How Lunny took the music from black-and-white to colour.
Prof Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin
Director of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in the University of Limerick, and chairman of Culture Ireland
"When I think of Dónal, I think of consistency. He has been involved with so many of the important things that have happened in traditional music in recent years. And even though he's anything but a pushy character, if you look at his body language, he's leading - sometimes from behind and sometimes from the side. I worked with him on a piece called A River of Sound, so I got a sense of how he works. It's very quietly done. There's no razzmatazz.
"Then there's his contribution to the harmonisation of Irish music. This is intimately linked to the open tuning of the bouzouki, which brings him into a sound that is both old and new. It's old in that it has pre-Renaissance resonances, but contemporary because it jumps ahead of the usual chord shapes. That's his right hand on the fretted keyboard. His left hand - he's a ciotog - is very related to bodhrán playing, providing the rhythmic drive for the music. So even though the bouzouki is Greek, his left hand is organically the movement of the bodhrán player's hand across the skin - and that makes an integration between the bouzouki and the tune player that he's accompanying.
"Finally, because he's an oral-tradition musician, he's in the same arena of improvisation as the Irish traditional musician. If the piper makes a little twist there, changes the tune a little earlier or later, plays the tune one more time than he intended to, Dónal is there with him. Put all of that together, and you get a kind of dynamic integration into the tradition which has worked for the last 40 years."
Nuala O'Connor
Hummingbird Films producer, and director of the Arts Lives documentary, Follow the Music
"Dónal's overpowering influence until he was a teenager was the Irish-speaking culture of the Donegal Gaeltacht, and all that went with it. But he was also familiar with the idioms of the folk-based rock culture of the late 1960s. That made him unique, and gave what he was doing great depth and authenticity. There had been accompaniment for melodies before, of course, but his accompaniment is of a very high order. People have a very simplistic view of it, that it's simply a matter of adding in 'chords that kind of go with the melody'. That is not, ever, what Dónal did. His accompaniment is of huge subtlety and depth, and it comes from a knowledge of the music that is based in the music itself.
"I use the analogy that the music went from black and white to colour.
"He has absolutely no commercial side to him at all - he's entirely and completely driven by musical considerations, always. However, he didn't do what he did without a lot of soul-searching. I think he realised that putting colour into traditional music was a serious undertaking, that the default setting was solo voice, and that to go at that and start changing it was momentous.
"The other thing about him is that he's a musician's musician. All the musicians I've ever spoken to about him, or with whom he has collaborated over the years, would say that working with Dónal brings out the best of what they can do - and that goes right across the board, from older artists to the very youngest."
Noel Eccles
Percussionist with Moving Hearts and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
"Before I got involved with Moving Hearts in the early 1980s, I'd had very little experience of playing with traditional musicians. What I found immediately was that Dónal didn't go for the easy option. His approach was always to look for a better way of doing things - both from the point of view of the actual instruments he used to do it, and from the patterns and rhythms he would play. His rhythmic accompaniments never get in the way of the melody and never become the dominant factor. Dónal always looks for something that serves the tune but has value in its own right. He's also aware of areas where you can economise, take things out in order to make the sound bigger. When Dónal plays the bouzouki he provides a chordal accompaniment to whatever melody he's accompanying - but he's always finding intricate counter-melodies and rhythmic structures underneath. It's a particular talent that he has, and it's something that I've learned from and used to my benefit over the last 25 years and a bit.
"When you work with somebody like Dónal, he influences the way you think about music. His overall musical insight is tremendous - but in the rhythmic area his insight is particularly acute. I enjoy working with him tremendously."
Nicholas Carolan
Irish Traditional Music Archive director
"Although Dónal Lunny has been honoured for his compositions by election to Aosdána, he has made many other contributions to Irish music over the last four decades. All of them have been on the innovative side of the spectrum of creativity. All of them have been in the context of music ensembles. Many have involved public performance, but many have been backroom contributions: he has produced hundreds of Irish albums and midwived the studio performances of many other Irish performers, extending concepts of Irish record production in the process. In musical terms, he has played a crucial background formation role rather than a starring role in these groups, playing harmony and percussion instruments and singing harmony. He has also experimented with creating different ensemble forces in Irish music such as Celtic Orchestra, the Donal Lunny Band, Coolfin and Bugle.
"As a musician, arranger and organiser, he has extended the essentially melodic nature of older Irish music in the dimensions of harmony and percussion, borrowing from the instrumentation and practices of other ethnic traditions . . . He has been crucial in the internationalisation of Irish music that has occurred over the last three decades."