Dónal Lunny didn’t just want to play the melody, he wanted to colour it

It was poignant to see Dónal Lunny sitting, alone, in UCD’s otherwise empty Theatre L lecture hall during a scene in Nuala O’Connor’s entrancing In Time, the 2025 documentary film tracing Lunny’s artistic journey, the filming of which was interrupted by his illness. In 1972, Theatre L was packed to capacity as Lunny and fellow members of the recently formed folk group Planxty enthralled the students. Lunny was the linchpin; as Christy Moore recalls in the film, “every harmony I sang on Planxty was taught to me by Dónal”.

As a player, composer, facilitator, arranger and teacher, Lunny, who died last week, was a master of inventiveness and redeploying tradition. Even before the end of the 1970s, journalist Joe Breen noted in a profile of Lunny, still barely aged 30, that “he has played with more people than this piece could accommodate”. Breen described him as a man of “many faces ... for he is at home with rock as quickly as with a traditional piece”; a product of a time when “the different musical camps found that they had more in common than they believed”.

It was Lunny’s mission to make them confident believers, and the attention to every detail involved intense work. There was nothing cavalier about the experimentation, or any attempt to obscure the source: “I was dedicated to expanding the reach of traditional music,” Lunny recalled. “You want to push the boundaries and broaden the treatment of the music in an acceptable way ... one that wasn’t alien to the music.” This was also about confidence in the robustness of the tradition: “I think Irish music has enough room for any ideas that I might have.”

[ Dónal Lunny’s legacy will be his openness to new ways of interpreting old musicOpens in new window ]

It was the embellishments, nuances and devotion to the intricacies of rhythmic structures that provided part of Lunny’s force; it created what the flautist and music historian Fintan Vallely described as “a thrilling tapestry of layered sound.” Throughout Lunny’s career there were new expressive avenues, driven by curiosity but also empathy and the ability, as the musician recalled, to hear music “in two dimensions”; his natural awareness of harmony and arrangement: “I realised that the music asks for a structure, and I could hear it; I could imagine it. So I was never drawn to learning the melody, playing the melody. I always wanted to colour it in some way.”

Lunny’s great colouring project was sustained for more than 60 years. He also had the gift of anticipation; Frank Harte, the traditional singer and assiduous collector of Irish music recalled that Lunny seemed to know where Harte was going with a piece before Harte himself knew. Observing the intuition was like watching a magician; Lunny was never one to boast of his musical intelligence, but he was confident about his instincts, and that ensured he was always able, in Nuala O’Connor’s words, “to contain multitudes”. This was despite the fact that he did not, as is the case with some maestros, come from a family of traditional musicians. Growing up in Kildare, he immersed himself in nature as well as drawing from the well of the Donegal Gaeltacht, where his mother was reared.

Lunny seemed to be everywhere, not just with Planxty and later the Bothy Band and Moving Hearts, but collaborating with Kate Bush, Elvis Costello, Sinéad O’Connor and Kieran Kennedy, who said “the one mainstay in Ireland is folk music ... folk will stay. And although these songs are Irish, they’re also world music. That’s what Dónal made me see.”

[ Andy Irvine pays tribute to Dónal Lunny: ‘The first 18 months of Planxty were the most joyous of my life up to then’Opens in new window ]

Lunny gave his own version of this in New York in 1991 at one of the New Music Seminars, under the title Mixing Culture in a Shrinking World. Adapting the Greek bouzouki to Irish music was one part of this. So too, on a day in 1987, was taking charge of music for “the Connemara Salsa” benefit for Nicaragua, as was composing scores for films or plays.

Lunny’s multiple interactions allowed him to elevate the music of others. He had that intimate feeling for what the Clare fiddler Martin Hayes described as the “carrying” of the music. This was not about straight lines, but curves and, as the Galway accordionist Joe Cooley once remarked, “It’s only the music that brings people to their senses”. This enabled the players to have, in poet Ciaran Carson’s words, a whole room “pulsing like a diaphragm ... floating in on the sound waves that connect the present here-and-now to the present then”. Or else crying through painful laments.

Lunny mostly chose the side stage; the musical considerations were more important than the limelight or material riches. In 1998 he spoke of avoiding “the centre of the stage ... it’s easier to operate not being a star – I think I’m about right where I am.” Right where he was is one of the reasons why Irish folk music today is right where it is, filling venues at home and abroad.