The Masses of Seán and Peadar Ó Riada: Explorations in Vernacular Chant by John O'Keeffe (review)

Scholars and performers of Irish traditional music are deeply familiar with the standard dance forms and song styles of the island. Regardless of one's spiritual orientation, the jigs and reels, ballads, and lyric songs are the bread and butter of the traditional music world. Few among those who know Irish music at this level are those who have ventured into the realm of Catholic Mass composition and performance. This book is a welcome guide into that realm, featuring the sacred works of Seán and Peadar Ó Riada.

The Ó Riada family has been known for decades as one of the standard bearers of Irish music. Seán Ó Riada (1931–1971) was a composer, performer, and academic whose accomplishments include the composition of film scores using traditional materials, a well-known radio series titled Our Musical Heritage, and the development of Ireland's first supergroup. With the group Ceoltóirí Chualann, Ó Riada created complex arrangements of tunes for stage performance; by 1963 some members of this set of players became the Chieftains. In the ensuing decades, the group toured the world and set a standard for the Irish music revival of the 1960s and beyond. Seán Ó Riada's score for the documentary film Mise Éire (1959) is considered his masterpiece.

Peadar Ó Riada (b. 1954), Seán's son, has been equally active in musical groups, also composing, performing, appearing on television and radio, and writing. He lives in the Irish-speaking townland of Cúil Aodha (part of the Múscraí Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking district) in the southwest of Ireland. He leads and composes music for the male vocal group Cór Chúil Aodha—founded by his father in 1963—and in a variety of musical genres. Both father and son have composed Masses in the Irish language, outside the Roman Catholic liturgy but within the vernacular Catholic tradition of Ireland.

In The Masses of Seán and Peadar Ó Riada, John O'Keeffe explores three Roman rite Mass settings in connection with Irish traditional song and plainchant; in the context of solo liturgical composition; and as an element of post–Vatican II composition. The first two Masses are by Seán Ó Riada, and the final Mass is by Peadar. Throughout the book, the emphasis on oral tradition—oral culture, oral compositional processes, and the essential nature of orality in music—highlights the composers' engagement in the Irish traditional musical culture of the Irish southwest. Based on the models of the Roman Ordinary (fixed model) and Proper (variable) settings of the Catholic Mass, the three major works reveal complicated relationships between text and melody.

The introduction lays out the basic premise of the text and is followed by seven chapters. In chapter 1, "Tradition and Context," O'Keeffe examines the impact of the 1967 Vatican II document Musicam Sacram (http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_instr_19670305_musicam-sacram_en.html [accessed 18 July 2019]), which lays out what vernacular liturgical music should and should not be. (It was released fifty years before the publication of the present volume.) O'Keeffe highlights the moment that Seán Ó Riada begins his first Mass with a musical setting of "Ár nAthair" ["Our Father"] in Irish. Followed by a discussion of the traditional singing style of the Múscraí Gaeltacht, from which the Masses emerged, the early part of the chapter reveals the ease with which new compositions based on older models flow. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Roman Mass. In chapter 2, "Words and Music," O'Keeffe connects monophonic Irish-language song with both plainchant and medieval song by highlighting the musical production of texts as a way of setting up scansion in prose. He continues with a discussion of modes and motifs, concluding with an assertion of the flexibility of form.

Chapters...