Liam O'Flynn RIP funeral service rte news
Farewell Liam
Liam O’Flynn, a master at coaxing mournful, inspirational and even rollicking music out of the uilleann pipes, arguably the most difficult instrument to play in the arsenal of Irish music, died on March 14 in Dublin. He was 72.
Among those announcing his death was the Society of Uilleann Pipers, a group he helped found in 1968 and of which he was honorary president. On its website it called him “a great ambassador for Irish traditional music throughout Ireland and around the world.”
The society did not specify a cause of death, but Mr. O’Flynn, who died in a hospital, had been ill for some time.
Mr. O’Flynn was comfortable in practically any musical world, playing alongside rock and country stars, in front of orchestras and on his own. He was best known as a member of Planxty, an acclaimed Irish folk band, formed in 1972, that was influential in the Irish folk revival of that period.
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The group released a series of albums, and Mr. O’Flynn also recorded solo records and played on albums by Emmylou Harris, Mark Knopfler, Enya, Nigel Kennedy, Kate Bush and many others.
“When it came to music, he was just pure genius, and his music was filled with heart and soul,” said Joanie Madden, of the Celtic group Cherish the Ladies. (Mr. O’Flynn is heard on its 2001 release, “The Girls Won’t Leave the Boys Alone.”) “I think the testament of a great musician is playing a slow air, and, by God, he could move your heart by how he played slow airs.”
Liam Og O’Flynn was born on April 15, 1945, in County Kildare, Ireland. His father, also named Liam, played the fiddle, and his mother, Maisie, played the piano and organ. In an interview rebroadcast by RTE Radio One last week as a tribute, Mr. O’Flynn recalled that his musical awakening came when his parents took him to a classical music concert when he was about 8.
“Before the concert started, as was the case then, I guess, the orchestra played the national anthem,” he said. “The audience rose, and the orchestra played, and the effect on me was extraordinary. I actually nearly fainted with the might and the beauty of the sound.”
The instrument he fixated on, though, was not part of the traditional orchestra.
“As far back as I can remember, there was something about the sound of uilleann pipes that just struck a chord very deep within me,” he said. (The instrument’s name is pronounced ILL-yin or ILL-in.)
Learning to play the pipes — the instrument involves a bag inflated by a bellows to produce a wide range of sounds and notes — was no easy task, but Mr. O’Flynn had as his first teacher one of Ireland’s greatest experts, Leo Rowsome. He fondly recalled his Friday evening lessons with Mr. Rowsome.
“That was the high point of the week for me,” he said. “I lived for that hour.”
Two other great pipers, Willie Clancy and Seamus Ennis, were also major influences. Mr. O’Flynn even shared a rental with Mr. Ennis for a time. When Mr. Ennis died in 1982, he willed Mr. O’Flynn his pipes.
In a 1999 interview with thistleradio.com, Mr. O’Flynn noted that, though people may have heard the pipes on recordings, they don’t fully appreciate what goes into playing them until they see it done.
“It’s great when someone comes up to you after seeing the uilleann pipes played for the first time,” he said. “They can be utterly amazed by all the things going on. You’re pumping bellows, keeping pressure on your left arm, sending air into the instrument, and they also see something happening under the right wrist, where the regulators are. There’s a lot going on.”
The instrument had begun to fade from use in Mr. O’Flynn’s childhood, despite a few famed players, but in the 1960s he and others helped bring it back into the public eye and ear. A crucial moment came in the early 1970s, when the folk singer and guitarist Christy Moore asked Mr. O’Flynn and two others, Andy Irvine and Donal Lunny, to play on an album he was making, titled “Prosperous.”
The four realized that they had a unique sound and formed Planxty. Their first album — titled simply “Planxty” but often called the Black Album because of its cover, an allusion to the Beatles’ so-called White Album released a few years earlier — was a revelation.
“The Planxty Black Album made traditional Irish music as powerful as rock and roll,” Gwen Orel, publisher of the online magazine New York Irish Arts, said by email, drawing a comparison to a signature Rolling Stones song. “The passion and anger in Planxty’s arrangement of the trad song ‘The Blacksmith,’ in which a girl is betrayed by her lover, is up there with ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ any day. It is explosive, scary, even feminist.”
Planxty disbanded and re-formed several times over the years, but Mr. O’Flynn pursued other projects as well. Among the most notable and beloved was “The Poet and the Piper,” a series of collaborative performances with the poet Seamus Heaney. (It became an album in 2003.)
Mr. Heaney, the Nobel laureate, introducing Mr. O’Flynn at one performance, said of his music, “It’s like putting your back to a strong tree of sound, and you feel safe with it.”
In 1979 Mr. O’Flynn began working with the composer Shaun Davey on what was originally intended to be just one song commemorating the adventurer Tim Severin’s attempt to re-create an ancient Atlantic crossing that was part of Irish legend.
“He sent me the tune and we worked at it to make it fit the pipes,” Mr. O’Flynn said of Mr. Davey in 1999. “Then he decided to do another one, and another one, and then he had the idea of trying to tell the story of the whole voyage through music.”
Their collaboration led to Mr. Davey’s “The Brendan Voyage,” an orchestral suite featuring the uilleann pipes — played, of course, by Mr. O’Flynn. They recorded the work in 1980, and Mr. O’Flynn played it numerous times with orchestras.
Mr. O’Flynn appeared often in the United States, including at Alice Tully Hall in New York in 2001 with Mr. Heaney. He is survived by his wife, Jane, and a sister, Maureen.
Fellow musicians remembered Mr. O’Flynn not only as a great player, but also as a man of gentle warmth in a business full of volatile personalities. Ms. Madden recalled wanting to kick off the release of “The Girls Won’t Leave the Boys Alone,” an album full of guest musicians, with a 2001 concert.
“We were launching in Ireland,” she said in a telephone interview, “and I said, ‘Liam, I’m embarrassed; I can’t afford to pay you.’ And he said, ‘Joanie, it’s not about the money; I’ll be there.’ That’s the kind of person he was.”
