The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin absolutely stun in their choral rendition of Mo Ghille Mear (Gaelic for “My Gallant Hero”).
To hear it once is to be arrested and changed: the notable melancholy paired with the characteristic Irish lilting and soaring melody enters the depths of the soul and mind, filling it with song, hope, mystery, and life.
Listen:
I have some Irish background, which inspired my own Irish Ballad. But upon hearing this song for the first time, my heart took flight as if inside of a deep ancestral memory of my truest identity.
That is the power of a great folk song—one we have now mostly overshadowed with market-driven pop.
(Those who read here often know I make a sharp distinction between what is simply popular and what is a simulacrum of human emotion for financial gain and fame. Popularity is not the problem; contriving for it such that the artistic vocation is undercut is.)
The song has roots in a traditional Irish melody and lyrics of the 18th century referring to the aftermath of a complicated uprising, but its most recent form was adapted into this form 1970 by Seán Clárach Mac—proving that a great, true folk song is not a thing of the past, but can be composed and spread even now. This exact arrangement was completed prior to recording by Desmond Earley.
The lyrics are captivating but the song is best experienced prior to premature translation, so I will not include them here now. But it is athe lament of a widow, rejoicing in the greatness of her “lad” and her profound grief at his leaving.
Most interesting is the foundational statement a song like this makes: we have real history, and who we are is connected to who we’ve been. Melodies, language, food, ways of being and celebrating and grieving—all of this contributes to us exactly as we find ourselves now.
We come from somewhere, and it matters. There is richness of life that can only be found in the layered history that comes together in sincere cultural expressions.
This is precisely why the reduction of so much of our current music landscape is so devastating: the very medium that ought to proliferate our hard-won sense of identity, instill a love for our ancestors in all of their complexity, and give us a deep sense of belonging and meaning instead infects us with the myopia of the thin experience of disconnected modern life with its shallow emotion, narcissism, and excessive concern with the market.
Mo Ghille Mear does not lead us astray but leads us into the joyful and sober truth of being human, calling on us to sing, dance, grieve, and live, as has been the need of every human heart since the dawn of time.
In one of my Art Episodes, I go into this need for cultural richness in greater detail because I believe it to be supremely important. Although the full set of Episodes is part of an arts course behind a paywall, I wanted to share this one with you today.
This particular rendition, too, makes a perfect case for the value of preserving the classical arts, especially in the form of structured choral singing—one of my first great loves as a singer and writer, forming the foundation for my whole life as an artist. With 20 million listens on this song, it’s obvious the hunger for real things persists despite the cult of distraction, hedonism, and falsity all around us.
Real art cuts through this noise and releases the heart into its natural state. I am grateful to the Choral Scholars of University College Dublin for this beautiful gift to the world.
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