The Instrument That Nearly Disappeared
The uilleann pipes are the most technically demanding bagpipe in existence. Unlike their Scottish cousins, which play nine notes, the uilleann chanter produces two full chromatic octaves. The player sits, working a bellows strapped between elbow and ribcage to push dry air into a leather bag, freeing the mouth entirely. Below the chanter hang three drones, tuned an octave apart, and three regulators: closed pipes fitted with brass keys that the piper strikes with the wrist to produce chords. A full set contains seven reeds, all cut from Arundo donax cane. By the mid-twentieth century, fewer than a hundred playable full sets survived in Ireland. Leo Rowsome (1903–1970), a third-generation pipemaker from Wexford who taught at Dublin’s Municipal School of Music, dedicated his life to reversing the decline. Among his young students, starting at age eight, was Paddy Moloney.
Ó Riada, the Chieftains, and a New Architecture
Before 1959, traditional Irish music existed mainly as solo pub performance or ceili bands playing dance tunes in rigid unison. Seán Ó Riada, a Cork-born composer trained in classical harmony, broke that mold. His orchestral score for George Morrison’s documentary Mise Éire (1959), performed by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra, arranged rebel ballads for full orchestral forces; the opening horn solo over “Róisín Dubh” reached audiences who had never considered traditional music as concert material. Then Ó Riada reversed course. In 1961, he assembled Ceoltóirí Chualann, a small ensemble that gave each instrument an individual voice. He sat at the center on harpsichord and bodhrán, the goatskin frame drum he helped restore to the tradition after decades of disuse. Moloney played pipes in the group. When Ó Riada died of liver failure in 1971, aged forty, Moloney carried the concept forward.
He had already started. In 1959, Garech Browne, an aristocratic Guinness heir, co-founded Claddagh Records in Dublin; its first release was Rowsome’s Rí na bPíobairí (“King of the Pipers”), and its second was the Chieftains’ debut, recorded in 1963. The group’s name came from a poem by John Montague. Over fifty years, Moloney released more than forty Chieftains albums: Celtic Wedding (1987) explored Breton traditions, Irish Heartbeat (1988) paired them with Van Morrison, Santiago (1996) fused Irish and Galician music. Six Grammy Awards followed. Moloney died in October 2021 at eighty-three.
The Ballad Boom
The Clancy Brothers, three siblings from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, moved to New York in the 1950s to act. They fell into folk singing at Greenwich Village clubs, adding Armagh-born Tommy Makem to the lineup. A 1961 Ed Sullivan Show appearance, wearing Aran sweaters their mother had sent, introduced Irish balladry to millions. A young Bob Dylan watched them at the White Horse Tavern. Back in Ireland, their success inspired Ronnie Drew, Luke Kelly, Barney McKenna, and Ciaran Bourke to form the Dubliners in 1962, playing rougher, louder, and closer to the pub session, with Kelly’s raw tenor and McKenna’s virtuosic tenor banjo defining the drinking-song wing of the revival.
Planxty, the Bothy Band, and the 1970s
In the summer of 1971, Christy Moore asked three musicians to record his second solo album, Prosperous, at his sister’s house in the Kildare village of the same name: Dónal Lunny (his school friend from Newbridge, who had taught him guitar and bodhrán), Andy Irvine (who had introduced the Greek bouzouki to Irish music through Sweeney’s Men in 1966), and Liam O’Flynn (a piper trained by Leo Rowsome). They formed Planxty in January 1972, initially calling themselves CLAD before adopting a term from the seventeenth-century harper Turlough O’Carolan denoting a musical tribute.
O’Flynn’s pipes wove around Irvine’s mandolin, while Lunny drove rhythm on a flat-backed bouzouki custom-built by luthier Peter Abnett, with octave strings stripped from the lower courses for stronger bass. Johnny Moynihan had retuned the original Greek instrument to GDAD; Lunny’s modifications turned it into something else entirely, now standard across the tradition.
When Lunny left in 1973, he founded Mulligan Records and assembled the Bothy Band: piper Paddy Keenan, flute player Matt Molloy, fiddler Tommy Peoples, and the Ó Domhnaill siblings from the Donegal group Skara Brae. They played traditional tunes at rock-concert intensity across three studio albums (1975–1977) before dissolving in 1979, having reshaped what ensemble session playing could sound like.
Sean-nos, Clannad, and Enya
Sean-nos (“old style”) singing is the oldest surviving Celtic vocal form: unaccompanied, performed in Irish, ornamented differently across three Gaeltacht regions. Connacht singers use florid melismatic passages where note clusters elaborate a single syllable; Munster singing is less decorated; the Donegal style is sparest, with higher pitch and steadier pulse. Ornamentation is improvised, so a song never sounds the same way twice.
Clannad formed in 1970 in Gweedore, County Donegal: siblings Máire, Ciarán, and Pól Brennan with their twin uncles Noel and Pádraig Duggan. Their father Leo played in the Slieve Foy showband; their mother Baba led the local choir. Beginning with traditional songs in Irish, Clannad layered in synthesizers and vocal harmonies. Their youngest sister Eithne joined in 1980, left in 1982, and, as Enya, recorded Watermark (1988) with producer Nicky Ryan. Ryan multi-tracked hundreds of vocal takes through a 32-track Mitsubishi digital tape machine, bounced them to a second machine, and layered the results without samplers. “Orinoco Flow” reached number one in five countries. Combined sales of Clannad and Enya exceeded seventy million by 2005.
Beyond Ireland
The term “Celtic music” properly spans six nations: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and Galicia. Alan Stivell, born in 1944, revived the Breton harp his father had reconstructed. His 1972 album Renaissance of the Celtic Harp fused harp, cello, electric guitar, and drums, winning the Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros and triggering a Breton cultural revival. In Scotland, Capercaillie formed in 1984 around Gaelic singer Karen Matheson, bringing Scottish Gaelic song to international audiences and selling over a million albums.
On 30 April 1994, 300 million viewers watched a seven-minute interval act at the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin: Irish stepdancing set to an original Bill Whelan score. The standing ovation overshadowed Ireland’s third consecutive Eurovision win. Whelan’s composition spent eighteen weeks at number one in Ireland and expanded into a full stage show by February 1995. Riverdance brought Irish music and dance to audiences who had never encountered either.
Essential Listening
- The Chieftains – The Chieftains 4 (1973)
- Planxty – Planxty (1973)
- Alan Stivell – Renaissance of the Celtic Harp (1972)
- The Bothy Band – The Bothy Band (1975)
- Clannad – Clannad 2 (1974)
- De Dannan – De Dannan (1975)
- Enya – Watermark (1988)
- The Chieftains & Van Morrison – Irish Heartbeat (1988)
- Capercaillie – Delirium (1991)
- Loreena McKennitt – The Visit (1991)
- Bill Whelan – Riverdance: Music from the Show (1995)
- Lunasa – Lunasa (1998)