Murrough Connolly is a composer and guitarist from Tralee, Co Kerry. During his B.Mus studies at MTU Cork School of Music, he experienced a traumatic wrist injury and turned from performance to composition as a means of creating music. With a newfound purpose, he pursued an M.Mus in Composition at the University of Manchester and began to develop a unique style which infused his innate love for jazz with contemporary compositional techniques. Murrough is currently in his final year of a PhD in Composition at Manchester (supervised by Prof. Camden Reeves). Jazz and blues idioms feature strongly in his work, which seeks to explore the concept of harmonic colour and challenge conventional harmonic practices. Several of his recent compositions have been inspired by the connection between visual colours and harmonic colour. His current work strives to reveal a rich harmonic sound-world by combining two mutually exclusive musical phenomena: twelve-tone equal temperment and the overtone series.
Murrough’s music has been performed by outstanding performers and ensembles across the UK and Ireland, including: Psappha Ensemble, Quatuor Danel, Katherine Hunka, Trio Atem and The Irish Guitar Quartet. These performances have resulted in exciting commissions to compose for the SCS Killaloe Music Festival, the UCC Singers and The Kerry School of Music. More recently, Murrough composed a solo piano piece (Quiver) for Ben Powell as part of Psappha Ensemble’s Composing for Piano Scheme 2022. In January 2023, Quiver featured in the final of Festival Musical Durtal’s International Piano Composition Competition. He was also selected for the 2022 Peter Reynolds Composer Studio, a one-week composer residency run by the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, where he worked with the award-winning Carducci Quartet and Grammy-nominated Sandbox Percussion.
