Winners announced for the West Cork Chamber Music Festival / Contemporary Music Centre Composition Competition 2014
| Works by composers Patrick Connolly, Seán Doherty, Christopher McAteer and Amy Rooney have been selected for performance during the festival, which runs from 27 June to 5 July.
The works are Extracts of music from the room next door by Patrick Connolly, for Arche by Seán Doherty, Christopher McAteer’s Intaglio, and Foreground Background by Amy Rooney. As well as being performed at the festival, the works will also be presented at the Festival’s Young Composers Forum, directed by Deirdre Gribbin, on Saturday 28 June. Each composer will also receive a bursary of €500. Running in partnership with the CMC, the West Cork Chamber Music Festival has held a competition for young Irish composers for the last five years. Each year, works for chamber ensembles have been selected to be performed in concert during the Festival and as part of the Festival’s public workshop programme. The competition has been a valuable opportunity for young composers to work with professional performers, to receive guidance from a leading composer and to hear their works performed. Louth composer Patrick Connolly has written nearly thirty works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles and choir. He is currently undertaking a PhD in composition at Dundalk Institute of Technology. Seán Doherty’s compositions have received a number of awards already, including the Jerome Hynes composition competition, the Feis Ceoil choral composition competition, the St Giles’ Cathedral composition competition, and the Choir and Organ Magazine composition competition. Twenty six year old Christopher McAteer is based in Dublin and began composing at the age of fifteen. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Music with a bachelors degree in composition in 2011, and went on to win the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize in 2012. He is currently writing an opera based on the life of Roger Casement. Amy Rooney is a composer and violinist from Co. Down, and is currently studying for a PhD in composition at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research is focused on contemporary musical notation, with a particular interest in rhythm, investigating whether the pursuit of minute rhythmic inflections is best achieved through mathematically exact scores or through a more fluid notational approach. |
  |
