Mícheál Ó Domhnaill: The vibrant pulse of traditional music was rendered silent last week with the news of the sudden death of Mícheál Ó Domhnaill at the age of 53. He was a quiet, self-effacing man who never sought the limelight on stage, yet he was a musical visionary whose influence touched musicians and listeners in traditional, folk and contemporary music circles across the world.
Mícheál Ó Domhnaill was born on October 7th, 1952, in Dublin, the second son of Aodh Ó Domhnaill from Rannafast, Co Donegal, and Bríd Comber, Dublin. The family were reared in Kells, Co Meath. He had two sisters, Maighréad and Tríona, and two brothers, Éamon (who died in 2003) and Conall. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1979 and married American potter Peg Feindt. But in 1997 Mícheál returned home to be closer to his family and settled in Dublin.
Mícheál was an avid sportsman. He was a Meath minor footballer and played rugby until an injury brought him to the attention of the GAA, which then banned him from Gaelic football. His love of golf was lifelong, particularly in latter years as he happily combined musical sorties around the country with Paddy Glackin with daily golf games.
Mícheál's musical literacy was encouraged from an early age. A grounding in piano, courtesy of the Kells nuns, left a lasting influence on him, as did his participation in a choir founded by his father.
An emergency hospital admission with appendicitis at the age of 12 resulted in an unexpected musical opportunity that steered his life course thereafter. To ease the boredom of recuperation, a brother who was teaching in Mícheál's school gave him a guitar, which quickly became an extension of his 10 fingers, and later defined his musical identify with enormous subtlety and skill.
Mícheál first came to prominence at the age of 20 when he and his sisters, Tríona and Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill, joined him along with Dáithí Sproule in the group, Skara Brae.
They recorded one seminal album in 1970. After a brief but adventurous interlude playing with Mick Hanley in Munroe, Mícheál embarked on a picaresque journey as one of the founding members of The Bothy Band in 1974, along with Donal Lunny, Paddy Glackin, Matt Molloy and his sister, Tríona.
By the age of 22, Mícheál had already played a central role in two groups, both of which pushed the boundaries of traditional music through a combination of sheer genius, forensic attention to tune pairings and arrangements, and crystalline vocals and harmonies.
He later engaged in diverse musical collaborations, including Nightnoise, with Brian Dunning, the late Johnny Cunningham and his sister, Tríona, which achieved significant successes in the US and Japan; and Relativity, with Tríona, Johnny and Phil Cunningham.
Mícheál had a keen ear for great music and was never slow to share his discoveries with a willing audience. He was the first presenter of Radio Éireann's The Long Note, and was the producer of what is acknowledged to be a sublime recording in 1978 of concertina player Noel Hill and fiddle player Tony Linnane. Ó Domhnaill also contributed harmonium to this recording, making his mark with the subtlest of accompaniments, and undoubtedly broadening the audience for traditional music in the process.
Although steeped in the tradition, primarily through his father's Donegal roots and through Aodh's role as a music collector, Skara Brae took some of the oldest songs in the tradition and breathed fresh life into them, with their peerless sibling harmonies and sympathetic yet startling arrangements.
Their revolutionary harmonies sparked the imagination of everyone from Máiréad Ní Mhaonaigh (later of Altan) to Clannad.
It was Mícheál, along with Dáithí Sproule, who introduced the DADGAD guitar tuning to Irish music, having been influenced by John Renbourn and Bert Jansch of Pentangle. (This tuning enabled countless musicians to unpick the harmonies and underscore the melodies in traditional and folk music with a finesse previously unknown.)
The group set the bar high with this early recording, aided in no small way by their deep appreciation that to sing a song well, one had to understand its provenance. It was here that Aodh Ó Domhnaill's long summers of music collection bore fruit.
Mícheál inherited his father's passion for delving deep beneath the skin of the tradition, and he spent well over a year in the company of his blind aunt, Néilí Ní Dhomhnaill, in Rann na Féirste.
Her unique and formidable store of songs fuelled a lifelong love of forensic musicianship in Mícheál, a passion he later pursued by collecting songs in the Hebrides and western isles of Scotland. This attention to detail was also repeatedly evident in his magnificently detailed arrangements of songs and tunes on two albums with Relativity and seven album recordings with Nightnoise, not to mention his superbly innovative recordings with Kevin Burke, Portland and Promenade.
Ó Domhnaill was a musician who had a deep appreciation of the space between the notes as much as he did the notes themselves. He had an equal facility with songs in both Irish and English.
In that he united disparate audiences, with his arrangement of the Scots Gaelic song, Fionnghula, becoming a keystone of The Bothy Band's repertoire; while his interpretation of Lord Franklin, a seminal English seafaring song, has yet to be matched, in terms of both the sensitivity of his arrangement and the subtlety of his vocal delivery. His more recent forays into the recording studio resulted in the excellent collaboration with Paddy Glackin on 2001's Athchuairt/Reprise.
At his funeral, the remaining members of The Bothy Band convened, along with piper Liam Ó Floinn, accordion player Tony MacMahon and Máiréad Ní Mhaonaigh, an apt farewell to a musician whose talent remains peerless.
Mícheál Ó Domhnaill: born October 7th, 1952; died July 7th, 2006