Michael McGlynn

Irish composer

Michael Philip McGlynn (born 11 May 1964) is an Irish composer, producer, director, and founder of the vocal ensemble Anúna.

McGlynn was born in Dublin and attended Coláiste na Rinne and Blackrock College. He was a student of Music and English at University College Dublin and Trinity College where he studied for an M. Litt degree. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree (1985) and Bachelor in music (1986) from University College Dublin. He was a member of the RTÉ Chamber Choir and in 1987 he founded the Irish choral group Anúna (originally spelt "An Uaíthne"). Anúna have released fourteen albums, almost exclusively featuring his arrangements and original works. Deep Dead Blue was nominated for a Classical Brit Award in 2000 and went Top 5 in the UK Classical Charts. Anúna: Celtic Origins was the biggest selling world music CD in the US in August 2007 according to Nielsen Soundscan , and remained in the top twenty albums of the Billboard World Music Charts until early 2008. Although best known as a writer of choral music, McGlynn has written orchestral and instrumental works as well as cantatas and masses. 2007 saw the premiere of the cantata St. Francis commissioned by RTÉ, the Irish National broadcasting station. It is a setting of texts associated with Francis of Assisi for tenor, choir and symphony orchestra. The album Behind the Closed Eye is a collaboration with the Ulster Orchestra, Northern Ireland's premiere orchestra. McGlynn has written music for theatre, including the Adrian Noble/Cusack family production of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and the Royal Court, London. He is also a vocal and choral clinician, working recently in the University of Miami (US), Sumida Hall (Japan) and Festival 500 in Newfoundland (Canada). He was an Eminent Scholar at Florida Atlantic University for the 2011–12 academic year. In 2017 he was awarded the University College Dublin Alumni Award for Arts and Humanities. McGlynn will be the Artistic Director of the 2021 Tampere Vocal Music Festival in Finland. McGlynn's music has been recorded and performed by such internationally recognised performers and ensembles as Rajaton, Dawn Upshaw, the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, The Dale Warland Singers, the Phoenix Chorale [formerly the Phoenix Bach Choir], Conspirare, the BBC Singers and Chanticleer.

McGlynn's harmonic language combines elements of traditional Irish music such as modal melodic lines and ornamentation, fixed and shifting drones and liberal use of jazz tinged chordal clusters and sonorities. These features can be heard in his contribution to the Chanticleer commissioned And on Earth Peace: A Chanticleer Mass. McGlynn contributed the 'Agnus Dei' to this multi composer work. McGlynn says "One of the misapprehensions about my music is that I am not actually concerned with saving Irish traditional music; I am not a traditionalist. The only exposure I had [to traditional Irish song] was during my year at Coláiste na Rinne in Dún Garbhán. The songs that I set are not from a specific collection; they are more impressions of the songs I remembered." McGlynn also created new compositions that could be perceived as arrangements of Irish songs but were, in fact, new melodies composed to traditional texts. He has stated that "People just assume that I have just found a 'living' version. In fact I have done what has made solo traditional music so viable: I have created a new version. I take the songs and reinterpret them in a new way. My priority is always to create a choral version that works."