Editorials

The Irish Times view on the death of Seán Keane: a void left in traditional music

His playing was always in service to the tunes, and the players who went before him

Seán Keane in The National Concert Hall in October 2005 before a concert with The Chieftains ( Photo: The Irish Times)

Fri May 12 2023 - 20:00

Seán Keane was a Dublin-born fiddle player who married an enviable technical virtuosity with a deeply soulful and at times, highly explosive playing style. His sudden and unexpected passing this week, at the age of 76, leaves a void in traditional music.

Both of his parents were fine fiddle players, hailing from Longford and Clare. He grew up listening to different musical accents, which must have influenced the development of his own musical ear. Most musicians favour one regional style of playing, but Seán was fluent in a remarkable range of musical dialects.

He had a particular affinity for the uilleann pipes, and loved how pipers could bend notes in a manner that was akin to how sean nós singers would inhabit a song. The combination of pipes and fiddle created a sound that was particularly appealing to Seán, and it was this that marked his strong bond with Willie Clancy, Séamus Ennis, and most tellingly, Paddy Molony.

Seán Keane’s intuitive relationship with his fiddle marked him apart from his earliest days at the Pipers Club in Dublin, where he, along with his accordion-playing brother James, formed lifelong musical friendships, and from where he found his first musical bandmates in the Castle Céilí Band. Later, he joined Ceoltóirí Chualann and The Chieftains, where he was given licence to devote a lifetime to making music: a dream come true for a man who openly admitted to being obsessed with playing the fiddle – and nothing else.

READ MORE

Unprecedented musical success ensued, but never at a cost to his music. His firmly rooted sense of identity resulted in the release of three seminal solo albums along with a widely revered album with Matt Molloy.

His playing was always in service to the tunes, and the players who went before him. Yet he embraced the countless collaborations that Paddy Molony forged with The Chieftains, in the full knowledge that a tradition thrives by exploring new horizons, not by retreating into entrenched certainties. Proof positive that with firm roots, the sky was his only limit.

LATEST STORIES