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Death of Musicologist Francis Llewellyn Harrison

Francis Llewellyn Harrison, better known as “Frank Harrison” or “Frank Ll. Harrison” and one of the leading musicologists of his time and a pioneering ethnomusicologist, dies in Canterbury, England, on December 29, 1987.

Initially trained as an organist and composer, he turns to musicology in the early 1950s, first specialising in English and Irish music of the Middle Ages and increasingly turning to ethnomusicological subjects in the course of his career. His Music in Medieval Britain (1958) is still a standard work on the subject, and Time, Place and Music (1973) is a key textbook on ethnomusicology.

Harrison is born in Dublin on September 29, 1905, the second son of Alfred Francis Harrison and Florence May (née Nash). He becomes a chorister at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin in 1912 and is educated at the cathedral grammar school and Mountjoy School. A competent organist, he is deputy organist at St. Patrick’s from 1925 to 1928. In 1920, he also begins musical studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he studies with John Francis Larchet (composition), George Hewson (organ) and Michele Esposito (piano). In 1926, he graduates Bachelor of Music at Trinity College Dublin and is awarded a doctorate (MusD) in 1929 for a musical setting of Psalm 19. He then works in Kilkenny for one year, serving as organist at St. Canice’s Cathedral and music teacher at Kilkenny College.

In 1930, Harrison emigrates to Canada to become organist at Westminster Presbyterian Church in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 1933, he studies briefly with Marcel Dupré in France but returns to Canada in 1934 to become organist at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ottawa. In 1935, he takes a position as organist and choirmaster at St. George’s Cathedral in Kingston, Ontario, as well as taking up the newly created post of “resident musician” at Queen’s University at Kingston. His duties include giving lectures, running a choir and an orchestra, and conducting concerts himself. His course in the history and appreciation of music is the first music course to be given for full credit at Queen’s. He resigns from St. George’s in 1941 to become assistant professor of music at Queen’s in 1942. During his years in Canada he still pursues the idea of remaining a performing musician and composer, winning three national composition competitions: for Winter’s Poem (1931), Baroque Suite (1943) and Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon (1945).

On a year’s leave of absence from Queen’s, Harrison studies composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale University, also taking courses in musicology with Leo Schrade. In 1946, he takes up a position at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and then moves on to Washington University in St. Louis as head of the new Department of Music (1947–1950).

In 1951, Harrison takes the degrees of Master of Arts (M.A.) and Doctor of Music (DMus) at Jesus College, Oxford, and becomes lecturer (1952), senior lecturer (1956), and reader in the history of music (1962–1970) there. In 1965, he is elected Fellow the British Academy and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford. From 1970 to 1980, he is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, retiring to part-time teaching in 1976.

Harrison also holds Visiting Professorships in musicology at Yale University (1958–1959), Princeton University (spring 1961 and 1968–1969), and Dartmouth College (winter 1968 and spring 1972). He also briefly returns to Queen’s University at Kingston as Queen’s Quest Visiting Professor in the fall of 1980 and is Visiting Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh for the calendar year 1981.

Harrison’s honorary titles also include Doctor of Laws at Queen’s University, Kingston (1974), Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society (1981), and Vice President and Chairman of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society (1985). At Queen’s also, the new Harrison-LeCaine Hall (1974) is partly named in his honour.

Harrison dies in Canterbury, England on December 29, 1987.

In 1989, Harry White appreciates Harrison as “an Irish musicologist of international standing and of seminal influence, whose scholarly achievement, astonishingly, encompassed virtually the complete scope of the discipline which he espoused.” David F. L. Chadd writes of him “He was above all things an explorer, tirelessly curious and boyishly delighted in the pursuit of knowledge, experience and ideas, and totally heedless of artificially imposed constraints and boundaries.”

Since 2004, the Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI) awards a bi-annual Irish Research Council Harrison Medal in his honour to distinguished international musicologists.


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Death of John Francis Larchet, Composer & Teacher

John Francis Larchet, Irish composer and teacher, dies in Dublin on August 10, 1967.

