My father was a lifetime member of ACDA (the American Choral Directors Association), and despite his passing several years ago, I’ve continued to receive monthly copies of their flagship publication, The Choral Journal. Even though I am not a choral director, I find it a calming connection to my dad’s interests, in a way, and sometimes I learn something new.

For example, I recently read an article in the August issue of “The Choral Journal” about the problems and possibilities of Irish choral music. The article largely lays out the argument that Irish choral music is sparse due to the non-indigenous nature of “native” choral music in Ireland. This is partly due to Irish music’s historical development of ornamental solo melodies coupled more with unison responses; however, subsequent development is complicated by the cultural implications of British colonialism and the suppression of the Irish language, and the long polarizing battle over religious preferences. That many Irish themes in choral music are largely the work of British composers is unique to this environment.

Within the article, the author identifies that there are a small number of Irish-born composers that deserve more mention in the history of Irish music composition, and in particular, choral composition. One of these – Rhoda Coghill – is who I want to feature in this “Poet in Mind.”

Rhoda Coghill was born in Dublin on October 14,1903. She was the youngest of eight children. Her father was a Scotsman who worked as a printer, and her mother was a Dublin native. Rhoda displayed musical ambition at an early age, beginning piano lessons at the age of eight. She was talented and considered a prodigy. By the time she was 22, she had amassed twenty-one prizes at the Feis Ceoil [fesh-k’yole], an Irish classical music festival to encourage native Irish performers and composers.

Over her lifetime she was a sought-after soloist and accompanist and served as the primary accompanist for Radio Eireann. She was self-taught as a composer, composing piano pieces, selections for voice and piano, and arrangements of Irish folk songs. Arguably, her best-known work was composed when she was twenty years of age in 1923. It was a rhapsody for Tenor, choir, and orchestra, entitled “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The work uses text from the poem by Walt Whitman. Coghill was a student at Trinity College, Dublin at the time, and being just after the conclusion of the Irish civil war, the work was unable to be performed due to inadequate orchestral resources. The work wasn’t fully performed live until 1990.

As mentioned previously, Coghill composed a number of original pieces based on Irish poetry. She specifically used several George Russell and Padraic Colum poems. Two examples are A Ballad Maker, by Padraic Colum and Refuge, by George Russell. Her poetic tendencies in composition fell toward the romantic and beauty in nature. Her attempts to be taken seriously as a composer were met with a certain ambivalence typical of the period towards women. She had conquered music as a performer and held a respected position as accompanist for the state radio; however, acknowledge of her compositional successes were not to come in her lifetime.

Coghill began writing poetry in the 1940s. She only published two small poetry collections in her lifetime: The Bright Hillside (1948) and Time is a Squirrel (1956) and, sadly, both are out of print. I’ve only been able to find excerpts that were used in the references. She wrote from a musician’s point of view, with phrasing and thematic elements that are expressed in rhythm. Her work was praised as a new voice at the time of publication. Several of her poems are gendered female and express the stark societal expectations of Irish women during the early 20th century: forced into marriage with older, more financially secure men, having very little control over their destiny, and the sense of duty carried. Some reviewers have speculated that her poems were a reaction to her dismay at the lack of recognition for her musical compositions.

With a gull’s beak I cry,
And mount through strong resistance.
My wingspan beats the sky,
Across the high distance,

Circling about your place,
Wheeling to cover your bed
With the curve of space
And the airs overhead;

To keep you, to delay
Spirit in one dear shape;
But spirit will not stay
When it has planned escape,

And life at last will leave
This, and all bodies dead
Those who remain to grieve,
The world they habited.

From “The Young Bride’s Dream.” In “The Bright Hillside”, Rhoda Coghill

Another poem excerpt appears to lament the loss of inspiration, and the hope of finding it elsewhere… perhaps in poetry.

…I’ll find a fruit upon another tree,
One day, so full of juice that I’ll be sucking
Until my very lips drip poetry
Coghill, ‘Lamenting a Sterile Muse’, The Bright Hillside, 1948

I hope to one day find a copy of either of these collections. I am grateful to have happened upon this writer and musician.

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Boushel, Kevin, Irish Choral Music: Problems and Possibilities, Choral Journal, August 2024, Vol 63, No. 1, pp 6 – 20
Watson, Laura, Epitaph for a Musician: Rhoda Coghill as Pianist, Composer and Poet, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 11 (2015–16), p. 3
Schreibman, Susan, Irish Women Poets 1929-1959 Some Foremothers, Colby Quarterly, Vol. 37, Issue. 4 [2001], Article 4