John Scally pays tribute to Seán Ó Riada, composer and arranger of Irish traditional music who became the single most influential figure in the revival of Irish traditional music during the 1960s.
His name is carved on the collective consciousness of the nation. Seán Ó Riada died in 1971 at the young age of forty. A weak liver curtailed his life cruelly. His funeral was televised and public sympathy was that of the loss of a great chieftain.
John Reidy was born in Cork City in 1931. His formative years were spent between Cork and Limerick; he was the son of a Garda from Clare while his mother was from the West Muskerry Gaeltacht. He began his studies in University College, Cork on a scholarship in 1948, reading Classics and Irish, before moving to the music department.
He graduated as a bachelor of music from UCC in 1951. He was already assistant director of music in RTÉ when he graduated and moved to Dublin, but the work’s administrative nature frustrated him. His initial motivation was a hunger for success in classical music.
Leaving behind the marginal classical music scene in Ireland, as well as his wife and first-born child, Ó Riada attempted a music career in Europe in 1955. He moved to Italy and France where he adopted a more bohemian lifestyle and composed several Avant Garde compositions for orchestra called Nomos.
Just as he was on the verge of becoming Ireland’s first Avant Garde composer, he decided to return to Ireland, gradually rejecting modern ‘classical’ music, as he began to devote his time to the study of all things Irish.
Although he was inspired by Paris and gave some recitals and broadcasts of his work there, his wife fetched him home and he settled back with his family in Dublin. He said to her: “I’d rather be breaking stones in Ireland than be the richest man living in Europe.”
At about this time he changed his name from John Reidy to Seán Ó Riada.
He took over as the musical director in the famed Abbey Theatre in 1957 where he remained until 1962. In 1950s Ireland traditional music was often held in low regard by some elements of Irish society.
O’Riada’s first attempt to combine Irish song with the classical tradition was in 1959, when he composed the score for the documentary Mise Éire and ‘Saoirse’ in 1960 and, most famously, the score for the film version of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ in 1963. This last piece made him a household name in Ireland.
In this period, he sought to create a sort of Irish flavoured classical music, that is, Irish folk tunes arranged for orchestra, as Vaughan Williams had done in England and other nationalist composers has done in Europe towards the end of the previous century. He studied and collected old Irish music and produced a series for RTÉ called ‘Our Musical Heritage’.
Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own