Larchet is born on July 13, 1884, at Sandymount, Dublin, the son of John Edward Larchet, manager of a wine business, and his wife Isabella Emily (née Farmar). Educated at the Catholic University School in Leeson Street, Dublin, he subsequently commences study under Michele Esposito at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) in Dublin, winning many prizes for composition, theory, harmony, and counterpoint from 1903 to 1912. As a student at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), he obtains his Bachelor of Music in 1915 and Doctor of Music in 1917 and comes to dominate the music profession in Dublin over the next forty years, moulding the composers, teachers, and conductors of the next generation, while developing an Irish school of music based on folk tradition but writing in the modern idiom. A senior professor at the RIAM by 1920, the following year he is appointed professor of music at University College Dublin (UCD), where he remains until 1958, successfully establishing music as a serious discipline within the university. He is director of music examinations for Irish secondary schools (1907–34) and succeeds in raising standards of teaching, particularly with regard to rectifying weakness in the teaching of the theory of music.

Along with Aloys Fleischmann and composer Frederick May, Larchet keeps discourse on music in the public domain during the 1930s and 1940s, frequently addressing the need for a national school of music and a system of music education that would raise standards of musical appreciation and nurture a school of Irish composers.

Appointed music director at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, he is closely associated with Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, establishing a tradition of music at the theatre that delights critics. A popular myth at the time is that there are some who leave the theatre during the acts and return to enjoy Larchet’s music during the intervals. Appointed musical adviser to the army in 1923, he introduces a new philharmonic pitch, and serves as president of the Dublin Grand Opera Society for many years.

A fellow of the RIAM, Larchet also conducts the Dublin Amateur Orchestra Society, is choir master of the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street, Dublin, and organises annual orchestral concerts at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). He is also involved in preparing a report for the commission on vocational organisation on behalf of the Musical Association of Ireland. The products of his own creative endeavour are mostly orchestral and choral works including An Ardglass Boat Song, Pádraic the Fiddler, and Diarmuid’s Lament.

Perhaps the main challenge facing Larchet in the 1920–50 period is the divide between “colonial” and “native” which has characterised the history of music in Ireland. A gentle-mannered, kindly man who is acutely aware of the lack of a national policy for music, he is a persuasive advocate of the European aesthetic and his main aim is said to have been “a reconciliation between the cultural chauvinism of Ireland as an emergent nation state and the central value (artistic as well as educational) of music as a vital dynamic in Irish cultural affairs.”

Although it can be argued that Larchet is not possessed of a uniquely original voice, with his authority coming rather from his enormous workload and his essential contribution as a teacher, it is no exaggeration to claim that the majority of Irish composers who emerge in the decades after the 1940s are influenced by his guidance, including Frank Llewellyn Harrison, Frederick May, Joan Trimble and Brian Boydell.

In addition to receiving an honorary Doctor of Music from the National University of Ireland (NUI) in 1953, Larchet is made a Commendatore of the Italian Republic.

Larchet dies in Dublin on August 10, 1967. He is survived by his wife, Madeleine Moore, a well-known musician, and their two daughters and son, also musicians. His daughter, Sheila Larchet Cuthbert, is an Irish harpist and author. She publishes The Irish Harp Book: A Tutor and Companion (Dublin, 1975).

(From: “Larchet, John Francis” by Diarmaid Ferriter, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Vincent O’Brien, Organist, Composer & Teacher

Vincent O’Brien, Irish organist, music teacher and composer, is born in Dublin on May 9, 1871, where he lived all his life. He is an important figure in early 20th-century Irish music. For some, he is mainly known as the first teacher of singers such as John McCormack, Margaret Burke Sheridan and the writer James Joyce.

O’Brien is the eldest child of a Roman Catholic church musician. In 1885, he first appears in a public piano recital and, later in the year, becomes the organist of Rathmines parish church, a position he holds until 1888. He holds another organist’s position at the Dublin Carmelite church from 1897 to 1899 but is chiefly known as organist and choir director of Dublin’s largest Roman Catholic Church, St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, between 1903 and 1946. In 1898, he is the founder and first director of the Palestrina Choir, originally all-male, which is still active, and which is financed for many years by Edward Martyn.

O’Brien studies with Robert Prescott Stewart at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (1888-90), where he is the first winner of the Coulson Scholarship and frequently performs as both tenor singer, piano accompanist, and organist in many public concerts during the 1890s. As a church musician, he becomes particularly involved in the Cecilian Movement, conducting works by Michael Haller and others, and also pursuing their artistic ideals in his own sacred choral compositions.

