It was with great sadness that the SMI learned of the passing of Professor Seóirse Bodley, in November 2023, at the age of 90. Here, Gareth Cox writes of his life's work and his legacy.
Following music studies in the 1950s at University College Dublin and in Stuttgart, Bodley’s long and distinguished compositional career included important commissions as unofficial composer-laureate to write symphonies to commemorate the centenary of Pádraig Pearse in 1980 (Symphony no. 2: ‘I have Loved the Lands of Ireland’) and for the official state opening of the National Concert Hall in 1981 (Ceol: Symphony no. 3). He earned his doctorate at UCD in 1960 and taught there for nearly forty years retiring as emeritus professor in 1998. Since his passing, former students have recalled his dedication, encouragement, musical insights and wry sense of humour. He was also extremely active in Dublin’s musical life as a conductor, notably of the Culwick Choral Society in the 1960s, an accompanist working with Veronica Dunne, Aylish Kerrigan and Sylvia O’Brien, and a regular adjudicator and broadcaster.
The impact of his visits to the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt in the 1960s and his immersion in the European avant-garde is manifest in works such as Configurations (1967) and his String Quartet No. 1 (1968). In the 1970s Bodley then explored the possibility of evolving a modernist idiom influenced by Irish folk music in The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1972), A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland (1975), one of his best-known works, and Aislingí (1977). His artistic collaboration with the poet Brendan Kennelly resulted in his important song cycle, A Girl (1978), a setting of 22 poems, performed and recorded by Bernadette Greevy and John O’Conor. Later significant song-cycles include The Naked Flame (1987) and The Earlsfort Suite (2000) to texts by Micheal O’Siadhail. Bodley’s congregational masses have endured as a deeply familiar mainstay of everyday Catholic worship in Ireland with sections of his Mass of Peace (1976) being performed by 1.5 million people in the Phoenix Park during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Dublin in 1979.
In the context of this appreciation, it should be noted that Seóirse was a long-standing member and firm supporter of the Society for Musicology in Ireland which reflected his own musicological background and activities. He contributed to Comhar and Feasta and his ethnomusicological research on technique and structure in sean-nós singing was published in Éigse Ceol Tire in 1973. He also wrote an introduction to the 1970 reprint of Grattan Flood’s A History of Irish Music as well as entries on Irish composers for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980 edition) and a chapter on Ó Riada’s original compositions in Fryer & Harris’s Integrating Tradition: The Achievement of Seán Ó Riada (1981). He was elected as the inaugural chair of the Folk Music Society of Ireland. In 2013 he discussed his compositional process at an NUI Maynooth/SMI seminar on the relationship between composer and musicologist and presented a paper on ‘The Claims of Conformity’ at a CHMHE conference on the role of composition in music education, ‘Teaching the Unteachable’, held as part of Waterford's New Music Week in 2005. Having chaired both sessions I can attest to his deeply-felt and clearly articulated views on two topics very close to his heart.
Tributes flowed from many quarters after Seóirse’s death with President Michael D. Higgins declaring that his ‘unique legacy will endure for generations to come’. Earlier this year Seóirse’s 90th birthday was marked by a perceptive piece in the Journal of Music in Ireland by Adrian Scahill. Last October Bodley was conferred with an honorary doctorate by the NUI where the citation outlining his enormous contribution to music in Ireland was delivered by his wife and former SMI President, Lorraine Byrne Bodley. On a personal note, Seóirse’s music has always played a central part for much of my career and I recall over the years the very many fruitful and always enjoyable visits to his house to discuss his music. In particular I remember his 75th birthday seminar in Mary Immaculate College in Limerick when his Trio for Flute, Violin and Piano (1986) was performed by Concorde. He always followed up such events and meetings with a courteous letter of appreciation.
In my entry on Bodley for the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, I wrote that his ‘engagement with both Ireland’s Gaelic cultural heritage and the European avant-garde has had a profound effect on his extensive compositional output, in particular his attempts to achieve a synthesis of Irish traditional music and modernism’. It was appropriate that he should be elected as a founder member of Aosdána in 1981 and receive that academy’s highest artistic award of Saoi in 2008, prompting the then President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, to declare that Bodley ‘has helped us to recast what it means to be an artist in Ireland’.
The SMI extends its sincere condolences to his wife Lorraine and Seóirse’s family.
Gareth Cox