BIO
Image by George Hutton
Michael has produced and recorded nineteen albums for ANÚNA and M’ANAM. ANÚNA (1993), Celtic Origins (2007) and Christmas Memories (2008) have featured in the US Billboard Charts. Deep Dead Blue (1999) was nominated for a Classical Brit Award and went top five in the UK Classical Charts. In February 2017 he composed a score for and co-directed, with Japanese National Treasure Gensho Umewaka, a collaborative Noh Theatre/ANÚNA performance entitled Takahime at Orchard Hall, Tokyo (see below)
His extensive musical output includes a number of choral pieces that have entered the standard repertoire of choirs all over the world. Michael’s musical language fuses modality, alternating time signatures and medieval tonal colours in a unique fashion that is instantly recognisable as his work. While he is deeply passionate about creating music in the Irish language his music is expansive, spanning genres, languages and exploring the links between film making and musical creativity.
In 2017 Michael was the recipient of the University College Dublin Alumni Award in Arts/Humanities and was visiting Eminent Scholar at Florida Atlantic University (2011-2013). In 2019 he became part of the UCD Creative Fellows. He was Artistic Director of the Tampere Vocal Festival (2021) where he curated and created a series of ground-breaking films about vocal music.
In 2022 he was invited to give a presentation on the genesis of his compositions at the Nordic Choral Directors Conference in Reykjavík, and his film “Mutability and Transcendence” was premiered at the World Symposium on Choral Music 2023 in Istanbul. He was also invited to present at the 2015 Amercian Choral Directors National Conference in Salt Lake City USA in 2015.
Takahime (2017)
The making of Maalaulu (2021)
M’ANAM : Gunnarshólmi (2017)
30th Anniversary of The Celtic Mass (1991)
Michael’s music has been commissioned, recorded and performed by ensembles that include Chanticleer, the BBC Singers, Rajaton, Voces8, Apollo5, the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, Grammy-winning US ensembles Conspirare and the Phoenix Chorale. These include "Amhrán na Gaoithe" for Chanticleer and "O pia virgo" for New York Polyphony which appears on their Grammy nominated CD Sing Thee Nowell. In 2019 Kansas City Chorale released an entire CD dedicated to Michael’s compositions entitled Artifacts : The Music of Michael McGlynn which won a Grammy Award for Production in 2020.
He has written songs in many genres, collaborating with The Wiggles, Elvis Costello and with country music legend Rodney Crowell whose acclaimed 2017 album Close Ties includes a song written with Michael and features Crowell duetting with Sheryl Crow. In 2023 the Platinum/Nintendo video game Bayonetta Origins was released with the title song featuring a lyric composed by him to a melody by Hitomi Kurokawa and sung by his daughter Lauren McGlynn.
As a tenor soloist Michael specialised in early music repertoire and in that capacity shared a stage with Jeff Buckley at Elvis Costello’s Meltdown curatorship in London. He has also featured on a top twenty single in Ireland, duetting with Jerry Fish on the track "True Friends".
Education WORK
See HERE for information about the ANÚNA Education Programme
Film MAKING
See a comprehensive selection of Michael’s features HERE
He has also created shorts and promotional films for M’ANAM, ANÚNA, Wexford Opera Festival and his short films “Shadows of the Lowlands” and “Dreams of the Past, Memories of My Soul” were used to promote the release of the video games Xenoblade II (Nintendo 2018) and Chrono Cross : The Radical Dreamers Edition (Square Enix 2022).
He currently lives in Ireland, bouncing between Donegal and Dublin and is a year-round sea swimmer and occasional surfer.