O’Brien is the founding conductor of the Dublin Oratorio Society (1906), the Brisan Opera Company (1916) and conducts at many ad hoc events. In 1925, he becomes the first music director of Radio Éireann (originally called 2RN), a position he holds until 1941. He singles out his work as music director for the 31st International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin (1932) as his most prized personal achievement. As late as 1945, he founds Our Lady’s Choral Society, a large oratorio choir still in existence, which originally is recruited mainly from the various Roman Catholic church choirs in Dublin.

Among his teaching positions, O’Brien teaches at the diocesan seminary at Holy Cross College, is Professor of Gregorian Chant at the missionary seminary of All Hallows College from 1903, and Professor of Music at the Ladies’ Teacher-Training College at Carysfort Park, Blackrock, County Dublin, from 1908 until his death in Dublin on June 21, 1948. As a much-demanded vocal coach, he teaches at his home, his best-known pupils including John McCormack, Margaret Burke Sheridan and James Joyce. He performs the piano accompaniments for McCormack’s first gramophone recordings and accompanies him during his 1913–14 Australasian tour of 60 performances in three months, during which he also gives organ recitals at the Irish-dominated Catholic cathedrals of Sydney and Melbourne.

In 1932, O’Brien receives a doctorate honoris causa from the National University of Ireland (NUI).

Of his two sons, Oliver O’Brien (1922–2001) largely follows in his father’s footsteps, as organist and director of the Palestrina Choir, of Our Lady’s Choral Society, music teacher at Carysfort College and as teacher in various Dublin schools. His other son, Colum O’Brien, is organist in the Pro-Cathedral.

Before his work for the Palestrina Choir, O’Brien’s musical interests are very broad, culminating in 1893 in the composition of the full-scale opera Hester. As a church music composer, he follows Cecilian ideals, with a number of hymns, motets and other choral works. He also composes a number of songs for voice and piano, with The Fairy Tree (1930) being a particular favourite of John McCormack’s.


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Birth of Seóirse Bodley, Composer & Associate Professor of Music at UCD

Seóirse Bodley, Irish composer and former associate professor of music at University College Dublin (UCD), is born George Pascal Bodley in Dublin on April 4, 1933. In 2008, he is the first composer to become a Saoi of Aosdána. He is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of twentieth-century art music in Ireland, having been “integral to Irish musical life since the second half of the twentieth century, not just as a composer, but also as a teacher, arranger, accompanist, adjudicator, broadcaster, and conductor.”

Bodley’s father is George James Bodley (1879–1956), an employee in the Dublin office of the London Midland & Scottish Railway Company, and later of the Ports and Docks Board. His mother, Mary (née Gough, 1891–1977), works for the Guinness Brewery. He attends schools in the Dublin suburbs of Phibsborough and Glasnevin before he moves at the age of nine to an Irish-speaking Christian Brothers school at Parnell Square. He later studies at the School of Commerce in Rathmines, where he obtains his Leaving Certificate.

Music is encouraged in his parents’ home, and Bodley receives initial lessons on the mandolin from his father and on the piano from his mother. He studies the piano, harmony and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and obtains a Licentiate in piano from Trinity College London (TCL). From the age of 13, he also enrolls for a time at the Brendan Smith Academy of Acting. While he is still at school, he receives his first lessons in composition privately from the Dublin-based German choral conductor Hans Waldemar Rosen (1904–94), which continues, on and off, until 1956. From his student days he performs as an accompanist to singers and takes part in chamber music performances. An important element in his musical education is the twice-weekly free concerts given by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra in the Phoenix Hall, Dame Court, where he has the opportunity to hear leading Irish and international performers and conductors presenting both classics and modern repertory.

From 1952 Bodley studies for a Bachelor of Music degree from University College Dublin, mainly with Anthony Hughes. He obtains the degree in 1955. From 1957 to 1959 he studies composition (with Johann Nepomuk David) and conducting at the Württembergische Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart, Germany, and a year later he obtains a Doctorate in Music from UCD. He also takes classes in conducting with Hans Müller-Kray and Karl Maria Zwißler, and in piano with Alfred Kreutz. He returns to Germany several times in the early 1960s to participate in courses at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, which significantly expands his knowledge of avant-garde techniques.

From 1959 until his retirement in 1998, Bodley lectures at the university’s music department, becoming associate professor in 1984. During the 1960s, he is conductor of the Culwick Choral Society.

