Seán Ó Riada

Seán Ó Riada was the founder of the present day school (that is to state, the authentic historic style of performing) of Irish folk music and, equally essential, an essential nationalistic voice within the orchestral music of Ireland. Most widely known today like a composer, he was also present on the recording from the initial album with the Chieftains, and founded the folk chamber orchestra Ceoltoiri Cualann, Paddy Moloney’s group before developing the Chieftains. Seán Ó Riada (or John Reidy, in British) was created in Cork, Ireland, in 1931, and went to University University, Cork. He received his Bachelor of Music level in 1952, and offered as associate music movie director for Radio Eireann in 1954 and 1955. In 1955, he became the music movie director from the Abbey Movie theater in Dublin, a post he kept until 1962. The next calendar year, he became a lecturer at School University, Cork, a post he kept until his loss of life in 1971. During this time period, he constructed prolifically in every areas, including music for has, two ballets, several orchestral suites and symphonic parts, several choral functions, masses, chamber parts, and piano functions, and three significant bits of film music. Among his era of Irish composers, Ó Riada was probably the most deeply associated with traditional Irish music. Curiously, nevertheless, the majority of his functions for the concert hall used no folk materials, and some from it — especially Nomos No. 1, is really a contrapuntal piece that uses 12-build (“serialist”) technique. Nomos No. 2 utilizes a text message attracted from Sophocles’ Theban has in its reflections on lifestyle and loss of life and the annals of music, and carries a quotation from Mozart’s Symphony No. 41. Ó Riada was just like likely to appear back again to Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms concerning his very own nation’s musical traditions. Ó Riada also ready numerous preparations of traditional Irish tracks, and in the past due ’50s he arranged Ceoltoiri Cualann, a folk chamber orchestra whose account consisted of the very best traditional music artists in Ireland. Ó Riada’s group performed Irish folk music stripped of most its then-typical pop inflections and sentimentality. The initial versions from the melodies and dances offered as the supply material, as well as the group performed them with an all natural lilt and an abandon that originated from deep inside the music’s roots; the airs, specifically, stripped of the modern inflections, found with sustained poignancy than anyone experienced recognized inside them in years. It had been out of the group that Paddy Moloney created the Chieftains in the first ’60s, an inferior, more versatile ensemble that ultimately brought this fresh/old eyesight of Irish music towards the globe. Ó Riada was using the Chieftains on the 1st album, plus some 3 years after his loss of life, his structure “Ladies of Ireland,” as found in the 1974 Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon, broke the group in the us, garnering substantial radio play and network tv period for them. His personal film ratings included the music for three documentaries — I Am Ireland, Independence, as well as the Living Open fire — and Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1962 feature film, Playboy from the , THE BURKHA. Ó Riada’s additional great contribution to Irish folk music place in the world of orchestral structure. While England experienced composers such as for example Gustav Holst, George Butterworth, and, most significant, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who utilized British folk music because the basis for a few of the most effective orchestral compositions, Irish music by no means quite achieved exactly the same amount of prominence as a resource for severe orchestral music — not really until Ó Riada arrived. Although his many significant compositions drew from German and Austrian inspirations, he also used genuine Irish music being a basis for structure in a number of of his functions, and finished up carrying out for Irish folk music what Vaughan Williams do for British music. His function has been in comparison to that of Gustav Mahler, for his capability to color orchestral images with rich shades and sparse austerity, and to Sibelius in its nationalist sentiments.