"What's the best thing to come out of Limerick?" asks an old joke in Ireland. "The morning train to Dublin!" is the traditional reply, but that may soon be amended to read "Bill Whelan." Over the last two years, Limerick composer and keyboard player Whelan has gained enough momentum to take him far past Dublin, first to London, and now the U.S., where his Riverdance show played a short run at Radio City Music Hall in New York this spring, with a full tour scheduled to follow later in the year.

In Ireland, he has been propelled from the ranks of somebody familiar only to those few who read liner notes carefully, to a veritable household name. With the astonishing critical and commercial success (both in Ireland and in Britain) of the Riverdance stage show, for which he wrote all the music and lyrics, there can be little doubt that Whelan has earned the title of High King of Irish Music.

What appears to be an overnight success is, in fact, just the latest highpoint in a career that stretches back over two decades, taking in a couple of years of touring and recording with Planxty, five years as composer in residence at the Abbey Theatre's W.B. Yeats Festival, a much acclaimed Gilbert & Sullivan adaptation, several chamber works, settings of modern Irish poets, and two large-scale orchestral works incorporating choirs, drum corps, and traditional musicians. Not to mention production and arranging credits for Paul Brady, Kate Bush, The Dubliners, Hothouse Flowers, Richard Harris, Andy Irvine, Van Morrison, Patrick Street, Tanita Tikaram, and U2.

Riverdance started life as a seven-minute live television performance, broadcast from Dublin to a European viewing audience of over 300 million at the end of April, 1994. The occasion was the often-ridiculed Eurovision Song Contest, the infamous test of any audience's patience as 20-plus dubious representatives of countries from Cyprus to Estonia warble their way through three-minute pop statements of usually questionable merit in the hope of picking up votes from the international judges. Ireland had won the contest in 1993 (as well as in 1992), and so was host to the event in 1994.

Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan's "Rock 'n' Roll Kids," written by Brendan Graham, was the Irish entry that year; Riverdance was merely the intermission entertainment. While Ireland won the contest - making it three in row - "Rock 'n' Roll Kids" was kept from the number one spot in the Irish charts by the "Riverdance" single [RTE BUA CD1], which hogged the top of the pops for 18 weeks and remained in the charts for a full year.

The simple fact was that Riverdance integrated traditional and modern music, choral writing, and spectacular hard-shoe Irish dancing in a way never dreamed of before. The heart of the nation was captured that very first night in April, 1994, young and old alike, and this was to be the beginnings of what became the runaway artistic and commercial success of the decade in Ireland.

Anúna, the highly disciplined and innovative choral group masterminded by Michael McGlynn, was one of the centerpieces of the original Riverdance, but the appearance on stage of the spectacular American Irish dancers Michael Flatley and Jean Butler eclipsed even their brilliance. In recent years Irish dancing had come to be considered stuffy and constricting by many of the younger generation in Ireland, but watching the fireworks between these two changed all that overnight - literally. The stunning choreography, in Flatley's case including touches of bravado and hints of flamenco so foreign to Irish dancing, sent a whole new message out concerning the potential of this form of expression.

The response to Riverdance was so overwhelmingly positive that plans were made to develop it into a full stage show. Whelan decided to fulfill a long-standing ambition, and incorporate music and dance from other cultures "to reflect the Irish diaspora of the great emigrations of the 19th century."

Riverdance opened as a two-hour show at the Point Theatre in Ireland in February, 1995, produced by Moya Doherty and directed by John McColgan. This version, too, was an instant success, rapidly selling out its initial five week run. The choreography, which now incorporated flamenco dancer Maria Pagés, and Moscow's Moiseyev Dance Company, as well as the large dance troupe of hardshoe Irish dancers led by Flatley and Butler, left audiences breathless. Anúna are featured throughout, but sean-nós singer Áine Uí Cheallaigh stole the show with the sublime "Lift the Wings." (Uí Cheallaigh relinquished the singing of this song to Anúna later that year, and returned to her career as a school teacher.)

A simultaneous album release, featuring a new recording of the "main" Riverdance theme, became the first issue on the new Atlantic Records/Celtic Heartbeat label and raced to the top of the charts, while a video of the show debuted at #1 when it was released that April. The show moved to London in June for a four week sold out run at the Apollo Hammersmith, and the video became the fastest selling video of all time in the U.K. August saw a triumphant return to Ireland for a further run, and that sold out, too.

Riverdance makes abundant use of the talents of musicians Davy Spillane, Spanish guitarist Rafael Riqueni, Bulgarian multi-instrumentalist Nikola Parov, and a first-rate supporting team which includes accordionist Máirtín O'Connor and percussionist Noel Eccles.

