Our Inspiration
The mission of the Institute of Irish Music and Song, is to increase access to quality music education, provide inspiring musical experiences and to connect Ireland with the world. To this we looked to the past and found our inspiration in amazing Irish Composers from the recent past and in history. We have acknowledged their talents by naming our rooms after them.
Explore their achievements below…
Thomas Moore
(1779 – 1852. Born Dublin.)
Notable Work:
‘Moore’s Melodies’ (1808-1834) featuring ‘The Minstrel Boy’
‘The Last Rose Of Summer’
‘The Meeting Of The Waters’.
Commemorative Markers:
The Meeting Of The Waters, Avoca, County Wicklow.
Trinity College Dublin (College Street).
Central Park, New York.
Born over his parents’ grocers shop on Dublin’s Aungier Street, the teenage Thomas Moore first made his mark not in music but in politics. In 1798 Trinity student Moore was acquitted by the college of sedition against British rule. Five years later his college friend Robert Emmet would hang for high treason.
Moore’s success as a poet earned him an introduction to the future King George IV, but it was his ‘Melodies’ which made him an international superstar while still in his 20s. Published in ten volumes over 26 years, ‘Moore’s Melodies’ was a phenemonon. The sheet music for ‘The Last Rose Of Summer’ alone sold a reputed million copies in the US. Many other titles including ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘The Meeting Of The Waters’ formed the corpus of the 19th Century Irish songbook. The French maestro Hector Berlioz popularised Moore’s songs throughout Europe, while Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron sang his praises.
English critics revived the old charge of sedition, detecting in his lyrics “the melancholy ravings of the disappointed rebel”. Moore said he was merely putting heartfelt words to “our national music”. Sung by huge crowds at Daniel O’Connell’s monster meetings protesting the union with Britain, Moore’s melodies truly did become “our national music”.
Bill Whelan
(b. 1950 Limerick)
Accolades:
Grammy Award. Riverdance - Best Musical Show Album.
Lifetime Achievement Award. Irish Music Rights Organisation.
Lifetime Achievement Award. Meteor Music Awards.
Boards:
Berklee School of Music, Boston.
University of Limerick Foundation.
Irish Traditional Music Archive.
Crash Ensemble, Dublin.
No Irish tunesmith has enjoyed greater critical and commercial success across the contemporary spectrum than Bill Whelan, whose talents as a composer, arranger and producer have earned him acclaim in musical spheres that rarely converge in a single career. In 1987 the Limerick-born all-rounder premiered his first major orchestral work, ‘The Ó Riada Suite’, which was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra and conducted by the legendary Elmer Bernstein. Earlier that year Johnny Logan had won the Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland with ‘Hold Me Now’, the second Eurovision winner arranged and produced by Whelan. Recognising an exceptional talent, world renowned acts including Kate Bush, Van Morrison and U2 came calling.
His next major orchestral work was ‘The Seville Suite’ premiered in the Spanish city in 1992. A featured dancer was Maria Pagés whose thrilling performance would anticipate Whelan’s most celebrated composition, Riverdance. First aired as the 1994 Eurovision interlude, Riverdance electrified the watching world and the show quickly became a global touring phenomenon. Bill Whelan’s formidable musical credentials also include the composition of music to accompany fifteen WB Yeats plays for Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, and film scores for ‘Lamb’ starring Liam Neeson and ‘Dancing At Lughnasa’ with Meryl Streep.
Ina Boyle
(1889 - 1967. Born Enniskerry, Co Wicklow)
Notable Work:
‘The Magic Harp’ (1920). Selected for publication by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, the first time a female composer received the distinction.
‘Glencree’ (1927). First symphony composed by an Irishwoman.
‘Virgilian Suite’ (1930-1931). First ballet composed by an Irishwoman.
‘Violin Concerto’. First concerto composed by an Irishwoman.
In 1937 the great British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams sent a warm letter of encouragement to his gifted Irish protégé Ina Boyle. In it he wrote: “I think it is most courageous of you to go on with so little recognition. The only thing to say is that it does come finally.” Widespread recognition of Boyle’s unique talents never did come during her lifetime, but the 21st Century has been an age of rediscovery for her impressive body of work.
Ina Boyle was born into a tight-knit family in Enniskerry, County Wicklow in 1889 where her father was a Church of Ireland curate. She lived out most of her life in the village, and her physical isolation curtailed the social networking that would have ensured more performances and greater exposure for her works. But while Boyle’s physical movement was limited, her imagination was boundless and she wrote symphonies, choral, vocal and chamber music, an opera and several stage works. Vaughan Williams accepted her as a student after her 1920 orchestral rhapsody ‘The Magic Harp’ won the unique distinction for a woman of publication by the Carnege Trust. The outbreak of World War 2 disrupted Ina Boyle’s already tentative contacts with the international music circuit, but the outside world has finally come in search of her.
