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Breanddán Breathnach profile and interview on utube

Breandán Breathnach did a great many things with fervour, rage, enthusiasm, but also many things with modesty, and it was with modesty that he parted this life on the 6th November 1985, while making his way to a ceremony honouring a friend. On foot, of course.

He lived on a human scale, knew more people than most people can imagine existing and had attended more funerals saw the decline of traditions through the personal loss of talented and cherished friends. A son of the last silk weaver in Ireland he understandably respected old things and had an instinctive urge to preserve them.

So it was that in his middle years he began publishing orally transmitted music and editing his own journal, Ceol, on Irish music (1963), instigated the founding of Na PÍobairÍ Uilleann (1968) and became its Chairman until his death, was a founder member of Cumann Cheol Tire Éireann (1971), contributed to the establishment of Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy in Miltown Malbay (1973) and was involved in almost every effort to promote intelligent and sensitive revival of Irish musical traditions that has taken place in the last three decades when he was not actually its prime mover.

Always an individualist, and an impatient one, he left along the route of his achievement the traces of his saeva indignatio of which he was himself often the first victim in wars against monoliths of state and society.

Breandán’s death has bereaved many: most acutely his wife Lena and their daughters, to all of whom we express our sympathy and wish the happiest of memories. Na PíIbairÍ Uilleann have lost a guide, benefactor, agitator if this term sounds inept, the only other I can think of is Breandán’s image of the Little Red Hen. What a pity the Little Red Hen did not live to enjoy Henrietta Street, a centre for music not only for pipers, in which the works still in progress will soon reach their completion.

The Folk Music Society, of course, also profited by his organising ability most recently in the exhibition on eighteenth-century music which has just ended and by the numerous talks he gave its meetings during the fourteen years of his membership. During those years he published his FOLK MUSIC AND DANCES OF IRELAND (1971) and CEOL RINCE NA IREANN no. 2 (1976), no. 3 (1985), as well as many articles, and offered the benefit of his scholarly experience to all who needed it.

Breandán has left many labours unfinished, and the number and variety of his uncompleted research projects is astonishing. But the single project which most preoccupied his later years was certainly one of preservation not writing. His brief career in academe (University College Dublin 1974-7) was an endeavour to set up a sound archive which would somehow be the basis of a National Archive of Irish Folk Music.

The idea was not a new one for him then, nor did it recede subsequently from his mind. In 1981 the Arts Council, of which he was soon to become a member, took up the question where he had left it, several meetings were held, and a report was sent to the Minister for the Arts. No decision has yet been taken arising from this initiative.

There is no doubt that Breandán was absolutely right in the importance he attached to this deficiency of our national records: a deficiency in the fostering of the art which public opinion in Europe and America most readily associates with this country. And Irish traditional music travels further: Breandán’s FOLK MUSIC AND DANCES OF IRELAND has just been translated into Japanese. Of all possible memorials, a National Archive of Traditional Music is the one by which Breandán would have loved most dearly to be remembered.

Dr. Hugh Shields, November 1985

Breandán’s greatest wish

Breandán’s greatest wish was fulfilled with the founding of the thriving Irish Traditional Music Archive in 1987, less than two years after his death.

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Hugh Shields

Obituary
November, 1985

Volume 1

Collections of music published in Ceol

Volume 2

Volume 3

Volume 4

Volume 5

Breanddán Breathnach profile and interview on utube

FOLK MUSIC AND DANCES OF IRELAND (1971)

Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann
Irish Traditional Music Archive