ty versus quantity. I just try to
focus on doing what I do well. It’s
not a lot, but you get a lot more
out of what I’ve done hopefully.”INGRAM MARSHALL, 80
Composer of ‘Fog Tropes’ blended electronic sounds and orchestral music
CAMERON BLOCH/ASS0CIATED PRESS
American composer Ingram Marshall plays a Balinese flute i n his
home studio in Hamden, Conn., on Feb. 8, 2003.