Sean O Riada
(1931 – 1971. Born Cork City.)
Notable Work:
‘Nomos No.1: Hercules dux Ferrariae’. (1957) Classical composition for string orchestra.
‘Mise Eire (I Am Ireland)’. (1959) Film score.
‘Mná na hÉireann (Women Of Ireland)’. Song based on 18th Century poem by Peadar Ó Doirnín.
In his student days Seán Ó Riada was auditor of the Philosophical Society at University College Cork, and he subjected his life and his music to intense inquiry. In particular, he questioned what it meant to be Irish, and what we mean by the term ‘Irish Music’. As he grappled with issues of identity and what qualifies as in and what counts as out, he shaped Irish traditional and classical music into the forms it takes today.
The most influential figure in 20th Century Irish music was the son of fiddle playing parents who were themselves steeped in ancient playing ways. He once recounted: “My father had a wonderful store of music. I remember him telling me that he would walk seven miles, and do a day’s work, to learn a tune.” Engaged by the Abbey Theatre he assembled the Ceoltóirí Chualann collective, and his free-thinking tutoring liberated his players to test, bend and break the hide-bound rules of generations.
The world of film came calling and his majestic score for the patriotic ‘Mise Eire’ (‘I Am Ireland’) made him a national figure. Recorded by Kate Bush amongst many others, his best known composition, ‘Mná na hEireann’, capped Mary Robinson’s joyous victory speech as she was elected Ireland’s first female President in 1990.
Rhoda Coghill
(1903 – 2000. Born Donnybrook, Dublin.)
Notable Work:
‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’. Rhapsody composed 1923. Full premiere 1990.
‘Saoirdhréacht Gaedhealach/Gaelic Fantasy’. Composition for solo piano, published 1939.
Rhoda Coghill announced from early on that she was to be a significant figure in 20th Century Irish music. By the time she obtained a music degree from Trinity College in 1922 – a rare distinction for a woman – she had already found fame as a star ivory tinkler at Dublin’s largest playhouse, the Theatre Royal. As she sat her music finals in Trinity the Civil War was raging all around, and she recalled the charred pages of state papers floating down on the college campus from a massive explosion at the Public Records Office across the river.
After a year studying in Berlin with Artur Schnabel - who encouraged her to prize soul over technical proficiency - Coghill returned to begin a long and prolific career with the Dublin Philharmonic and the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra. In 1939 she joined the national broadcaster as chief accompanist, a role she held for the next 30 years. Coghill’s compositions were rarely heard during her lifetime, and her most acclaimed rhapsody ‘The Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ only received its first full performance in 1990, nearly six decades after its creation. In addition to her classical works, she also arranged Irish folk airs, often wedding them to poems by favourite wordsmiths such as A.E. and Padraic Colum.
Phil Coulter
(Born 1942. Derry, Northern Ireland)
Notable Work:
‘Tranquility’ (album). ‘Congratulations’.
‘Puppet On A String’.
‘The Town I Loved So Well’.
‘Saturday Night’.
Distinctions:
Gold Badge Award for an outstanding contribution to music from the Btish Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.
Grammy nomination for the 2000 album ‘Highland Cathedral’.
Ivor Novello Award for ‘Songwriter Of The Year 1975’, shared with co-writer Bill Martin
Honourary Doctorates from the University of Ulster, Dublin Institute of Technology and the Open University.
Raised in a Derry musical family, Phil Coulter’s parents left their young son in no doubt that their piano was “the most important piece of furniture in the house”. No natural, he “hated the piano at first”. But he persevered and by his mid-teens, “I began to think of the piano as an extension of myself”.
He studied classical music at Queen’s University Belfast, but the pull of pop lured him to London in the mid-Sixties where he wrote and arranged for Tom Jones, Van Morrison and others. In partnership with lyricist Bill Martin, Coulter penned two Eurovision standards, ‘Puppet On A String’ and ‘Congratulations’, plus hits for The Bay City Rollers, Cilla Black, Midge Ure’s Slik and his personal hero Elvis Presley (‘My Boy’).
A pioneer of the New Age genre, Coulter found worldwide success with his ‘Tranquility’ albums and the Grammy-nominated ‘Highland Cathederal’. His two songs which perhaps touch Irish hearts most deeply are ‘The Town I Loved So Well’ and ‘Scorn Not His Simplicity’. The former is a plaintive lament for his war-torn birthplace written during The Troubles. The other, a deeply moving ode to his son born with Down’s Syndrome, is regarded as the outstanding moment in the career of the great Dubliners’ singer Luke Kelly.
Turlough O'Carolan
(1670 – 1738. Born near Nobber, County Meath)
Notable Work:
‘Bumper Squire Jones’.
‘The Clergy’s Lamentation’.
‘The Fairy Queen’.
