The last man standing at the listening post for cultural globalisation

"I'm a slow developer. I need an awful lot of time for some things to gestate." Micheál Ó Suilleabháin is talking with his customary brio, and blithe indifference to the fact that all evidence is to the contrary. Retirement isn't a concept that he's on intimate terms with, but this year, he has stepped away from his position as Chair of Music at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, passing the baton to his long-time musical collaborator, Mel Mercier.

Ó Suilleabháin’s slow development is, he insists, evident in his own musical career, where his recordings have taken their own sweet time to emerge, stubbornly refusing to line up obediently, during those interludes when he might have wished them to. Ideally, he muses, they should have been birthed to order during his various periods of sabbatical, but instead they tiptoed into the ether at times of their, rather than his choosing. Still, producing some 11 albums since 1990 could hardly be considered a lazy man’s load.

Ó Suilleabháin established the academy on the banks of the Shannon in the University of Limerick in 1994. Later, he lured the Irish Chamber Orchestra to relocate there from Dublin. His vision for this world class melting pot for performance arts was as bold as it was alien to most people's expectations of an academy. No fusty donnish robes. No cobwebbed offices in darkened corridors. His insistence from the get-go that this cockily titled space would be "a listening post for cultural globalisation" was one that resonated with students and academics.

Where else could you find nine Master’s courses established in everything from traditional music performance to music therapy and dance, within three short years? There was precious little that was predictable about the path he pursued over the past 22 years, but one thing was for certain: there was no grass growing under the feet of those who came to work alongside him. Like Muhammed Ali, Ó Suilleabháin subscribed to just one diktat in life: impossible is nothing.

“I remember thinking that I needed a board around me,” Ó Suilleabháin says smiling, recalling his early days at the helm, “and I remember then getting a feeling that that was not the thing to do: that I needed to run with the ball myself. Because it was a complete start-up situation, I either had to have the courage to kick the ball or not. Then it was a bit like constructing a car while you were in it: changing the wheel while ‘twas going.  Comic in a way, I know, but it felt like that.”

Ó Suilleabháin brought traditional music into the heart of academia, never for a minute sacrificing its flinty, ungovernable essence, much to the envy and amazement of long-established music faculties the world over. He melded the local and the global (or the “lobal” as he calls it) with apparent ease. How did he manage it?

“I have always been drawn towards the creation of a cultural egalitarianism,” he insists. “When I would see something that would be patently unjust, that would immediately set something off in me. I fell for traditional music under Ó Riada, and then I started to realise that it wasn’t being given “cothram na féine” or parity of esteem. So that was something to do: to redress that balance. And ‘tisn’t that I had to become anti classical music to become pro trad. “

Ó Suilleabháin has always embraced traditional and classical forms comfortably. For him, this notion of “bimusicality” is an instinctive one, but given his success at melding all manner of performing arts, perhaps the notion of “transmusicality” is apposite?

"The theories that are emerging around transgenderism are very applicable to this," he suggests. "The notion of an either/or, as distinct from a 'both/and'. Heaney has it in The Government of the Tongue where he talks about two orders of reality; one the poetic, the other the practical. And he says that you can move between the two, and that both benefit from that movement. So what is happening is the development of a new perception of what has always been there."

Ways of seeing, as the art critic, John Berger suggested, apply to all facets of life, and not just the arts. “I keep thinking of the flat earth and the round earth,” Ó Suilleabháin says, “and I’m astonished to think that people some centuries ago believed that the earth was flat, and they woke up the next day and they sensed it was round. Now, we know it was round all the time, so what changed wasn’t the world: but the perception of the world. And I think that that’s what’s happening now: our perception has been shifting in a post-modern kind of way. It’s part of the overall seismic shift in human consciousness. Ireland is an interesting cultural laboratory because if you look at classical music and traditional music, and the oral tradition that’s so strong here, you’ll realise that each is a wonderful foil for the other.”

Ó Suilleabháin’s always had an intuitive understanding of the vital place Irish traditional music, song and dance have in the global firmament.

“I’ve always loved the idea of local global dialogue. Addressing cultural globalisation, not because it’s good or bad, but because it’s there. And it’s not going away. It’s like the Shannon is in flood: how are you going to manage it? So you walk into that particular space and you try to illuminate it.”

The son of shopkeepers – “both lovely people” – from Clonmel, Micheál Ó Suilleabháin was reared in a house where there were no musical instruments,  no record player and precious few books. He laughs when he recounts how he realised that the first time he heard Bach, it was when he was playing it himself. “It must have sounded terrible!” Still, he found himself in UCC, studying music, “in the force field of Seán Ó Riada and Aloys Fleischmann”, by dint of passion, rather than birthright. That initial spark ignited by his musical education never dimmed.

“I’ve always been drawn to the world of education. It’s a pathway to a realisation of the self,  and it’s been so good to me, that I have a natural instinct for how fertile an arena it is for other people.”

In this centenary year, when conversations about ourselves have been characterised by nuance and subtlety rather than by any sledgehammer declarations or to use his own word, “polarities”, does Micheál see the Irish World Academy as an important contributor to our evolving sense of ourselves?

“Our sense of community,  identity and nationality is so strong in Ireland for all kinds of reasons,” he says. “When it came to talking about 2016, and how we should mark it, we felt we had been doing that all the time anyway. Whether through text, through conceptual intelligence, through the gesture of dance or through music, there is a celebration and an interrogation of our identity. The inclusion of cultures rather than their exclusion has been what we’ve been about: facilitating different voices, rather than beating the drum of triumphalism and xenophobia.

“I’ve always felt an undercurrent of a commonality between our two islands too, in terms of a heritage of traditional music and dance. They are much more entwined than they are different, and we celebrate that.”

The mantle has been passed, and now Micheál Ó Suilleabháin has time for his own music. It’s another leg on his journey that he’s embraced with his customary enthusiasm for new horizons. Revisiting earlier work, re-orchestrating it and reimagining it is all part of this latest chapter. Next year will see him tour internationally with the Irish Baroque Orchestra and the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland.

“I don’t think I realised at the time the extent of the richness of the journey,” he reflects on those heady years at the helm of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. “The more and more that people came in, the more it seemed to be sustainable outside of myself. It seems to have a sustainable energy at its heart: one that’s very difficult to slow down.”

Elver Gleams: A concert celebration of the music of Professor Micheál Ó Suilleabháin will include some of his best-known works, performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, with soloists Mel Mercier, Kenneth Edge, Niall Keegan, Pádraig Keane and  sean nós dancer Sibéal Davitt, as well as students from UCC and UL, and his sons, Eoin and Moley Ó Súílleabháin with Kathleen Turner and Academy Gospel Choir. Irish World Academy, UL on November 22nd uch.ie