Donnacha Dennehy

Donnacha Dennehy’s music often pulls between the poetic and the structural: he is drawn to obsessive processes, and nearly always breaks them. The meeting of words and music, and the sean-nós (old style) singing tradition, have pulled at him since childhood. After studying abroad, principally at the University of Illinois, he returned to Ireland and founded Crash Ensemble in 1997. He joined the music faculty at Princeton University in 2014 and lives in the United States.

Tessellatum (2017) was written for violist Nadia Sirota and viol player Liam Byrne, who recorded it at Greenhouse Studios. The 38-minute piece, in three continuous sections, is scored for solo viola, three “ghost” violas and eleven microtonally tuned viols, all fifteen parts played by Sirota and Byrne. Its harmonies move between tuning systems made by people and those found in natural resonance. Nadia Sirota has often performed it alongside a specially commissioned film by Steven Mertens. Dennehy has since arranged it for other ensembles, including a 2020 version for string orchestra of modern instruments. His As An Nos, written for Crash Ensemble, is on the ensemble’s Bedroom Community album Ghosts (2017), alongside music by Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson.

His music has been commissioned by performers including Alarm Will Sound, Augustin Hadelich, Dawn Upshaw, Kronos Quartet and Third Coast Percussion. With the writer and director Enda Walsh he completed a trilogy of operas: The Last Hotel (2015), The Second Violinist (2017) and The First Child (2021). The Hunger, a docu-cantata about Ireland’s Great Famine for Alarm Will Sound, was released by Nonesuch in 2019, and Land of Winter, also with Alarm Will Sound, won the 2026 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. In August 2026 Nonesuch released Limina, premiere recordings of his piano concerto Limina, with pianist Eliza McCarthy, and his Violin Concerto, with violinist Stephen Waarts. In 2021 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His music is published by G. Schirmer.