Donnacha Dennehy
Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer and leader of the Crash Ensemble specializing in contemporary classical music. According to musicologist Bob Gilmore, Dennehy's "high profile of his compositions internationally, together with his work as artistic director of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, has distinguished him as one of the best-known voices of his generation of Irish composers".
Career and works
Dennehy was born in Dublin, where he read music at Trinity College where he studied composition with Hormoz Farhat. He continued his studies in music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with support from a Fulbright Scholarship, and earned his master's and doctoral degrees at UIUC. His post-doctoral musical period included a stint at IRCAM, with Gérard Grisey, and studies in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen.In 1997, Dennehy returned to Dublin and subsequently co-founded the Crash Ensemble, which focuses on the performance and recording of contemporary music. His works for the Crash Ensemble include Junk Box Fraud, Derailed, and For Herbert Brun. He later returned to Trinity College Dublin as a lecturer in music. His 2005 work for chorus and orchestra, Hive, displays his developing interest in microtones and harmonies based on harmonic spectra. His composition Grá Agus Bás, which was premiered in February 2007, incorporated music from the sean nós tradition and was a collaboration with the Irish vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird. He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored academy of artists.
NMC Records in London released the first portrait CD devoted to his music, Elastic Harmonic, in June 2007. In the spring of 2011, Nonesuch released an album with Grá Agus Bás and the Yeats cycle That the Night Come. His first opera, The Last Hotel, an 80-minute chamber work with a libretto by Enda Walsh about a woman planning her suicide, received its premiere on 8 August 2015 in Edinburgh, followed by performances in Dublin, London, New York and Luxembourg. A recording was issued in 2019. The Hunger, about the Great Irish Famine, premiered in June 2016 at a concert performance in Washington DC, and in a staged production in St. Louis and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, all with the orchestra Alarm Will Sound.
Dennehy was a visiting scholar at Princeton University from 2012 onwards. He served as composer-in-residence for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in 2013/14. In the fall of 2014, he joined the faculty of the music department at Princeton University.
He wrote Hard Landing about the "Miracle on the Hudson". It was commissioned by the BBC, first performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales on 6 February 2025, and had its radio premiere on BBC Radio 3 on 29 March 2025.
Compositions
Orchestra / chamber orchestra
Junk Box Fraud The Vandal O Elastic Harmonic ; violin and orchestraHive ; voices and orchestraAisling Gheal ; voice and chamber orchestraGrá agus Bás ; voice and chamber orchestraCrane That the Night Come ; soprano and chamber orchestraIf he died, what then ; soprano and chamber orchestraDisposable Dissonance The Hunger ; soprano and chamber orchestraThree Sean Nós Settings ; voice and orchestraDirty Light Turn- Memoria ; symphony orchestra
- ''Hard Landing''
Small ensemble with voice
Two Yeats Songs ; soprano and fluteHinterlands ; two female voices and backing trackTo Herbert Brun ; voice, saxophone, trombone, double bass, and live electronicsThe Weathering ; soprano, recorder, percussion, violin, and videoSwift's Epitaph ; countertenor and percussionInstrumental ensemble
Pluck, Stroke, and Hammer ; piano quintetThe Traces of a Revolutionary Song A Game for Gentlemen Played by Thugs Severance Ecstasis, full stop ; string quartet and backing trackCounting ; string quartet and backing trackDerailed Composition for percussion, loops, blips and flesh ; percussion sextetGlamour Sleeper Streetwalker The Pale ; saxophone quartet and percussion sextetThe Blotting Table Manners ; percussion quartetMild, Medium-Lasting, Artificial Happiness ; saxophone quartet or any quartet of like-sounding instrumentsTilt ; electric guitar quartetBulb ; piano trioPushpulling ; string quartetFold STAMP ; string quartetAs An Nós An Irish Process Céad Slán ; string quartet and backing trackSolo/electroacoustic
Work for Organ GUBU ; tapeBegobs I–IV ; pianoMetropolis Mutabilis ; tape and optional video Voitures ; oboe and tapeCurves ; amplified harp and tapeSwerve ; flute and tapeFAT ; flute and tapeMad, Avid, Sad ; organpAt ; piano and tapeinterlands ; two female voices and tapePADDY ; percussionBRAT ; recorder and tape North Strand ; pianoNorth Circular ; pianoReservoir ; pianoStainless Staining ; piano and backing trackOverstrung ; violin and backing trackMisterman ; music for a play by Enda WalshOpen ensemble
Blips and Static ; multiple boomboxesFlashbulb ; three melody instruments and one struck instrumentA Fatal Optimist ; for any instrumentationOpera
The Last Hotel The Hunger The Second Violinist- ''The First Child''