Seán Ó Riada

Seán Ó Riada established the contemporary approach to performing ancient Irish folk music in its genuine historical manner and simultaneously functioned as an essential proponent of national identity within Ireland’s orchestral tradition. Although primarily identified today as a composer, he took part in the Chieftains’ debut recording and created the folk chamber ensemble Ceoltoiri Cualann, the group Paddy Moloney led prior to founding the Chieftains.

Born John Reidy in Cork, Ireland, in 1931, Ó Riada studied at University College, Cork, completing his Bachelor of Music degree in 1952. He served as assistant music director for Radio Eireann during 1954 and 1955, then became music director of Dublin’s Abbey Theater in 1955, remaining until 1962. The next year he joined the faculty of University College, Cork as a lecturer, a position he retained until his death in 1971. In those years he produced an extensive body of work that included incidental scores for theater, two ballets, assorted orchestral suites and symphonic compositions, multiple choral pieces, masses, chamber music, piano works, and three notable film scores.

Among Irish composers of his generation, Ó Riada maintained the closest engagement with traditional music. Nevertheless, most of his concert-hall pieces avoided folk sources, and certain works, such as the twelve-tone contrapuntal Nomos No. 1, employed serial techniques. Nomos No. 2 sets text from Sophocles’ Theban plays to contemplate existence, mortality, and musical history while quoting Mozart’s Symphony No. 41. Ó Riada turned as readily to Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms as to Ireland’s own heritage.

He prepared numerous settings of traditional Irish songs and, in the late 1950s, assembled Ceoltoiri Cualann, an ensemble of Ireland’s foremost traditional players. The group performed folk melodies and dances drawn from their earliest documented versions, free of prevailing popular mannerisms and sentimentality, conveying instead an innate rhythmic buoyancy and expressive directness rooted in the music’s origins; the airs in particular gained renewed poignancy once stripped of later stylistic additions. From this ensemble Paddy Moloney formed the more compact, versatile Chieftains in the early 1960s, which eventually carried the revitalized vision of Irish music worldwide. Ó Riada appeared on the Chieftains’ first album; roughly three years after his death, his composition “Women of Ireland,” featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1974 film Barry Lyndon, introduced the group to American audiences through extensive radio airplay and network television exposure. His own film scores comprised music for the documentaries I Am Ireland, Freedom, and The Living Fire, as well as Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1962 feature Playboy of the Western World.

Ó Riada’s further major contribution to Irish folk music arose through orchestral composition. While England possessed composers such as Gustav Holst, George Butterworth, and especially Ralph Vaughan Williams who successfully incorporated English folk material into prominent orchestral works, Irish music had not achieved equivalent standing as source material for serious concert music until Ó Riada. Although his most substantial compositions reflected German and Austrian models, he employed authentic Irish music as the foundation for several pieces, thereby accomplishing for Irish traditions what Vaughan Williams had done for English ones. His work has been likened to Gustav Mahler for its ability to create orchestral imagery through rich coloration and restrained austerity, and to Sibelius for its nationalist character.