Michael McGlynn
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Thursday, 4 September 2025 at 5:30pm
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR HARRY WHITE, School of Music on 4 September 2025 on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa on MICHAEL PHILIP MCGLYNN
Deputy President, Colleagues, Honoured Guests,
Citation for Michael Glynn (Honorary D. Mus., 4 September 2025)
Michael McGlynn, whose work we celebrate here today, is, among much else, the most distinguished and widely-performed composer of Irish-language vocal settings since the death of Seán Ó Riada in 1971. His body of work for unaccompanied and accompanied choral ensembles is rightly regarded as a landmark in the domain of Irish art music, not only on account of its globally-recognised originality of voice and its superlative re-configuration of the relationship between Irish language texts and musical soundscapes, but also because of its historical significance. The current renaissance in choral music written by younger Irish composers, some of whom are with us here today, is directly attributable to the influence and international circulation of Michael McGlynn’s exquisitely-crafted tapestries of sound.It is not too much to add that the vocal ensemble which he founded in 1987, Anúna, has in the meantime become the principal intelligencer of Irish art music across the globe through the agency of Michael McGlynn’s own body of work. This work, which may be defined as a uniquely sustained exploration of the relationship between the Irish landscape (and in particular the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland) and the sounding forms of a strikingly original and deeply responsive musical imagination, is without precedent. It quietly bypasses the quandaries and idiolects of contemporary musical discourse in its own quest for voice, and privileges instead a synthesis of uncanny staying-power and prowess. This synthesis comprises the compositional techniques of early English choral music, the morphology and expressive nuance of traditional sean-nós singing, and the acoustic signatures of Irish itself. In a phrase, Michael McGlynn’s outstanding achievement is to have imagined Ireland musically, and to such a memorable degree.
In this enterprise he has not acted alone. The evolution of his art, which now stands revealed in over twenty CD collections and countless concert performances throughout Europe, North America and Asia, has depended at every turn on an intimate communion between composer, performer and sound engineer. As an instance of this formative and painstaking collaboration, I cite and salute Michael’s work with Brian Masterson, whose formidable expertise in the production of these recordings for so many years has decisively contributed to the stellar success and arresting soundprint of this music across the world.
Even the briefest survey of Michael McGlynn’s career as a composer, conductor, educator and visual artist (his own films and documentaries are an utterly compelling representation of the relationship between music and landscape) lies beyond the reach of this necessarily restricted testimonial. But on this occasion, I cannot pass silently over the fact that he was educated here in UCD and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1986. Many years later, at the height of his fame, he received the UCD Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017, and in 2019 he was awarded a UCD Creative Fellowship. These plaudits were richly-deserved, but I would like to dwell just for a moment on Michael’s years as an undergraduate. It was in his last year, forty years ago, that I first encountered him when I joined the (then) Department of Music as a young assistant lecturer.I vividly recall Michael’s irrepressible presence, his intellectual curiosity and his cheerful (not to say brazen) refusal to be cowed by the rather authoritarian atmosphere that prevailed in those days. But I could not have guessed at the profound impact which our early music history courses were to make on his subsequent emergence as a composer, to say little of the creative influence of my late colleague Professor Seóirse Bodley on Michael’s own artistic development. If only for these reasons, it gives me more pleasure and pride than I can say that Michael McGlynn should be honoured with a doctor’s degree as I take my leave of this university.
In Echoes of Ireland, a film directed by Michael to mark his sixtieth birthday last year, he remarked that ‘education is fundamental to Anúna. Everything we do has a didactic element to it.’ The sound-world that Michael McGlynn has created through this ensemble has produced a body of compositions which not only imagine Ireland, but which represent this country with such conviction and authenticity to the world at large. There can scarcely be a professional choir in the United States, for example, that does not have a McGlynn composition within its repertory. In Finland, Norway, Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and France (to name just a few instances), his music, as one French singer put it, ‘explains Ireland to us’. That is indeed a singular and utterly remarkable achievement in today’s musical environment. And it is not least on that specific account that we honour Michael McGlynn here this afternoon.
At the close of Brian Friel’s play, Performances, about the great Czech composer Leoš Janáček, the protagonist says: ‘But the work, Anezka! Everything must remain ancillary to the work!’. This is an imperative which Michael McGlynn has passionately safeguarded throughout his distinguished career. On that account also, it is a joy to acclaim him in this gathering.
Praehonorabilis Pro Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in Musica; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.