Bodley’s development as a composer sees several distinct phases. In the 1970s he merges avant-garde styles with elements from Irish traditional music and becomes a figure of national importance. He receives several prestigious commissions for large-scale works, such as Symphony No. 3 (1981), written for the opening of the National Concert Hall.

In 1982 Bodley becomes a founder-member of Aosdána and President Mary McAleese confers the distinction of Saoi on him in November 2008. McAleese says that Bodley “has helped us to recast what it means to be an artist in Ireland.”


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Birth of John Buckley, Composer & Pedagogue

John Buckley, Irish composer and pedagogue, is born in Templeglantine, County Limerick, on December 19, 1951. He is a co-founder of the Ennis Summer School and a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists.

Buckley grows up in a rural environment and is introduced to traditional music learning the button accordion from the local player Liam Moloney when he is 9 years of age. In 1969 he moves to Dublin to study for the Teacher’s Diploma at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. Here he has his first opportunity to hear live classical and modern music including contemporary and avantgarde works by Irish composers including Aloys Fleischmann, Brian Boydell, John Kinsella, and Seóirse Bodley, as well as works by international composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki. He becomes a student at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin (1969–74), studying the flute with Doris Keogh and composition with A. J. Potter and James Wilson. He continues his musical studies with Alun Hoddinott in Cardiff, Wales (1978–82), Aloys Fleischmann in Cork (M.A. in composition, 1980), and briefly with John Cage during a summer school for composers and choreographers at Guildford, Surrey, in 1981. Initially working as secondary school teacher, from 1982 he is able to work independently as a composer.

In 1983, Buckley is the co-founder, with James Wilson, of the annual Ennis Summer School for composition, which becomes an influential training ground for aspiring young Irish composers; pupils include Michael Alcorn, Rhona Clarke, and Gráinne Mulvey. He becomes a member of Aosdána in 1984. Since 2001 he has been a lecturer in music at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. From the National University of Ireland at Maynooth (now Maynooth University) he receives a PhD in 2002 and a DMus in 2007.

Apart from membership in Aosdána, Buckley is honoured with the Varming Prize (1976), the Macaulay Fellowship (1978), the Arts Council‘s Composers’ Bursary (1982) and the Marten Toonder Award (1991).

Buckley’s output includes many commissions for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, choirs, bands and orchestra. His music has been widely performed and broadcast in Ireland and in more than fifty countries worldwide. He has represented Ireland at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers on five occasions and at the 1990 Prix Italia. His music has also been performed at five International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals.

Buckley’s music does not adhere to any particular compositional school. He acknowledges the influence of Luciano Berio, Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti, and Olivier Messiaen. His harmonic approach is freely atonal. Structurally, there is frequently a gradual build-up from initially very limited pitch material to large formal constructions. Many compositions work towards a climax in the fourth quarter of a piece and then return to initial pitch sequences. In a number of early works he explores the Celtic myths of his native Ireland in orchestral scores such as Taller than Roman Spears (1977) and Fornocht do chonac thú (1980) and in small-scale works such as Oileáin (1979) for piano, Boireann (1983) for flute and piano, or I am Wind on Sea (1987) for mezzo-soprano and percussion. Later this aspect becomes less important for him. Works since the late 1980s display “a textural subtlety in marked contrast to the more robust sonorities explored in Buckley’s earlier keyboard works,” a “French refinement of sound, and an elevation of timbre as central characteristics” and “a concern with achieving a greater degree of formal unity” and “an exploration of analogies between sound and light.” O’Leary (2013) describes his style as “characterised by a broad harmonic idiom, contrasting consonance and dissonance in a non-tonal but strongly coloured soundworld.”

In 2010, Buckley arranges a number of Irish traditional songs for flute, some with harp, viola, percussion and string quartet. These are skilled and tasteful settings in a tonal harmonic language, quite unlike his original compositions.


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Birth of Jerome de Bromhead, Composer & Classical Guitarist

Jerome de Bromhead, Irish composer, classical guitarist, and member of Aosdána, is born in Waterford, County Waterford, on December 2, 1945.

De Bromhead studies with A. J. Potter and James Wilson at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, with further studies with Seóirse Bodley in 1975 and Franco Donatoni in 1978. He holds an M.A. in music, art history and English from Trinity College Dublin. As a guitarist, he studies with Elspeth Henry (1967–68) and at the Guitar Centre, London (1969).

