Peter Moran is a composer and music director whose interests include microtones and tuning systems, postcard miniatures, sacred choral writing and the mystical in music.
He studied music at University College Dublin and the University of York, UK. His teachers have included Seóirse Bodley, Michael Finnissy, Nicola LeFanu, William Brooks and Roger Marsh.
He has held artistic residencies with the Creative Futures Academy in Dublin, the soundSCAPE Contemporary Music Festival in Italy, and the Frédéric Chopin Conservatoire in Paris. Awards include first prize at the Carl von Ossietzky Composition Competition in Germany, and Ireland's Walter Beckett Cup for Original Song. He has been shortlisted for the Sean O'Riada Composition Prize, the Mauricio Kagel Composition Prize, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards from Irish Arts Council, as well as the Bill Whelan International Music Bursary and the Kildare Per Cent for Arts Commission.
His music has been performed in concerts and festivals across Europe, America, Canada, Indonesia and Japan, by leading artists including Isabelle O'Connell, Benjamin Dwyer, Elizabeth Hilliard, Beth McNinch, Cathal Roche, Nick Roth, the Crash Ensemble, the Fidelio Trio, Chamber Choir Ireland, Trio Scordatura, Black Hair, Negativ Zed, and the award-winning vocal trio Juice. His work is released on Ergodos Records and Farpoint Recordings.
Peter is the artistic director of Ireland's National Concert Hall Gamelan Orchestra, which he founded in 2014 when he acquired for the NCH a complete double gamelan as a gift from His Royal Highness the Sultan of Yogyakarta in Java. Since then, his ensembles have performed traditional and contemporary gamelan music across Ireland, the UK and Indonesia.
He has a long track record in music education at all levels from primary schools to universities across Ireland, the UK and France. In 2008 the New Music Alive! series of workbooks was commissioned by the CMC and Dublin City Council to bring composition and contemporary music to primary schools. He was Musical Director of COMA Yorkshire in England from 2007-11, and the Music Educators Orchestra in Dublin from 2011-2016. Many of his works are written especially with children and amateur musicians in mind, and he has been commissioned by Gill & MacMillan Publishers to compose a collection of educational songs. From 2018-2020 he worked with the Dublin Simon Community delivering songwriting workshops for Dublin's homeless community, funded by Dublin City Council, and he was Musician-in-Residence with Fingal County Council 2019-2022. He has taught composition, ethnomusicology and community music in universities in Ireland and England, and he was secretary of the Association of Irish Composers from 2012-2015.
Peter is currently Assistant Professor in Composition and Performance at UCD where he teaches composition, songwriting and gamelan music.
“There were these flutes carved from animal bones found to be over thirty thousand years old. Even the wheel was only invented around six thousand years ago - that’s one thought that keeps me going.”