Seán Ó Riada brought classical, jazz and avant -garde into the traditional music stew. Arminta Wallace reads his new biography

Nowadays it would be called fusion, or eclecticism, or postmodernist-genre-crossing-something-or-other. But when SeáÓ Riada was doing his thing in the Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s, there was no word for it: it was just the way he was. Classically trained composer with a penchant for the European avant-garde; dance-band pianist with an ear for both jazz and Latin American rhythms and harmonies; creator of trad-influenced film soundtracks that, for a generation, pretty much defined the sound of Ireland itself.

In his biography Seán Ó Riada: His Life And Work, the composer's friend and colleague Tomás Ó Canainn explores the many facets of his subject in an affectionate, chatty way. Beguiling as it is, however, this little book packs a number of not inconsiderable punches.

The first is on the cover. It shows a black-and-white photograph of an old man, despite the fact that, as the reader will discover all too soon, Ó Riada died at the disturbingly early age of 40. The other is in an appendix. It lists the available recordings of Ó Riada's music - also, alas, disturbingly short.

Ó Riada was born plain John Reidy in Cork on August 1st, 1931. His father was a Garda sergeant, but there was no particular interest in the Irish language in the Reidy household - that, along with an astonishing fluency in vernacular music and literature, was something Seán would develop for himself in later life. After attending primary school in Adare, he was enrolled at St Finbarr's College, in Farranferris, Co Cork.

A boarding seminary for the diocese, it sent many of its students into the priesthood and so placed considerable emphasis on Greek and Latin, at which Ó Riada excelled, and on hurling, at which, to put it mildly, he did not. There were also lessons in violin, piano and organ.

Ó Riada's début as a performer came in a Sunday-night concert at the Palace Theatre in Cork, with a large audience of Corkonians as well as students from Farranferris. He began by playing some classical violin pieces; when he realised that his audience's attention was straying, he switched to traditional music and won huge applause. A portent of things to come, perhaps - and this before he had completed his Intermediate Certificate examination.

He eventually emerged from University College Cork with a degree in music but was never totally enclosed in the ivory tower of classical composition. While studying classical music he played jazz piano with Billy Browne's dance band and, later, with an ensemble called the Kamble Combo, directed by Noel Campbell.

In 1953 he got a job as assistant director of music at Radio Éireann - thanks, as the word around the station at the time had it, to the fact that he spent a good deal of the interview arguing with his interviewer about philosophy - and though his time at the station was short and stormy, he impressed his colleagues with the scope of his musical knowledge.

One day, with the regular radio scriptwriter absent from the office for some reason, a script was required urgently for a concert at which Mozart's Jupiter symphony was to be played.

Ó Riada produced a cogently-argued essay on the topic of the compositional cohesion of Mozart's final three symphonies - and finished it before lunchtime. He was also very interested in the new movement in European contemporary music, the atonalism of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, music with which, in 1950s Ireland, very few people were familiar.

Ó Canainn's biography charts Ó Riada's growing interest in what he came to call an saol Gaelach - the Irish way of life. His devotion to Irish language and culture was unwavering, and his work in the field of traditional music in particular was highly significant. As described here, much of that work is almost proselytising: in his lectures and radio programmes Ó Riada made traditional music acceptable, even interesting, to a mass audience that had turned its back on the form.

Ó Canainn is at pains to stress his subject's respect for the tradition. "His aim," he writes, "was to let people hear how real traditional music, played by the best players, sounded and to set a standard by which traditional performance could be judged."

Anyone who seeks detailed analysis of Ó Riada's musical output must seek it elsewhere, however. What emerges most strongly from the pages of this book is a sense of Ó Riada the man: paranoid and petulant, certainly, but with an indomitable charm.

In the early days of their marriage, when Ó Riada was working every night at the Abbey Theatre, he drew up a timetable for his wife, Ruth - with a different man pencilled in for every night of the week.

If she wanted to go out for a drink or to the cinema, all she had to do was phone the appointed person, and she was sorted.

Much later in the story, when Ó Riada was very well known around Dublin, a friend recalls the composer giving him a lift in his Jaguar - but having enough money to buy only a single gallon of petrol, hardly enough to get them as far as the next petrol station.

This charm extends even to the famously acrimonious exchange of letters with Charles Acton, then the Irish Times's music critic, who lambasted Ó Riada in a review of a solo musical comedy performance at Liberty Hall. According to Acton the gig was amateurish and unworthy of Ó Riada.

The composer defended himself robustly and at great length, leading Acton to reply in print and, eventually, one "David Hanly of Rathfarnham" to declare wearily in a letter to the editor that "one more word from either Mr Ó Riada or Mr Acton will be a bore". Less than two months later, however, Acton was required to write Ó Riada's obituary - and did so with warmth and generosity.

Was there a kernel of truth in Acton's assertion that Ó Riada needed to knuckle down to some serious work as a composer before it was too late? If he hadn't spent so much of his time writing plays in Irish, humorous newspaper articles and the like, would we now have a longer, weightier catalogue of pieces to conjure with? Was Ó Riada's a magpie mind that refused to focus on anything for long enough to achieve real mastery of it or did alcohol simply cut short what would have been a distinguished career?

It's probably too early to tell, and if judgments are to be made, they certainly can't be made by a book which comes, as this one does, from the very centre of the Ó Riada circle.

Not that Ó Canainn claims to judge anybody, in any case. His book is, as he explains in the introduction, a tribute - "cloch ar a charn", a small stone on the monument to Ó Riada's memory.

But if it rekindles an interest in the man and, especially, in his music, it will have served its purpose. Gael-Linn is reissuing its recordings of Ó Riada's traditional music, but a good deal of his liturgical work, including two settings of the Mass, have never been available on disc.

And in an age when musical fusion is an everyday occurrence, perhaps a "complete works" recording that would allow listeners to hear his classical, traditional and liturgical pieces side by side won't be too far behind.

Seán Ó Riada: His Life And Work, by Tomás Ó Canainn, is published by The Collins Press, €20