Moya Brennan, the eldest of nine children from a Gaelic-speaking rural Irish family who went on to lead a family band that brought Gaelic to the global pop charts, died on April 13 at her home in Donegal, the county where she grew up. She was 73.
Her band, Clannad, announced the death on social media. In recent years, Ms. Brennan had discussed having pulmonary fibrosis.
The band was where Ms. Brennan’s sister Enya, probably Ireland’s most famous solo act, got her start. It also featured a rotating cast of Ms. Brennan’s siblings and uncles. Her uncles Noel and Padraig Duggan provided rhythm, playing mainly guitars, and her brothers Pol and Ciaran Brennan composed, in addition to playing guitar, mandolin, flute, bass and piano.
Moya played the harp. But it was her voice — breathy, with a delicate vibrato yet also a deep resonance — that provided Clannad with its signature sound.
Even as the band’s music combined influences of jazz, rock and electronica, there was something ancient and wistful in Ms. Brennan’s singing that kept a folkloric quality in its songs.
In 1979, The New York Times credited her with having “one of the purest and most expressive soprano voices in folk and popular music.” About a decade later, the Times music critic Stephen Holden called her “a vocalist whose reflective, distanced lyricism belongs to the same tradition of sweet balladry that includes Jean Redpath, Judy Collins and the late Sandy Denny.”
The band’s biggest successes came through soundtracks. In Britain, the song “Theme From Harry’s Game,” made for a three-part TV drama, reached No. 5 on the singles chart in 1982. The British music magazine Prog later described it as “the first hit single sung in Irish.”
In the United States, Clannad contributed to the soundtracks of two 1992 movies, “Patriot Games” and “The Last of the Mohicans.” The next year Volkswagen used “Theme From Harry’s Game” in a Passat ad — and was inundated with calls about where the music came from. Clannad’s latest American album, “Anam,” reached the Billboard charts, and the cover began featuring stickers mentioning the ad.
Initially, not all Irish listeners were fans. Some associated Gaelic with backwardness; others felt it was some kind of sacrilege to do synth orchestrations of primordial folk songs.
Writing in The Times in 1995, the music journalist David Browne charged Clannad with producing “watered-down pop” resembling nothing so much as “musical Irish oatmeal.”
But Ms. Brennan gradually became known as “the first lady of Celtic music,” a label she proudly embraced. In 2023, she was named Donegal’s person of the year.
She was born Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin on Aug. 4, 1952, in Dublin. She grew up in Gweedore, an Irish-speaking district of Donegal. Her mother, Máire (Ní Dhúgáin) Uí Bhraonáin, was a music teacher. Her father, Leo, an accordion player, led a family band of his own that he had inherited from his father.
The children spoke Gaelic at home, and though Ms. Brennan often sang in English, she claimed as an adult that she could not count past 10 in the language. Still, she later changed the spelling of her name to its English transliteration.
When she was about 15, her father bought a pub that he renamed Leo’s Tavern in a Donegal village called Meenaleck. He made it into a familial music venue.
“I was just a wee girl getting a chance to do Irish dancing and singing onstage with my daddy,” Ms. Brennan told The Irish Independent in 2005. “Nobody knew anything about stage fright.”
Just like another Irish band that went global, U2 — whose pivotal early success came in winning a contest in the Irish city of Limerick — Clannad was launched by winning a competition in a local festival.
In 1970, a police sergeant who took his family to Leo’s Tavern every Sunday told the Brennan children to enter a folk festival at Letterkenny, a local market town.
The new family band won the competition. Its prize was the chance to make a record. The band members argued with the label, insisting they be allowed to sing in the language they had grown up speaking.
The band is generally seen as having achieved its mature sound in its seventh album, “Magical Ring” (1983). Around the same time, Enya, the youngest band member by nine years, joined. She soon went solo — and took Clannad’s producer and manager, Nicky Ryan, with her.
“There was a big clash,” Enya told the American music journalist Michael Azerrad in 1989. “I liked being more independent and found I was somebody in the background with them. I found I would never be a full member of the group.”
Enya went on to sell tens of millions of records and become Ireland’s richest woman.
Early on, there was a hint of ambivalence in Ms. Brennan’s comments about Enya’s popularity, particularly on the subject of whether she had been inspired by Clannad’s unique sound.
“She used it for a while, but she doesn’t need to now because she feels her success is properly her own” Ms. Brennan told The Irish Independent in 1996. “I am absolutely delighted for her.”
In recent years, Enya, who does not have children, spoke happily about hosting her nieces and nephews at her Irish castle.
Ms. Brennan’s major struggles were not with her sister but rather with her own past, as she described in “The Other Side of the Rainbow,” her 2000 memoir.
On a very early tour with Clannad in 1971, playing a festival in France, she had a whirlwind affair with a French musician. But he quickly lost interest — and she discovered that she was pregnant. While still a teenager, Ms. Brennan had an abortion.
“I thought I could get on with my life,” she told The Sunday Independent in 2003. “Later, I even imagined I’d recovered from it, but I hadn’t. In actual fact, I’d started to abuse myself with drink and drugs.”
She realized later, she continued, “There was self-loathing in my subconscious, without me realizing it — a feeling that I had totally lost respect for myself by having that abortion.”
Her relationship with Pat Farrell, a blues guitarist, ended in divorce. In later years, she described the 1980s as a period of wildness and excess. She became pregnant out of wedlock again and looked forward to having the baby. Then a miscarriage caused her to spiral.
She recovered a sense of stability after finding a prayer book that her grandmother had given her. She started a relationship with Tim Jarvis, a photographer and an observant Christian. They decided to remain celibate until their marriage, in the early 1990s.
Ms. Brennan, then approaching her 40s, feared she would not have children of her own. Instead, she gave birth to a daughter, Aisling, and a son, Paul, in quick succession.
A full list of her survivors was not immediately available.
“The quality of the joy you feel is determined by the sorrow you have felt,” she told The Sunday Independent. “That’s very Irish. This double edge of sorrow and joy runs through all our songs.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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