A requiem for Ó Riada 40 years on
FOR many of us, Seán Ó Riada is spectral, a nebulous legend. To others, he is a vital and tangible presence. The gregarious Ó Riada drew people and had a knack for dissolving social barriers. His name brings a smile to those who knew him, but his effect on music and culture is fresh and immense.
As 2011 draws to a close, so too does the 40th anniversary of Ó Riada’s death, in 1971 at 40. A weak liver shortened his life cruelly. His funeral was televised and public sympathy was that of the loss of an epic chieftain.
This year’s array of diverse tributes includes a film Seán Ó Riada: Litir ód Mhac recently broadcast on TG4 and directed and produced by RTÉ Nuacht journalist Grett O’Connor. Frank yet reverent and delicately crafted, it takes the form of a letter from Ó Riada’s eldest of seven children, Peadar, who was 16 when his father died.
Ó Riada was a warm raconteur who could drift into fascinating topics. He was bolstered by the courage of his convictions. His earliest 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 entered University College Cork on a scholarship in 1948, reading Classics and Irish, before moving to the music department under Aloys Fleischmann. 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 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. The experiment was not wholly successful, though 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.”
Ó Riada is perhaps most often honoured for his seismic influence on Irish traditional music, forever altering its course. He recognised its power when many of the greatest traditional musicians were living in relative isolation or trapped in the constricts of the ceílí band, a form he attacked ruthlessly.
Éamon de Buitléir, celebrated film-maker and wildlife conservationist, witnessed Ó Riada’s re-ignition of traditional music around 1960.
De Buitléir was a button accordionist and one of the younger generation of traditional musicians. Ó Riada was musical director of the Abbey Theatre, earning a modest living conducting its orchestra, a handful of classical musicians.
“He got us together because Brian McMahon’s new play called for another kind of music,” says de Buitléir. “We weren’t presented to the public at all, we were in the orchestra pit, it had never happened before. The group played every night while the actors were on stage and we’d know where we were to come in and stop in relation to what was happening.”
The sessions at which they honed this new craft are legendary, and often became hoolies when many of Ó Riada friends would visit from the city, among them leading artists and writers.
The group of musicians rehearsed at Galloping Green, the house between Dublin and Bray where Ó Riada lived in spartan grandeur with his young family. “He actually changed the culture of group-playing in this country. Before then, you’d play three reels one after the other, you’d often repeat them a few times, but there was no change in how the musicians were playing the tune. Think of jazz improvisation and that’s exactly what he did. He’d give each musician an opportunity to play solo and often pick tunes that were a favourite of the soloist,” says de Buitléir. He opened the door to a world of variation, countermelody and experimentation.
“It was very exciting, but the older players thought he was gone crazy when they heard this at the beginning,” says de Buitléir. The group became Ceoltóirí Chualann, a massive success and a prototype for every traditional band since.
With Ó Riada playing bodhrán or exploring the capabilities of the harpsichord to replace the traditional wire-strung harp, the new structures encouraged virtuosity and won new audiences.
His activities with the Abbey Theatre and the continuing development of Ceoltóirí Chualann left time for other work, and many of Ó Riada’s compositions, including film music, date from this period. Mícheál Ó Suilleabháin, the noted pianist, composer and educator, was one of his students when Ó Riada returned later to University College Cork as a lecturer. “He would have been very aware of 20th century classical music as he grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” Ó Suilleabháin says. “As he came into himself, he would have been listening to Stravinsky and serial music.”
His Nomos series of orchestral works, published 1957-60, are regarded by some as his finest classical music. Until this year, only one of these, Nomos no.1, had been recorded, on his recently re-issued Vertical Man album on Claddagh records.
Nomos no. 2, a large-scale, heroic yet eclectic work for choir and orchestra was considered by Aloys Fleischmann to be his most important original composition, but remains unrecorded. A recent release by RTÉ Lyric FM of some of Ó Riada’s orchestral works includes the first recording of Nomos no. 4, a piano concerto. This more serious work contrasts with the approach he took for his wealth of film music and arrangements of traditional music, which had far more popular appeal.
Ó Riada began more often to renounce the European cultural influence and to delve deeper into Irish heritage. His radio series, Our Musical Heritage, which was recently broadcast again for the first time since the 1960s by RTÉ, is considered a seminal work of research and record.
In 1962, Ó Riada left Dublin and moved south, settling a year later in the Muskerry gaeltacht to commute to a new post as lecturer at UCC. He took frequent trips to Dublin and abroad but nurtured the idea and spirit of a Gaelic nation.
In Cúil Aogha, where he spent most of his 30s, the second half of his adult life, that spirit is alive and well — and indeed had been for many centuries before him, and that is what attracted him to the area. It is there that Peadar continues his father’s deep involvement with the community and is himself a strong creative force.
Having taken over his father’s choir, sustaining the group as well as the music his father had written for it, he is also a musician, composer and broadcaster.
To honour his father this year, Peadar conceived and ran the first Festival of Heroes in his honour, Féile na Laoch. The event will be repeated in seven years, when he hopes more communities across Ireland will put on their own festival and every seven years thereafter, a new tradition. It continues his father’s extraordinary power to combine elegant restructure with heartfelt cultural passion, while bringing together great thinkers and performers to meld and develop traditions. The festival opened with ceremony and a celebration from dusk until dawn, with many of Ireland’s living cultural icons performing. An exhibition of pictures and histories of 100 local and national heroes was a focal point, and talks and seminars were held. The festival closed in October with a weekend of events including a conference on local resilience and sustainability.
“We are hoping that this period from August to October, once every seven years, will be given over to go back to who we are and renew ourselves as a nation,” says Peadar. Describing the closing event, he says: “Ceoltóirí Chualann and our two choirs performed a piece I’d thrown together, then all the flags and the exhibitions were taken down and put into a big box.
“The torches were quenched and the box hammered six times in each corner, not to be opened until May Day, 2018.”
One can imagine that Ó Riada would have been hugely taken by the idea and the event, which combined ceremony with substance and a real modernity.
One of the last events of the year, Ó Riada Revisited, is a commemorative programme run by UCC this weekend, celebrating both Ó Riada’s traditional and his classical music.
* Ó Riada Revisited — UCC Commemorative Events Concert with Ceoltóirí Chualann, 8pm, Thursday, December 8, Cork Opera House.
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