Appreciation

• Published date: 15 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Prof Bodley’s public contribution to music in Ireland did not rest within the borders of UCD: in 1969, he became the founding chair of the Dublin Festival of Twentieth-Century Music (which was to feature many of his own compositions), and in 1970, he likewise chaired the newly-established Folk Music Society of Ireland. He was also a founding member (in 1981) of Aosdána, Ireland’s Academy for the Arts, and became the first composer to be elected a Saoi of Aosdána in 2008

Throughout the unfolding of his art, many of Prof Bodley’s original compositions transpired as landmarks in the history of 20th-century Irish art music. His seven symphonies (including two chamber symphonies) were frequently written for public occasions of national significance and were expressly commissioned on that account. His second symphony, for example, entitled I Have Loved the Lands of Ireland (1980) commemorated the centenary of the birth of Pádraig Pearse; his third, Ceol (1981), was written for the opening of the National Concert Hall in Dublin; and his fifth, The Limerick Symphony (1991) commemorated the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. Other of his orchestral works, including A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland (1975) afforded strikingly original configurations of traditional music through the medium of a textural impressionism that Prof Bodley himself located in his encounters with Japanese music.

In his song cycles and vocal-orchestral works,he collaborated with several Irish poets, including Brendan Kennelly (A Girl, 1978), Mícheál Ó Siadhail (The Naked Flame, 1987 and Earlsfort Suite, 2000) and Seamus Heaney (The Hiding Places of Love, 2011). One of his earliest such settings was of WB Yeats (Never to have lived is best, 1965). He also made extensive settings of Goethe, George Russell, Thomas MacGreevy, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Seán Ó Riordáin and many other writers, as well as settings of his own texts. Many of these settings were written for distinguished artists with whom Prof Bodley worked closely for sustained periods of time. These included Bernadette Greevy, Aylish Kerrigan and Sylvia O’Brien.

As a writer of works for piano, he significantly enriched the repertoire of contemporary Irish keyboard music. Leading exponents of the instrument, including John O’Conor, Anthony Byrne, Hugh Tinney and Dearbhla Collins, frequently featured his music within their recital and concert programmes. Works such as The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1976) and Aislingí...