A special feature of the original show was two gospel numbers, written - like everything else - by Whelan and performed by the Rev. James Bignon's Deliverance Ensemble from Atlanta. These explored the common feelings of dispossession and displacement which Irish and African people felt over the years when they found themselves in the New World.

However, changes were afoot, so to speak. A revamped Riverdance was unveiled that October for a second London stint, and early ticket sales prompted extending the show's run right up to February, 1996. A new album on Celtic Heartbeat was released on both sides of the Atlantic in November, and, like the show itself, it included some significant changes. The American songs were gone, and in their place were four new Irish pieces, though "The Nova Scotia Set" was a nod to the American connection. The end of the show and album had been given a major overhaul, now sporting a more satisfying conclusion, and overall the logical structure was a lot tighter. Of particular note among the new material is "Shivna" (sung in Irish by Anúna), based on an 11th Century text found in the library of the Royal Dublin Society. Translation and a pronunciation guide was provided by the Irish language scholar Gearóid MacEoin. Another new piece, written for American fiddler Eileen Ivers, who had joined the show, is a tour de force called "Homecoming." Most startling of all, however, was the fact that star dancer Michael Flatley was gone from the show, though ironically his taps had been added to several tracks on this new release of the album. The exact circumstances of Flatley's departure, literally on the eve of the show's opening in October, are unclear, and are the subject of an as yet unresolved legal action. Colin Dunne, from Birmingham, the nine-time World Irish Dance Champion, was drafted at short notice to fill the void, dancing many of Flatley's parts as well as creating his own routines. New York-born Jean Butler, whose mother hails from County Mayo and whose background includes acting and dancing with the Chieftains, remained with the show. During the second London run she was plagued with a leg injury, which resulted in Arleen Boyle, Eileen Martin, and others filling her shoes for numerous performances, but she has since rejoined the cast on a full-time basis.

The Bill Whelan story began many years before Riverdance, and a full decade before anybody had heard of him. While still in school in the early 70s, he got to contribute the main title music to the film Bloomfield (renamed The Hero for U.S. release), which starred fellow Limerick citizen Richard Harris. This lead to further work with Harris, and an introduction to his idol Jimmy Webb (the list of dedicatees on the Riverdance album includes Webb).

At the end of the 70s he turned up as an auxiliary Planxty member, having spent the intervening years first completing law school, and then sweating in the trenches doing Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice musicals on endless tours of Ireland. He had also tried his hand at songwriting and arranging. "I got involved in music firstly as a writer, but after an initial small degree of success as a songwriter, began to concentrate more on producing, arranging and working as a session musician," Whelan recalled. "It was during my period as a keyboard player that I first got involved with Planxty. Dónal Lunny and Andy Irvine invited me to play on a Planxty album, and as a result I ended up joining the band and touring and recording with them for two years."

Whelan can be found on the albums The Woman I Loved So Well(1980) and Words and Music (1983). He almost made a dent as a composer at this time, oddly enough in a way which would be echoed many years later on a much grander scale. Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland in 1980 with "What's Another Year?," produced by Whelan, and during the intermission of the ensuing 1981 contest in Ireland, "Timedance" was performed by Planxty supplemented by Nollaig Casey on fiddle and Whelan on keyboards. Whelan and Lunny shared writing credits for two thirds of this mini-suite, which was also released as a 12" single.

"I was also involved in the seminal version of Moving Hearts with Dónal, Christy Moore, and Declan Sinnott, but left after a short while," Whelan revealed. "However, my connection to traditional music had been sealed at this stage and I was to go on to produce albums for Andy Irvine, East Wind, Patrick Street, Stockton's Wing and the Dubliners."

Over the next 10 years, Whelan did extensive work for television, as well as more producing and arranging, including Dublin City's all-star Millenium album in 1988. He cut his orchestral teeth with a piece for the Seán O Ríada celebrations in Dublin in 1987, performed by the Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE) Concert Orchestra. He also got involved in theatre work, and made his mark with a much acclaimed adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore, which proved to be a big hit at London's Old Vic.

Then came the five year long Yeats Festival composer-in-residence appointment at Dublin's prestigious Abbey Theatre. "It was only in 1989 that my writing began to become the center of focus again, and the role of the W.B. Yeats Festival and its director James Flannery was central to this. My connection to the works of William Butler Years and to the directorial style of the festival director James Flannery was enormously influential on my theatrical writing style, to say nothing of its effect in freeing up certain hesitancies I had felt about my own writing. Flannery was very important in reopening my connection to composition."

