2025-26 Music Current Commission Awardee Announced: Bethany Younge
Photo: Bethany Younge. Credit: Polly Chesnokova.
Via Dublin Sound Lab, 26 May 2025.
Dublin Sound Lab would like to offer our thanks to all those who responded to the recent Music Current Festival annual commission call for proposals. We are now delighted to announce the Music Current commission for 2026 has been offered to Bethany Younge who will write a new work for Dublin Sound Lab involving intricate hocketing, choreographed movement and spatialised sound, to be performed at Music Current Festival 2026.
Younge’s new work will explore an intricate, hocketing texture—irrationally rhythmic, teetering on surreal polka—where bass clarinet, cello, electric guitar, percussion, and electronics collide in playful instability. The performance will include suspended percussion to invite choreographed motion, while samples of analog synths weave through the ensemble. A kinetic, immersive performance where sound and movement blur, softening the lines between roles, where live music becomes as much a visual gesture as a sonic one.
Younge writes about the commission:
Being awarded the Music Current Commission for 2025-26 is a great honour—an opportunity to explore new artistic possibilities with Dublin Sound Lab’s bold and talented musicians. I am deeply drawn to performers who not only master their instruments with precision but also embrace the expansive potential of live music: the weird interplay of theatre, technology, and movement in shaping a work’s identity. For this opportunity to collaborate with artists who share this ethos, I am profoundly grateful.
The commission is offered annually as part of Music Current Festival, with the newly commissioned work being prepared for the following year’s festival. Previous commissioned composers include: Anna Murray (Ireland), Panayiotis Kokoras (Greece), Patricia Martinez (Argentina), Silvia Rosani (Italy), Alessandro Massobrio (Italy/Germany), Brona Martin (Ireland), Seán O'Dálaigh (Ireland), and João Pedro Oliveira (Portugal), and Lautaro Figueroa Balcarce (Argentina).
Younge is currently serving as the Technical Director and Lecturer at Dartmouth College. Her works have been featured in the 2020 National Sawdust New Works Commission, the Long Beach Opera Songbook, the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Resonant Bodies Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The 16th International Young Composers Meeting, the Frequency Festival, Ear Taxi, and many other festivals.
She has worked with many ensembles including JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, TILT Brass, KLANG, Ereprijs Orkestra, Fonema Consort, AndPlay, Chartreuse, Gyre Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Mocrep, and others throughout Europe and the USA. She has been awarded the Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, the Kanter/Mivos Prize, the Barcelona Festival Mixtur Commission award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives scholarship award, a Fromm Commission award, and was nominated for the Gaudeamus award.
Learn more about Bethany's work and music at: http://www.bethanyyounge.com