De Bromhead’s compositions include works for solo guitar as well as orchestral, choral and chamber music. His Symphony No. 1 (1986) represents Ireland at the International Rostrum of Composers at UNESCO‘s headquarters in Paris. He describes his style as “neither a Postmodernist nor a deaf-as-a-postmodernist. Above all I am suspicious of anything that seems like dogma.”

De Bromhead’s harpsichord piece Flux (1981) is performed at the ISCM World Music Days in Germany in 1987 and is now published by Tonos Verlag of Darmstadt.

According to guitarist John Feeley, de Bromhead’s solo guitar composition Gemini (1970) is “a sophisticated work, both technically and compositionally. It has the dynamism of youth, with a sense of freshness and it projects an attractive, driving energy […] It is an effective concert work, which speaks well on the instrument and is particularly gratifying for the performer.”

De Bromhead works at RTÉ as a television news director and announcer, as well as a senior music producer for radio, until a serious accident forces him to retire in 1996. He currently lives in Dublin.

The Contemporary Music Centre (www.cmc.ie) provides scores and sample recordings of a selection of de Bromhead’s works, available here.


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Death of Composer Brian Patrick Boydell

Brian Patrick Boydell, Irish composer whose works include orchestral pieces, chamber music, and songs, dies on November 8, 2000. He is Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin for 20 years, founder of the Dowland Consort, conductor of the Dublin Orchestral Players, and a prolific broadcaster and writer on musical matters. He was also a prolific musicologist specialising in 18th-century Irish musical history.

Boydell is born on March 17, 1917, in Howth, County Dublin, into a prosperous Anglo-Irish family. His father James runs the family maltings business while his mother, Eileen Collins, is one of the first women graduates of Trinity College. Following their son’s birth, the Boydells move from Howth and live in a succession of rented houses before settling in Shankill, County Dublin. The young Boydell begins his formal education at Monkstown Park in Dublin and is subsequently sent to the Dragon School at Oxford, England. From there he goes to Rugby School, where he comes under the influence of Kenneth Stubbs, the music master. Although he later speaks of his resentment at the anti-Irish attitude he experiences at Rugby, he appreciates the very good education in science and music he receives there.

Having completed his secondary education, Boydell spends the summer of 1935 developing his musical knowledge at Heidelberg, Germany, where he writes his first songs and also studies organ. He wins a choral scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where, perhaps through parental pressure, he studies natural science, graduating in 1938 with a first-class degree.

However, his love of music leads him next to the Royal College of Music where he studies composition under Patrick Hadley, Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. Already a good pianist, he also becomes a proficient oboe player during this time.

Upon the outbreak of World War II, Boydell returns to Dublin and achieves further academic success in 1942 with a Bachelor of Music degree from Trinity College. He also takes further lessons in composition from John F. Larchet.

Boydell’s busy working life combines teaching, performing and composing. Following a brief stint in his father’s business, he plunges himself into Dublin’s classical music scene. In 1943, he succeeds Havelock Nelson as conductor of the Dublin Orchestral Players, beginning an association with the amateur orchestra that endures for a quarter of a century (until 1966). In 1944, he is appointed Professor of Singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, a position he holds for eight years. Along with fellow composers Edgar M. Deale, Aloys Fleischmann, and Frederick May he founds the Music Association of Ireland in 1948 as a vehicle to promote classical music throughout the country.

Boydell’s interest in Renaissance music, in particular the madrigal, leads in 1959 to founding the Dowland Consort, a vocal ensemble with which he performs for many years and records an LP. In 1962, having obtained a Doctorate in Music, he is appointed Professor of Music at Trinity College, a position he holds until 1982. He immediately revamps the course making it more relevant to the second half of the twentieth century. He also finds time to sit on the Arts Council throughout the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s.

Boydell’s communication skills combined with his infectious enthusiasm makes him a natural broadcaster. The appeal of his programmes on the history and performance of music, first on RTÉ Radio 1 and later on Telefís Éireann, go beyond a specialist audience and are, for many people, their introduction to a new world of aural pleasure.

Boydell has many interests beyond music. As a surrealist painter in the 1940s, having taken lessons from Mainie Jellett, he is a member of The White Stag Group. He is also passionate about cars and photography.

