Riverdance composer Bill Whelan: ‘I think we forget how important ritual is, and we’re losing it’

Thirty years after Riverdance’s extraordinary debut, during the interval of the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, an observation by the journalist Fergal Keane still rings true. He suggested that Bill Whelan‘s original take on Irish traditional music, which helped to facilitate Michael Flatley and Jean Butler’s eye-popping reimagining of Irish dance, “changed how Ireland felt about itself and how the world saw Ireland”.

The modest composer, arranger and performer cuts an unlikely figure as the engine that propelled Riverdance to global success. He’s softly spoken, a forensic listener and full of curiosity about the world in all its messy glory as he prepares for a concert of his orchestral works at the National Concert Hall this weekend.

Talk to him and he’s likely to refer to everyone from the authors Colm Tóibín and Philippe Sands to the politicians Éamon de Valera and Gary McMichael, as well as to a raft of musicians from Joni Mitchell to Thelonious Monk, the Contempo Quartet and the many traditional musicians with whom he has collaborated. He is equally conversant with the natural world, technology and music entrepreneurship.

The passage of time has done little to dim Whelan’s passion for music making. Strikingly, he seeks out younger musicians and singers who bring a fresh perspective to his creative processes. As well as his inventive collaborations with the fiddle player Zoë Conway, he has worked extensively with the sean-nós siblings Seamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta and the piper Tara Howley.

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Having made his home in Roundstone, Co Galway, Whelan relishes the vibrant musical tradition of Connemara but isn’t afraid to play with it, just as he did with Riverdance and its predecessor, Timedance, which he premiered at the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest (both pieces feature in Friday’s concert).

In his colourful 2022 autobiography, The Road to Riverdance, Whelan wrote of how, in the 1960s, traditional music was gasping for breath beneath the weight of church and State, when protectionism was valued over innovation. Now it’s thriving. How recognisable is its world from the one he remembers from six decades ago?

“If you take the canon of trad music, that’s always recognisable,” he says. “What has changed about it is the culture, I think. When I did Riverdance initially, I was lucky enough to have worked with some of the top people, like Davy Spillane and Máirtín O’Connor. I had the pick of the cream of trad musicians, but it didn’t seem to me that, once I got through that level of players‚ behind them was another layer of musicians. What I mean is that it started to fall away, whereas nowadays there are so many great young players. The players we have in Riverdance at the moment, like Haley Richardson, she’s an extraordinary fiddle player.”

“I suppose what has changed with the music is that, if you look at Lankum or Ye Vagabonds, the engagement with the music is as passionate as ever, but the interpretation is fresh and new. I remember when I first heard The Bothy Band. I thought, Wow: this was speaking to me. It wasn’t that I was searching for it particularly, but the way that Dónal [Lunny] and everybody else had put those colours into it, that made it understandable and even attractive to a young pair of ears. That, to me, was really important, and what I’m hearing now is that it’s happening again, in a different way for a new time.”

There’s a palpable sense of continuity in Whelan’s reading of our musical tradition, stretching back through generations and binding them to the present. Seán Ó Riada played a pivotal role in elevating the tradition and respecting its inherent value as a performance art form, he believes.

“Seán put the music up on the concert stage as well,” Whelan says. “You know, it’s really lovely to sit with a group of musicians and play for each other, but he turned it around and said, ‘Right, this is going to be a piece of entertainment that we’ll present,’ as opposed to simply internally enjoying it. He took it from the kitchen to the concert stage. That’s the best way I can put it.”

Whelan did the same when he and Dónal Lunny, his long-time collaborator, wrote Timedance. “We brought the music and the dance together and put them up on the concert stage and presented them outwardly to the audience,” he says. “We were saying, ‘We are playing for you. We’re not playing for ourselves. And you can look over the wall and have a listen.’ And the dance and the music somehow kissed.”

Whelan spent years as a musician and producer. He switched his attention to working as a composer, arranger and orchestrator after hearing Richard Harris’s performance of MacArthur Park. He was floored, he says, by the orchestrations underpinning the song, which was written by Jimmy Webb; the bridge bears minimal relationship to the verse and chorus, yet the whole seven minutes works beautifully.

Whelan is certainly a renaissance man: he recently spoke at the Listowel Writers Week literary festival on the history of popular song from Tin Pan Alley to rap, and he speaks as enthusiastically about his work with the Turkish musician and composer Omar Faruk Tekbilek as he does about Lunny.

One thing he struggles with, on the other hand, is the concept of eternity. He writes evocatively in his autobiography about his terror in its face. “The whole thing about eternity: I still haven’t lost that – that feeling that comes over me when I think about those fundamental questions about what it’s all about, those existential questions,” he says with a grimace. “You know, even now, in my 70s, it can still bring that feeling of terror. If I think about eternity, I think about this theatre of life and what it means.

“I suppose, as Woody Allen said, ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ I mean, I think that I’m more at peace with the idea now that this particular outing for me is in its leisure stages. I’m still writing. I still love work. I don’t know anything about retirement. But that’s different. There’s always that big question about eternity: of seeing things going on and on and on. That’s something we all have to think about.”

As he prepares for his concert with the National Symphony Orchestra, which will feature the former Riverdance fiddle player Athena Tergis as well as Howley, Ó Flatharta, Uí Fhlatharta and the violinist Julieanne Forrest, there’s scant sign of Whelan taking his foot off any pedal. He speaks animatedly about his current work-in-progress, which is grounded in ritual and our need for it regardless of any religious affiliation.

“Recently I saw the film That They May Face the Rising Sun,” he says. “You recognise that simple life, and there’s a lot of value in it. One of the things that I’m currently working on is a piece that is looking at ritual. I think we forget how important ritual is, and we’re losing it. It’s not that I think everybody should be going to Mass, but I think that ritual takes many forms, and I believe that it’s very important to us as humans.”

Unsurprisingly, reflecting on eternity and on ritual spurs Whelan to consider the daily pressures on people in all walks of life to be productive, to make or create something for some purpose. There’s a deep folly in this approach to life, he believes.

“So much of life is now spoken about as being results - or outcomes-driven,” he says. “AI [artificial intelligence] has been designed for outcomes, but life isn’t really about outcomes, you know. AI has been designed with those kinds of corporate notions behind it. It’s a fantastic tool, but it needs to broaden itself into what our human life is about, because there’s something fundamentally missing from all of the discourse around AI, and we really need to get to grips with it before it gets to grips with us.”

NSO: The Music of Bill Whelan, hosted by Aedín Gormley and conducted by Gavin Maloney, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, July 5th; Riverdance is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, September 8th