Deirdre, from 1991, one of 15 Yeats plays for which Whelan wrote original music, included a prototype of the great slow air which was to form such an important part of The Seville Suite the following year. During this period there were numerous shorter works, too, such as The Dance of the Morrigu, performed by The National Symphony Orchestra, and a meditation on a poem by Eavan Boland, written for Ireland's leading classical pianist John O'Conor.

Whelan produced and arranged two albums for Andy Irvine at the end of 1990 and the start of 1991, though neither was released for some time. One was Irvine's solo Rude Awakening [Green Linnet 1114], and the other the East Wind album [Tara 3027]. The latter was a natural extension of ideas which Irvine had been promoting off and on since his own travels to parts east in 1968, a marriage of Irish with Bulgarian and Macedonian music.

Prominent among the numerous guests brought in to consummate this marriage were former Moving Hearts man Davy Spillane (low whistle, uilleann pipes) and Márta Sebestyén (vocals). The resulting album, on which Irvine himself did not sing, was unfocused, but at its best it came across as an Eastern European variation on the Moving Hearts concept. It included pieces in time signatures not normally attempted by Irish musicians, such as 5/16, 7/16, 11/16, and 15/16, all driven along with consummate skill by Whelan on keyboards and Nikola Parov on gadulka, kaval, and gaida.

When East Wind was finally released in the latter half of 1992, it was credited to Irvine and Spillane only. Soon afterwards, in a Dirty Linen interview, Spillane commented, "Basically, I'm just a session musician on that album." In an earlier interview, just after the album's completion, Irvine said that the original idea was to credit it to Sebestyén and the principal players, including Whelan, in the hope that, like the first Patrick Street album, the project might prove such a success that it could sustain a touring and recording unit under the East Wind moniker. While the album sold in respectable quantities, it never took off on the scale hoped for, and the world would have to wait a few more years to hear Whelan and Parov together again, in Riverdance.

Whelan spent 1992 putting together his first large-scale orchestral work, The Seville Suite (Kinsale to La Coruña), which was commissioned by the Irish government as part of Ireland's National Day at Expo '92 in Seville, Spain. For this project, which told in music the story of the flight to Spain of the defeated forces of Red Hugh O'Donnell after the disastrous Battle of Kinsale in 1601, Whelan enlisted the services of Davy Spillane, Máirtín O'Connor and members of the Galician group Milladoiro, as well as the full RTE Concert Orchestra. The resulting album [Tara 3030] included as a bonus a new version of "Timedance," with the original Planxty lineup (minus Christy Moore) reunited.

In June, 1993, the premier performance of another major orchestral work by Whelan, The Spirit of Mayo, debuted at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Introduced by Ireland's dynamic and forward-looking President Mary Robinson, herself from Ballina, County Mayo, this was part of the country's celebration of the 5,000 year anniversary of the Céide Fields, the field pattern systems and megalithic tombs near Ballycastle on the north Mayo coast, which form the most extensive stoneage monument in the world.

The Spirit of Mayo utilized an 85-piece symphony orchestra, Spillane, violinist Máire Breatnach, and soprano Caitríona Walsh, who sang a setting of "Anois Teacht an Earraigh," by the early nineteenth century Mayo folk poet Antoine Raiftéirí. It also used the combined forces of several choirs, including Anúna (200 singers in total) and a battalion of drummers. Apart from one repeat performance in Mayo itself, this impressive work has unfortunately not been heard since, as no recording was ever released.

It's not every day that a musician with a background such as Whelan's turns to orchestral writing, and the evidence points to Whelan being self taught. "If self-taught means the study and observation of other composer's work, many hours spent music copying, working as an apprentice to more experienced orchestrators, and trial and error sessions as a young arranger without the interposition of a trained didact, then yes, I am self-taught," he declared.

In spite of such a prodigious output, and the critical praise he invariably earned for his efforts, man does not live by art alone, and the sad reality is that being a "classical" composer did not, in itself, pay the bills. Production and arranging for artists as diverse as The Dubliners, Van Morrison and Kate Bush had its rewards, but it wasn't regular work. After 20 years of toiling at his chosen profession, Whelan seriously considered throwing in the towel and going back to law. Then came the opportunity which was to change all of that.

