Donnacha Dennehy

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Donnacha Dennehy is a composer, born in Dublin in 1970. He gained his secondary education in Templeogue College, Dublin. He studied Music at Trinity College, Dublin and later pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Upon returning to Dublin he founded the Crash Ensemble in 1997, an ensemble of young players performing minimalist music and pieces incorporating electronics and multimedia.

His first work for the group, Junk Box Fraud, was a breakthrough in his output and marked a new style in Irish contemporary music. Subsequent works for the ensemble have included Derailed, For Herbert Brun and most recently Grá Agus Bás (premiered in February 2007), the latter featuring the Irish vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird and incorporating music from the sean nós tradition. These works have established his reputation as one of the leading Irish composers of his generation.

Dennehy's music could be classified as post-minimalist and features energetic rhythms, hard-edged sounds (both acoustic and electronic) and an infectious sense of melody. Major works include pAt for piano and tape, the ensemble works Glamour Sleeper and Streetwalker and, for orchestra, The Vandal, O , the violin concerto Elastic Harmonic and, most recently, Crane, commissioned by RTÉ and premiered in September 2009. His 2005 work for chorus and orchestra, Hive, displays his developing interest in microtones and harmonies based on harmonic spectra, an interest that resurfaces in his piano trio Bulb, Stainless Staining for piano and tape, and other works.

His music has been called "viscerally thrilling" (New York Times), "most spectacular" (De Volkskrant, Amsterdam), "gripping" (Journal of Music in Ireland), and a "love-affair with the very anatomy of sound" (Times, London). NMC Records in London released the first portrait CD devoted to his music, Elastic Harmonic (NMC D133), in June 2007.^[1]

He teaches composition at Trinity College, Dublin and is a member of Aosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored academy of artists.

In the spring of 2011, Nonesuch released his song cycle That the Night Comes with the American soprano Dawn Upshaw^[2].

Discography

• Elastic Harmonic. NMC, 2007 (includes Glamour Sleeper; Paddy; Junk Box Fraud; Elastic Harmonic, pAt, Streetwalker )

Notes

1. ^ "WorldCat: Elastic harmonic". http://www.worldcat.org/title/elastic-harmonic/oclc/173315095. 
2. ^ http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2011/04/they_think_this_is_the_next_go.html

External links

• DonnachaDennehy.com
• MySpace
• New York Times review

Persondata
Name	Dennehy, Donnacha
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Date of birth	1970
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