Fittingly, in light of the renaissance man that he was, this collection of essays, poems and reflections recalling the life and picaresque times of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin embraces the world of arts, business, academia, media and business: a literary compendium that amply reflects and amplifies the many worlds that this irrepressible force of nature inhabited with consummate ease.
Variously described as a musical visionary, a grand spirit, a charismatic dynamo, Carolan’s Ellington (thanks to his extraordinary interpretations of the blind harper’s compositions) and a “psychopomp” (broadcaster Carl Corcoran’s bespoke description of an individual who guides people to other experiences in their lives), Ó Súilleabháin was, unusually for an academic, an inveterate dreamer and a doer who cleaved to the field of dreams diktat that if you build it, they will come.
And come they did, when he led the charge on the establishment of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, after a stellar sojourn in UCC, following the completion of his PhD on the music of Tommie Potts. Ó Súilleabháin was a man who never let the grass grow under his feet, so fleet of foot and wild of imagination was he.
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A life in music casts its net wide and far, weaving a tapestry of stories and music that characterised his mischievous and magnetic movement through a life that started modestly in Clonmel, where of his first year of teaching, Mícheál pronounced his own early efforts unsparingly as “my doctrinaire patronising approach”.
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Ó Súilleabháin followed nimbly in the footsteps of Aloys Fleishman and Seán Ó Riada, both seminal influences from his days as a student in UCC. Their lateral thinking and expansive world views were a boon to this curious searcher, who Joseph O’Connor describes in his Planxty for Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin as a “Reacher. Teacher. Syncopating Preacher.”
Broadcaster and fellow indefatigable visionary Philip King writes of Ó Súilleabháin’s “sensitivity of touch and his natural empathy” for the air Bean Dubh an Ghleanna, which was the first tune that King heard by Ó Súilleabháin in UCC’s Aula Maxima, when both were students. Many years later, he heard it again, when the pair collaborated on the groundbreaking 1995 TV series A River of Sound, which was written and presented by Ó Súilleabháin, much to the consternation of some traditionalists who felt he was straying too far from home with his pronouncements.
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The debates that sprang from the series breathed fresh life into our musical tradition, encouraging deliberations that mined the heart of the music at a time when technology was revolutionising its transmission and consumption, and capturing the imagination of generations of musicians, singers, dancers and listeners alike.
Singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, a long-time collaborator, writes of the globalist in Ó Súilleabháin, and of how “he would not be fettered by any provincialisms or easy dogmas” which had a tendency to characterise discourse around traditional music and arts during those heady years when he was hitting his full stride. Ó Lionáird concludes that he was simply “too gifted and informed a scholar to allow for simplification”. Ó Lionáird recounts how Ó Súilleabháin recognised the devil in the detail in that space, that silence that preceded a performance, and he made no secret of how he savoured occupying that space “between worlds”, a title Ó Súilleabháin chose for his 1995 album.
This is a stellar compendium, edited by Helen Phelan, director of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in the University of Limerick (and Ó Súilleabháin’s partner) along with Marie McCarthy, professor of music education at the University of Michigan, and Nicolas Carolan, director emeritus of the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Adopting a structural form inspired by Ó Súilleabháin’s albums, it addresses the many facets of his life from musician to educator and crucially, cultural mediator.
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Insights, colourful and reflective by turn, are shared by a panoply of contributors, including Edward Walsh, the founding president of the University of Limerick; poets Paula Meehan and Theo Dorgan; former RTÉ director general Cathal Goan; Emmy award-winning documentarian Nuala O’Connor; singer and theologian Nóirín Ní Riain; and many others. Ó Súilleabháin’s deep connection to plainchant and the monks of Glenstal Abbey sits effortlessly alongside his innate ability to charm essential funds from donors such as Toyota’s Tim O’Mahony and Chuck Feeney. His passion for an education that ignites the imagination of students fuelled many of his own creative endeavours, and vice versa.
Philip King recounts Ó Súilleabháin’s observation that “our music is a music to live and die for. Like all true music, it carries the spirit of truth and freedom.” Ó Súilleabháin embodied that in the countless imaginative endeavours he undertook throughout his life. This generous-spirited remembrance explores all of those avenues with verve, but somewhere in the threads of this rich tapestry lurks a summoning: of musicians, poets, academics and friends to corral these memories into a live performance, a gathering that celebrates once more the gargantuan legacy of this renaissance man.
Siobhán Long is a critic