"Moya Doherty asked me to write a piece of music for the center of Eurovision 1994," revealed Whelan. "Her brief was to write something which would involve dance. It was unquestionably her idea to involve a large group of hard-shoe Irish dancers. Other than this very important element, she left the structure and content to me. I had been working with Anúna for a few years and wanted very much to have them on board. Like Anúna, the drummers had already appeared in The Spirit of Mayo, and coincidentally, it was at the first performance of this work that Moya saw Michael Flatley and Jean Butler perform - not to my piece, but during the first half of the premiere concert. So Riverdance did not spring out of nowhere, but involved the continuation of a number of ideas and marriages that had been germinating for some time."

"I began to write the full-length Riverdance in October, 1994," Whelan continued. "In the previous July, both Moya and I went to Seville with Michael Flatley to meet with Maria Pagés, whom I very much wanted to be in the show. We had met when she danced the last section of The Seville Suite in 1992 at the Maestanza, in Seville. Maria and Michael spent some hours dancing experimentally together during this visit, and they got on well. We then travelled to Budapest, where my colleague, Nikola Parov (of East Wind), had arranged a meeting with choreographers who were expert in the field of Eastern European dance."

Bearing in mind that the show hit the stage a scant three months later, the question arises, did Whelan compose all of the music from scratch, or did he incorporate some ideas that were already on the drawing board? "From scratch," Whelan said. "But I have since added some new pieces to the show, one of which is a rework of a dance piece I did about eight years ago. It's not on the album, however."

So what is Riverdance about anyway? "There is no storyline in the conventional sense of a narrative. The show deals in Part One with themes which are at the heart of a lot of early music and dance - songs in praise of the earth, sun, fire, the moon and other elemental forces that are common to all cultures. Part One is more purely Celtic in form and content. Part Two tells how the native culture has been forced to emigrate and, by so doing, is exposed to the forms of expression of other cultures, both in dance and music. Finally, there is a homecoming where the influences picked up abroad are integrated.

"Incidentally, I am reading a book by Isabel Fonseca (Bury Me Standing) which is a study of the Eastern European gypsy culture. Much of their music and song is about missing home, and yet, as they are nomads, they can hardly be said to have a home place. Their songs are nostalgic (Greek: Nostos - coming home) and yet they have no home. Interestingly, she speculates that their culture celebrates purely the feeling of nostalgia, which raises some interesting spiritual questions."

One of the more striking features of Riverdance, which is all the more remarkable considering that the show draws so heavily on Irish traditions, is the overt sensuality of much of the dancing. "The Irish have very often separated sex and spirituality as if they were unable to coexist in the one human," said Whelan. "I am strongly of the view that a spirituality without sexuality and sensuality is arid. Sensuality is what much of the work is about."

In time, the show has, of course, attracted its share of criticism. In Ireland, a nation of begrudgers at the best of times, the success of the show has been so total and so quick that there is no shortage of people willing to take a swipe at it. Even old pal Christy Moore has reportedly made some disparaging remarks from the stage at the show's expense. More importantly, Whelan has been unfairly held responsible for a flood of imitators and purveyors of watered-down "Celtic Muzak."

"I am as uncomfortable with this kind of thing as the next man," he said uneasily. "But I equally believe that folk/Celtic music is a big boy now and well able to stand up for itself. I have difficulty with people who appoint themselves as guardians and protectors of any form of artistic expression. There is something that is smug about it, while at the same time infected with a siege mentality that smothers what they claim to protect, and invents a club within which all the members feel more secure. God, wouldn't it be awful if, as a result of hearing Riverdance, people were urged to investigate the piping of Davy Spillane, the lyrical musicianship of Máirtín O'Connor, or the singing of Áine Uí Cheallaigh?

"When I see people take on the condition of custodians, I am often reminded of the character of the Guardian of the Well in Yeats' 'At the Hawk's Well.' This dry, arid, gnarled figure sits by the well for years, guarding it and waiting for it to spring to life. It lives in hope that it will be enriched when finally the well bubbles up and passes on its mystical secrets. However, when the well does in fact spring to life, the guardian is asleep, and manages to miss entirely the enervating powers that the water brings. When he awakes, the well has dried up, and this blinkered unfortunate resumes his patient watch among the sticks and dry leaves."

In between the endless rehearsals and negotiations for the upcoming American shows, Whelan is writing the score for a new Jim Sheridan film, and hopes that his already completed music for Leon Uris' Trinity will also be heard on stage in New York in 1996.

It seems that he can't escape the Eurovision Song Contest connection, having recently written the leadoff single and title track for the just-released debut album Flying Blind by Niamh Kavanagh, whose Irish win in 1993 was what gave rise to the Eurovision being in Ireland in 1994 in the first place. It all comes 'round again.

Return to the back issue page.