Between Worlds: The Life of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin

The influential legacy of Irish composer, pianist, and musicologist Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin (1950-2018), including his ties to Boston College, is being commemorated this year through a series of tributes, including radio and television documentaries and a collection of essays.

On New Year’s Day, Clare FM broadcasted a seventy-five-minute program that traced Ó Súilleabháin’s life and career through interviews with fellow musicians and colleagues from University College Cork and the University of Limerick, where he founded the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in 1994. Producer Padraic Flaherty invited BC Irish Music Librarian Elizabeth Sweeney and Burns Librarian Christian Dupont to discuss the impact of Ó Súilleabháin’s visiting professorship in ethnomusicology in spring 1990. Capping an intensely productive semester of teaching and research, Ó Súilleabháin had organized a major Irish fiddle festival and inspired the creation of Burns Library’s Irish Music Archives, which Sweeney has led since 1999. The radio documentary remains available for listening as a podcast from the Clare FM website: http://www.clare.fm/podcasts/worlds-life-micheal-osuilleabhain/.

Sweeney and Dupont have also been invited to contribute to a forthcoming volume of essays edited by Nicholas Carolan, founder and director emeritus of the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, Marie McCarthy, professor of music education at the University of Michigan, and Helen Phelan, professor of arts practice at the University of Limerick. Their contribution will cover the full scope of Ó Súilleabháin’s engagements with BC, from his initial contacts with Irish Studies program founders Adele Dalsimer and Kevin O’Neill in 1980 through his subsequent campus visits and collaborations with Sullivan Artist-in-Residence Séamus Connolly.

Phelan is also collaborating on the creation of an hour-long video documentary for RTÉ to air later this year. Ó Súilleabháin’s visits and engagements with BC will be prominently featured, exemplifying the many ways in which he explored traditions “between worlds,” as reflected in the title of one of his albums and the program for his final performance with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in the months before his death in 2018.