- The Music of Riverdance
In 1996, a year after Riverdance emerged as a full-fledged stage show with phenomenal international appeal, the first Crossroads Conference was held in Dublin to address the state of Irish music. The conference addressed wide-ranging concerns, among them tradition and change, educational strategies, and the influence of commercialization. One of the most colorful and outspoken participants, the Sligo flute player Seamus Tansey, had this to say about the impact of Riverdance:
Each tribe, nation and country derives their music from their different environments, their different histories and ethos. They are quite different and are meant to be quite different, just like each nation’s culture, dress, history and language is different. Therefore, you can’t mix them or else you have a mongrel representing nothing or speaking nothing, just a noises or an obscene sound that should never be heard.1
Tansey viewed the show as a dilution of the purity of the tradition, and he expressed particular concern that traditional Irish music might be mixed with foreign forms of music in the name of progress:
It that is change, i.e., the mongrelisation, the bastardisation, the cross-pollination, the copulation of our ancient traditional music with other cultures, then I say we want none of it and I know I speak for thousands of traditional musicians, followers and music lovers up and down this country today. . . . I would sooner see our music die completely in this generation than see it drip-fed by outside cultures treading the length and breadth of this land in the century to come.2 [End Page 56]
One wonders what Mr. Tansey would make of a recent study that shows that, in a population of four million in the Republic of Ireland, a conservative estimate of 400,000 are new immigrants from Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Brazil, and China, not to mention the various nations of Africa.3 What is going to happen when the rich cultural traditions of these immigrants are added to the native traditions of Ireland? Fortunately, in Riverdance we have an example of a quintessentially Irish work whose very Irishness is all the more eloquently realized by being juxtaposed to, and influenced by, powerful contributions from other non-Irish musical and dance traditions.
Full disclosure here: Bill Whelan, the composer of Riverdance, and I are both colleagues and friends. I first met Bill in the summer of 1989 when I was searching for a music director and composer for the Yeats International Theater Festival that I produced at the Abbey Theatre from1989 to 1993. Bill was already known as one of Ireland’s top record producers, having written arrangements for such icons as U2,Van Morrison, Planxty, Paul Brady, and Kate Bush.
Bill had also reconstructed the complex orchestral scores of the great Seán Ó Riada for a 1987 memorial concert held in Dublin. This included transcribing, by ear, the twelve-tone music written by Ó Riada to accompany war scenes in the film Mise Éire (1959). The revival of traditional Irish music from the 1960s onward can arguably be traced to the pioneering work of Ó Riada as the composer of Mise Éire as well as the arrangements he did for Ceoltóirí Chualann, a chamber ensemble of traditional Irish musicians that Ó Riada put together in 1963, and out of which developed the Chieftains. Seán Ó Riada died at the age of forty in 1971. For many music lovers and critics, his death dashed the hope that Ireland had finally produced a composer who—like Bartók and Kodály in Hungary—had the ability to tap into the native musical genius and transform it into a classical idiom of international character and quality.
Bill Whelan, in my view, is the only Irish composer to have emerged since the death of Ó Riada with the talent, emotional depth, and intellectual sophistication needed to realize the same ambition. As was evident from his earliest compositional efforts with the Yeats Festival, Whelan also has another rare quality: an ability to write music that exploits to the full the performing skills of actors, singers, dancers, and gifted instrumentalists. That is the mark not only of a great...