Following retirement from Trinity as Fellow Emeritus, Boydell devotes himself to musical scholarship, writing two books on the music of 18th century Dublin. He also contributes to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Boydell dies at his home in Howth on November 8, 2000, at the age of 83 and in the company of his wife of 56 years, Mary (née Jones) and their sons, Cormac and Barra. A third son, Marnac, predeceases him.

Boydell is awarded several honorary titles in recognition of his services to music, including the Honorary Doctorate of Music from the National University of Ireland (1974), the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1983), the election to Aosdána, Ireland’s academy of creative artists (1984), and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (1990).


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Death of A. J. Potter, Irish Composer & Teacher

Archibald James (Archie) Potter, Irish composer and teacher who writes hundreds of works including operas, a mass, and four ballets, as well as orchestral and chamber music, dies suddenly in Greystones, County Wicklow, on July 5, 1980.

Potter is born in Belfast on September 22, 1918, to a Presbyterian family who, oddly, lives on the Falls Road, a republican (Catholic) stronghold. His father is a church organist and piano tuner who has been blind since childhood. His mother is, in Potter’s own words, “a raging alcoholic.” He escapes a rather grim childhood when he goes to live with an aunt in Kent, England.

Possessed of a good voice and natural musical ability, Potter is accepted as a treble by the world-famous choir of All Saints, Margaret Street. In 1933, after four years as a chorister, he is sent to Clifton College, Bristol. From there he goes to the Royal College of Music on a scholarship and studies composition under Vaughan Williams. While at the Royal College he wins the Cobbett prize for chamber music.

World War II interrupts Potter’s music education, and he leaves college to serve with the London Irish Rifles in Europe and the Far East. After the war he settles in Dublin, where he continues his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, gaining a Doctorate in Music in 1953.

Potter had already started composing chamber and vocal music before the war. Now, established in Dublin, he chooses the orchestra as his principal means of expression. His early pieces, such as Rhapsody under a High Sky and Overture to a Kitchen Comedy, show that he has absorbed Vaughan Williams’ pastoral style and his love of folk music. In 1952, both pieces are awarded Radio Éireann‘s “Carolan Prize” for orchestral composition by the adjudicator Arnold Bax. A year later Potter repeats this success when his Concerto da Chiesa, a concerto for piano and orchestra, also wins the Carolan Prize.

In 1955 Potter is appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he becomes an effective administrator and inspiring teacher.

In the 1960s, Potter turns to ballet, writing four orchestral scores for the Cork Ballet company. The first of these, Careless Love, becomes the composer’s own favourite of all his compositions. Several years later, following a successful battle with alcoholism, he writes what some regard as his magnum opus, Sinfonia “de Profundis” (1969). The première is given at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin on March 23, 1969, in a performance by the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Albert Rosen. The Irish Times refers to the concert as a “major national event.” In December 1969, he receives a Jacob’s Award for the composition.

Potter’s last substantial work, an opera entitled The Wedding, receives its first public performance in Dublin in 1981, almost a year after his death.

Potter dies suddenly at his home in Greystones, County Wicklow on July 5, 1980, at the age of 61. He is buried in the nearby Redford cemetery.


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Birth of Composer Siobhán Cleary

Siobhán Cleary, composer, is born in Dublin on May 10, 1970. Her most successful compositions are her orchestral works Alchemy and Cokaygne and her choral piece Theophilus Thistle and the Myth of Miss Muffett. Her opera Vampirella is first performed in Dublin in March 2017. She is a member of Aosdána.

Cleary starts to compose from an early age, often writing pieces while she is supposed to be practising at the piano. When she begins to study music at Maynooth University, she is initially inspired by Luciano Berio‘s Sinfonia, and soon afterwards by the works of the Irish composer Gerald Barry, the Frenchman Olivier Messiaen and the Hungarian György Ligeti. She continues her studies at Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. In addition, she follows courses in composition with the Italian composer Franco Donatoni and the Dutchman Louis Andriessen and receives private tuition from the American Tom Johnson and the South African Kevin Volans. She also studies film scoring with the Italian composer Ennio Morricone and the American Don Brandon Ray.

Inspired by the alchemists’ Opus Alchymicum which describes how cheaper metals are transmuted into gold, Cleary’s orchestral work Alchemy (2001) is, like the stages in the Opus, presented in four parts: it evolves from the slow nigrendo, the moderate albedo, the strong citronatus, and the burning rubedo. The work is performed by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in January 2002.

