John Kinsella (composer)

He died in Dublin on 9 November 2021, at the age of 89.

Kinsella received the Marten Toonder Award in 1979 and became a founder member of Aosdána in 1981. He succeeded Victory as Head of Music in RTÉ in 1983, but took early retirement in 1988 (the year he completed his Symphony No. 2) to devote himself fully to composition. As part of an arrangement made with RTÉ on his retirement the station undertook to commission a series of large-scale orchestral works from him.

Kinsella's music until about 1977 was strongly influenced by the contemporary European avant-garde, mainly serialism. Later, in De Barra's words (2013), "(t)he idiom Kinsella evolved […] seeks to reclaim from the twelve-tone series the structuring force of tonal attraction. He organises and manipulates the row so that fundamental pitches released from it can function as substitutes for traditional tonal centres."

In 1968, he was appointed senior assistant in the music department of RTÉ. As he found himself growing increasingly disillusioned with the avant-garde his attitude to his own work began to change: he came to question the artistic validity of much of what he had written. After completing his String Quartet No. 3 (1977) he stopped composing for 18 months. When Kinsella resumed composition it was with a resolve to find his own distinctive creative voice regardless of current fashions. The first work he composed in this new spirit of independence was The Wayfarer: Rhapsody on a Poem of P.H. Pearse (1979), commissioned for the centenary of Pearse's birth.

Kinsella was born in Dublin, Irish Free State, the younger brother of the poet and editor Thomas Kinsella. He studied viola at the College of Music (now the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama) in Dublin and took private composition lessons with Éamonn Ó Gallchobhair for a brief period. He developed an early interest in serialism and began to explore many of the techniques evolved by the contemporary European avant-garde. Supported by Gerard Victory and the conductor Hans Waldemar Rosen he had a number of works accepted for performance by RTÉ ensembles, including his first two string quartets (1960, 1968), a chamber concerto (1964), Montage (1965) for soprano and chamber ensemble, Two Pieces for String Orchestra (1965), and Montage II (1970) for orchestra. This group of works culminated in A Selected Life (1973), a large-scale composition based on verses written in memory of the recently deceased Seán Ó Riada by his brother Thomas.

John Kinsella (8 April 1932 – 9 November 2021) was an Irish composer and the country's most prolific symphonist during the twentieth century.