Seóirse Bodley (pronounced [ˈʃoːɾˠʃə]; 4 April 1933 – 17 November 2023) was an Irish composer and associate professor of music at University College Dublin (UCD).
While he was still at school, Bodley received his first lessons in composition privately from the Dublin-based German choral conductor Hans Waldemar Rosen (1904–1994), which continued, on and off, until 1956.
An important element in his musical education was the twice-weekly free concerts given by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra in the Phoenix Hall, Dame Court, where he had the opportunity to hear leading Irish and international performers and conductors presenting both classics and modern repertory.
From 1957 to 1959 he studied composition (with Johann Nepomuk David) and conducting at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, and a year later he obtained a Doctorate in Music from UCD.
[5] He returned to Germany several times in the early 1960s to participate in courses at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, which significantly expanded his knowledge of avant-garde techniques.
[11] a wide range of instrumental and vocal music, including the orchestral piece A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland (1975), four string quartets, and several large song cycles.
[13] The first encompasses the early years until 1961 when influences of Paul Hindemith and of his Stuttgart teacher J. N. David were audible in works like his Music for Strings, the Violin Sonata (1959) or the Symphony No.
1 (1959), when he arranged numerous Irish traditional tunes for choir and for orchestra, and when he also wrote a number of songs to the baritone voice of Tomás Ó Súilleabháin.
Cox noted "The instrumental writing is notably more experimental than in Bodley's previous orchestral works, with its frequent recourse to colouristic string effects.
This is obvious in works like The Narrow Road to the Deep North for two pianos (1972; one-piano version, 1977), the orchestral score A Small White Cloud Drifts over Ireland (1975), and the 40-minute song cycle A Girl (1978) to words by Brendan Kennelly.
In large-scale works such as his Symphonies Nos 4 and 5 (both completed in 1991), the "public" commissions partly led to a neo-Romantic style with very little resemblance to earlier phases in Bodley's output.
Probably Bodley's most widely heard work is his orchestral arrangement of the traditional Irish tune "The Palatine's Daughter", which was used as the theme music for RTÉ's rural drama series The Riordans.