Cleary’s tone poem Cokaygne (2009), which, like Alchemy, is commissioned by RTÉ for the National Symphony Orchestra, is based on a poem and old sources which evoke a land of extreme luxury and contentment. The elaborately orchestrated piece is performed by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in November 2009, Vladimir Altschuler conducting. It is performed by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra once again in June 2016, this time under the baton of Alan Buribayev.

Cleary’s choral work Theophilus Thistle and the Myth of Miss Muffett (2010), commissioned by the Cork International Choral Festival, is first performed in April 2011 by Chamber Choir Ireland directed by Paul Hillier. The work is based on a series of tongue twisters and other strange combinations of words popular in various European languages and dialects, moving from Italy, through Germany and Spain, finishing in Ireland. In 2013, it is performed twice by Chamber Choir Ireland in Dublin and Cork in connection with Ireland’s presidency of the European Union. The journalist and music critic Terry Blain comments on the choir’s “dazzingly virtuosic performance” in Belfast in 2013, qualifying the piece as “a tour de force of 21st century vocal chicanery, a clever and richly entertaining composition.” Theophilus Thistle is also performed the same year in the United States as part of the “Imagine Ireland” festival.

The chamber opera Vampirella with a libretto by Katy Hayes is first performed by students from the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre in March 2017. Based on a short story by Angela Carter telling how a young English soldier is seduced by a vampire countess, it is directed by Conor Hanratty and conducted by Andrew Synnott. Michael Dervan of The Irish Times finds the electronic sounds in the score particularly effective, commenting, “Perhaps this is a case of a genuinely electronic opera trying to break out of a more conventional mold.”

In 1996, Cleary receives a young artists award from Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes, followed in 1997 by the first prize in the Arklow Music Festival Composers’ Competition. In 2008, she is invited to become a member of Aosdána, an Irish association of creative artists.


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Birth of Irish Composer John McLachlan

Irish composer John McLachlan is born in Dublin on March 5, 1964.

McLachlan is the son of the writer Leland Bardwell, and studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) Conservatory of Music and Drama (1982–86), the Royal Irish Academy of Music (1989–97), and Trinity College Dublin (BA 1988). He studies composition with William York, Robert Hanson and Kevin Volans. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Trinity College (1999) for a study of the relationship between analysis and compositional technique in the post-war avant-garde.

McLachlan writes numerous articles for The Journal of Music in Ireland (2000–10). He is executive director of the Association of Irish Composers (1998–2012), and in 2007 he is elected to Aosdána.

McLachlan is the featured composer in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra‘s “Horizons” series in 2003 and 2008. He also represents Ireland at international festivals, including the ISCM World Music Days in Slovenia in 2003 and Croatia in 2005. In 2006, his work Grand Action is commissioned as a test-piece for the AXA Dublin International Piano Competition.

McLachlan’s musical aesthetic is largely shaped by a desire to impart a sense of narrative and expectation to his music without recourse to pastiche rhetorical devices. A critic writes of a recording of McLachlan’s piano piece Nine: “The style of each little piece sends one’s imagination and musical memory reeling, some of them evoking French Impressionism, some jazzy in feel, some reminiscent of the miniatures for piano of Webern, and none of them in any way, shape or form derivative.” Much of his music is structured in contrasting and suddenly changing block-like sections of homogeneous material. The material within these sections is propelled by a rigorous focus on subtle rhythmic and melodic permutations, which result in both surface opacity and gradually increasing tension.

McLachlan’s works have been performed in the United States, Peru, Japan, South Africa, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Moldova, Slovenia, Croatia, and around Ireland, with broadcasts in several of these countries. Performers who have played his music include the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Opera Theatre Company, the National Chamber Choir, Concorde, Sequenza, Traject, Archaeus, the Pro Arte Orchestra, Antipodes, Ensemble Nordlys, The Fidelio Trio, The ConTempo Quartet and Trio Arbós as well as many prominent soloists including Ian Pace, John Feeley, Mary Dullea, Darragh Morgan, Satoko Inoue and David Adams.

McLachlan is also known as a broadcaster and writer on contemporary music, with many published articles.

McLachlan now lives in Inishowen, County Donegal.