A giant of Irish music
THE world and his mother will be abroad on our streets this Friday for Culture Night – an event whose huge nationwide popularity speaks volumes for our enthusiastic inclination toward the intoxicating cocktail of education and entertainment.
Wandering around Cork on the night, top of my ‘to do’ list is a talk by Peadar Ó Riada on the work of his father, Seán. Though I am, sadly, far too ignorant upon the joys of Irish musical composition, even the dunce in me cannot fail to be stirred by the glorious notes of ‘Mise Éire’.
Penned by Ó Riada in 1959 as the score for the iconic George Morrison documentary, its glorious, rousing highs thrilled me as a kid – and still do today.
Play it at the right time of evening with the last rays of an autumn sun falling on a distant hillside and my tears will flood everything in the vicinity. Predictable, but there you are.
Cycling around the fields and lanes of Coolea during the glorious summer heatwave, the legacy of Ó Riada was never far away in this scenic corner of the West Cork Gaeltacht. The Coolea Men’s Choir proudly embodies a local spirit where fathers, sons and grandsons gather to sing throughout the year.
“The lads arrive as babies in their fathers arms, before growing up and leaving for the outside world in their late teens,” says Peadar.
“Then they will often return and settle down, and one day arrive into Mass with their own son, as the wheel of life gives another turn.”
A membership composed of farmers, carpenters, teachers, postmen and shopkeepers, they are the links in a chain dating back 50 years – a torch passed down through the generations in a melodic soundtrack to village life and its people.
When Ó Riada took his post at University College Cork in 1963, he settled his family in what was then a rural hamlet where even telephones were a rarity.
“Seán was moving closer and closer to the native traditions during his period in Coolea,” writes his biographer, Tomás O Canainn. “He felt that local ways were very important as he delved deeper into the work of the Munster poets.”
Interestingly, his favoured place of work was in the toilet, where he could spend hours reading and singing.
Never one to suffer fools, Ó Riada had echoes of other great Irish figures, as noted his fellow gaeilgeoir Seán Mac Réamoinn: “There was an arrogance in him, as there was in Kavanagh, Behan, Yeats, Shaw and O’Connor. But it was not the kind of arrogance that makes a man hated; on the contrary, it often blended all too well with other elements of the character which an Irish artist can easily become.”
At his funeral, the ultimate Irish homage to greatness, hundreds lined the roads as the voices of the Coolea Men’s choir soared to the heavens. “It resembled nothing less than a king coming back among his own people,” a fellow composer observed. Would that we all could shrug off this mortal coil to such a stirring musical epilogue.