Paul Scully is an Irish composer and arts manager. He was the Contemporary Music Centre’s Emerging composer for 2022–2023. Scully’s work is multidisciplinary, utilising both acoustic and electronic instruments, and combines performance art with theatrical elements to produce work that can be humorous, chaotic, and ambitious. Much of his work is site-specific and considers the full gamut of an audiences’ experience.
His recent works Will we Give it a Bash? and Everything’s Left That’s Worth Defence – both premiered in 2022 – seek to subvert the assumptions of the audience through playful means. Often Scully’s subversive work attempts to exist on the boundaries of dialogue rather than within and can therefore be ever-evolving depending on the context in which it is performed.
His works Line of Sight (2020) and Virtual Reality Therapy (2020) are concerned with the postdigital, examining the interplay between the digital and the physical worlds. In these works, performers are asked to explore, adapt, and juggle with demanding physical and digital spaces that are created for the piece. Scully uses speech and language in his music as well as other extra-musical elements, which he describes
himself as ‘expanded composition’. That is, pertaining to an extension or expansion of composition rather than a transposition of music composition into another field.
He studied at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 2016 with a BA (Hons.) in Music. In 2021 he graduated from IADT with a PGDip in Cultural Event Management (with distinction).
He is the general manager of the experimental music ensemble Kirkos and runs their venue and artist space, Unit 44, in Stoneybatter, Dublin. www.kirkosensemble.com
He is currently thinking about: carnivalesque and dialogue (Bakhtin), ‘potential music’, expanded composition, turning compositions into video pieces and/or installations, and running faster than he has ever ran before.
