Donnacha Dennehy (born 17 August 1970) is an Irish composer and leader of the Crash Ensemble specializing incontemporary classical music. According to musicologistBob 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".[1]
In 1997, Dennehy returned to Dublin and subsequently co-founded theCrash Ensemble, which focuses on the performance and recording of contemporary music. His works for the Crash Ensemble includeJunk Box Fraud,Derailed, andFor 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 inmicrotones and harmonies based on harmonicspectra. His compositionGrá Agus Bás, which was premiered in February 2007, incorporated music from thesean nós tradition and was a collaboration with the Irish vocalistIarla Ó Lionáird.[3] He is a member ofAosdána, Ireland's state-sponsored academy of artists.
NMC Records in London released the first portrait CD devoted to his music,Elastic Harmonic (NMC D133), in June 2007. In the spring of 2011, Nonesuch released an album withGrá Agus Bás and theYeats cycleThat the Night Come.[4] His first opera,The Last Hotel, an 80-minute chamber work with a libretto byEnda 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.[5] A recording (taken live from the Luxembourg performances) was issued in 2019.[6]The Hunger, about theGreat Irish Famine, premiered in June 2016 at a concert performance in Washington DC, and in a staged production in St. Louis and at theBrooklyn Academy of Music, all with the orchestraAlarm Will Sound.[7][8]
Dennehy was a visiting scholar atPrinceton University from 2012 onwards. He served as composer-in-residence for theFort Worth Symphony Orchestra in 2013/14. In the fall of 2014, he joined the faculty of the music department at Princeton University.