‘Lament For Owen Roe O’Neill’.
‘Ode To Whiskey’.
Distinctions:
O’Carolan was depicted on the £50 Irish banknote withdrawn in 1993.
A meteorite crater on the planet Mercury is named Carolan in his honour.
Born in 1670, the blind harper Turlough O’Carolan was amongst the last of the legendary itinerant bards who roved the land entertaining the gentry of the big houses, picking up local folk tunes and composing original works. O’Carolan is the best known of all the travelling harpers by dint of the fact that over 200 of his compositions have come down to us in words and music.
Most authorities accept Nobber, Co Meath, as his place of birth and a statue of the musician was unveiled during the town’s 15th annual O’Carolan Harp Festival in 2002. Struck blind by smallpox in his teens, the youngster found rescue in the person of a neighbour, Mary McDermott-Roe who took him under her wing and arranged tuition in the harp. When he reached the age of 21 his benefactress sent O’Carolan into the world with a harp, a helper and a couple of horses. Her patronage came at a time when Gaelic bardish culture was being extinguished by the Penal Laws. Repaying her in true bardish fashion, O’Carolan immortalised the McDermott-Roes in a number of compositions. Such was O’Carolan’s status in his mature years that it is said weddings, funerals and other grand occasions would be delayed until he could get there to play.
Enya
(Born 1961, Gweedore, County Donegal).
Notable Work:
‘Watermark’ (1988)
‘Shepherd Moons’ (1991)
‘A Day Without Rain’ (2000)
‘Dark Sky Island’ (2015)
Distinctions:
Grammy Award for Best New Age Album (4): ‘Shepherd Moons’, ‘The Memory Of Trees’, ‘A Day Without Rain’, ‘Amarantine’.
Billboard Awards 2001 – 2002: Top Charting Female Artist. Top New Age Artist. Top New Age Album.
Ivor Novello Award For International Achievement 1998, shared with Roma Ryan (lyricist) and Nicky Ryan (producer).
Born Eithne Ní Bhraonáin in Gweedore, Co Donegal, Enya was raised in the Irish language and continues to compose first in her native tongue, explaining that she can “express feeling much more directly” in Irish. Born into a musical family, she sang in her first competition aged three and began piano lessons at four.
At 21 she parted from her siblings in the famous family band Clannad to pursue a solo career. Oscar-winner David Puttnam invited her to score his comedy ‘The Frog Prince’, which led on to a BBC commission to compose the soundtrack for its TV series ‘The Celts’. On ‘The Celts’ Enya settled on a sound that would become uniquely her own, melding classical, Irish trad and church styles with lush strings and airy multi-tracked vocals. Edited highlights were released as her 1987 solo debut, ‘Enya’. That same year Enya lent her distinctive mezzo-soprano voice to Sinead O’Connor’s debut album ‘The Lion And The Cobra’. Years later, while scoring the first installment of Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’ movie trilogy, composer Howard Shore “imagined her voice”, while Enya herself made two contributions to the soundtrack.
With astronomical album sales of some 80 million to her name, Enya was aptly honoured with the naming of a minor planet in the asteroid belt as 6433 Enya.
Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin
(1950 – 2018. Born Clonmel, County Tipperary)
Notable Work:
‘The Dolphin’s Way’ (1987).
‘Oilean/Island’ (1989)
‘Enlightenment’ with Van Morrison (1990)
‘Lumen’ (1995)
Distinctions:
Founder of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick.
Founder of the Irish Music Archive at the Burns Library, Boston College.
Awarded the O'Donnell Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.
Inaugural Chair of the Irish state arts body Culture Ireland.
Honorary Doctorates from University College Cork and the Royal Scottish Conservatoire.
Freedom of the Town of Clonmel conferred 2016.
Reflecting on his rich and varied career in music, Clonmel-born Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin once mused: “I don’t always fit into the necessary boxes.” It was the maestro’s typically humble way of saying that his body of work defied easy categorisation. He was a musician whose every instinct was to think outside the box.
In his late teens Ó Súilleabháin began music studies at University College Cork where he fell under the spell of Seán Ó Riada, who encouraged Mícheál’s explorations of classical, traditional and modern styles. Like his great mentor, he was increasingly drawn towards traditonal forms, but unexpected fusions embellished some of his best known trad compositions.
Ó Súilleabháin’s infusions infuriated some purists, with one accusing the composer of peddling “hiberno-jazz, scrubbed clean of roots”. Ó Súilleabháin responded with his BBC/RTE TV series ‘A River Of Sound’ in which he threw down the gauntlet to those who argued that Irish traditional music should ever be set in stone. Aptly, he formulated his position on the importance of innovation while founding the groundbreaking Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick. Now renamed the Irish World Academy Of Music And Dance it is regarded as this pioneering composer’s most enduring bequest to his beloved Irish music.