04/09/2025
Congratulations to Michael McGlynn, who has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Music at UCD
Michael McGlynn (BMus) is an Irish composer whose body of work for vocal ensemble has earned him an international reputation across the globe.
Through the agency of three professional choirs which he founded and which he directs – Anúna (1987), M’Anam (2018) and Systr (2019) – and over twenty albums, Michael McGlynn has transformed the landscape of contemporary Irish art music. His compositions have entered the repertory of professional ensembles throughout Europe, North America and Asia, and his artistic collaborations, most notably in Japan, Finland, and the United States, have been widely acclaimed for their strikingly original synthesis of music and theatre. In 2019, the Kansas City Chorale released a CD of his compositions, and his work has been performed and commissioned by leading ensembles including the BBC Singers, Chanticleer, and the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, among many others.
He is renowned as the foremost composer of Irish-language settings at work in the world today. Many of his compositions achieve a memorable (and often uncanny) intimacy between the Irish Atlantic seaboard and the soundscape and acoustic signatures of Irish itself. As one distinguished French vocal artist has put it, Michael McGlynn's music ‘explains Ireland to us’. As a filmmaker, his documentaries and films have explored the audio-visual relationship between the Irish landscape and his own musical palette with stunning success. His influence on younger practitioners has been immense, and he has been rightly identified as the begetter of a school of Irish choral composition which continues to flourish in the present moment.
Michael McGlynn is a graduate of UCD (he received the BMus Degree in 1986), and he was awarded a UCD Distinguished Alumni award in 2017. It is therefore especially appropriate that his outstanding achievement as a composer should be honoured with the award of a doctor’s degree in music by his Alma Mater.