The Contemporary Music Centre Welcomes Seven Newly Represented Associate Artists
Following the latest application process, with review by an independent panel, CMC Ireland is delighted to announce the associate representation of artists Greg Felton, Breifne Holohan, Andy Ingamells, Ellen King, Richard McReynolds, Christopher Moriarty and Aleksandr Nisse.
As CMC-represented artists, their works will be documented in the CMC library and archive, supporting the research and performance of their music. In addition, CMC-represented artists have access to professional development initiatives and programmes, artist residencies, networking events and more. Promotional support for artists' performances and related projects are a further benefit of representation with CMC.
Meet the artists
Photo by Stuart Smyth.
Greg Felton
Greg Felton is a composer, pianist, improviser and educator from Dublin. He is a full-time jazz lecturer at DCU where he specialises in composition, rhythm studies and advanced harmony and jazz piano. He holds an MA in composition from WIT and an AGSM in Jazz Performance from Newpark Music Centre/Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He studied South Indian classical rhythm and melody in Chennai, creative improvisation in Banff, and advanced harmony and composition in Pennsylvania.
Projects include Origin Story, White Rocket, Michael Buckley’s Ebb & Flow, Greg Felton Quartet, Ronan Guilfoyle’s Always Know, Mappa Mundi and Evidence, Louis Stewart Quintet, Mike Nielsen Quartet and Mel Mercier’s Pulsus and MÓNCKK.
‘Good Friday’ the début album of the jazz piano trio Origin Story was named the jazz album of 2020 by The Irish Times.
An incredible force for good in Irish jazz.
- BBC Radio Ulster
Photo by Kelan Molloy Photography.
Breifne Holohan
Breifne Holohan is a musician, composer and producer from Drogheda, County Louth. He is a multi-instrumentalist with guitar and piano being his primary sources for music-making. A graduate from Dundalk Institute of Technology (B.A. in Applied Music, 2010), he specialised in composition under Dr. Ian Wilson and continued further studies with David Stalling and Kevin Volans.
As both a composer and musician he has won a number of awards including the Bill Whelan International Music Bursary for Young Composers (2004). A regular performer of his own work he has collaborated with a variety of visual artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, dancers and theatre groups. Large-scale projects for theatre and dance include The Dream Work by the Collaborative Artists Company. He has also written original scores and sound design for Kelly-Abbott Dance Theatre (UK). Productions include Launch Day and Deeds Not Words.
Currently working in film, Holohan has written original soundtracks for The Morning Side of the Mountain (2022) by Upstate Theatre Project and UNDERDROGS (2024) by CMcG Visions. His new work for chamber quartet, ‘de Falla’ was recently given its world premiere in Milan, Italy in June 2024.
Photo by Anton Lukoszevieze.
Andy Ingamells
Andy Ingamells is an experimental musician who develops unusual methods of composition that blur the line between composer and performer. His work is rooted in traditional elements of music-making and classical concert conventions, but implemented in a different way, often through physical actions. He takes inspiration from the playful Fluxus text scores of Yoko Ono and the musical storytelling of Robert Ashley.
His work has been performed internationally, and by ensembles which include Kirkos, Apartment House, Orkest de Ereprijs and more. He performs in Private Hire, a duo with Kathryn Williams in which the work teeters on a balance of rigorous enquiry and playfulness. In 2019 he formed a collaborative partnership with composer Seán Clancy that explores the collaborative process through a kind of visual musique concrète arising from the images of performance situations.
Andy is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research programme at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In 2017 he completed a PhD at Birmingham Conservatoire supported by the AHRC Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. He lives in Cork and lectures in composition at MTU Cork School of Music. He is a founder and co-director of the Inclusive Music Ensemble.
Photo by Cáit Fahy.
Ellen King
Ellen King is an Irish multidisciplinary composer, producer and DJ. Writing and performing music under her own name and ‘ELLLL’ moniker, Ellen has carved out a distinctive voice in both contemporary and club-music contexts, with compositions etched by abstract experimentalism, fragmented rhythms and bass-heavy club.
From shimmering melodies and gliding breakbeats to left-field, icy, percussive drum tracks and cinematic ambient, Ellen has released several EPs showing the breadth of her talents as a producer. Labels include Paralaxe Editions (ES), Glacial Industrials (IE), and First Second Label (IE).
Beyond club music, Ellen has worked extensively as a multidisciplinary artist for projects across visual, film, installation, dance and performance art. Recent works include sound design and score for theatre production Das Ereignis, Deutsches SchauSpielHaus Hamburg and Images & Sensations, an ensemble work commissioned by Ireland’s leading new music ensemble, Crash Ensemble.
Photo by vogonlaundromat.
Richard McReynolds
Richard McReynolds is a Belfast-born composer and multimedia artist living in Cardiff. He is interested in using technology to blur boundaries between artistic mediums. Recent projects include: visualising sound, generating still images from sonic input, building electronic instruments to track physical movement and designing light-tracking installations. The aim is to create performances that engage on multiple levels. His installation works invite the audience to play with sound, movement and digital control in active and embodied ways.
Self-taught as a musician playing guitar in bands as a teenager, his formal music education began at Liverpool Hope University. It was here that he learned studio techniques and scoring for music ensembles. He continued at Liverpool Hope for Masters study before moving to Cardiff to study for a PhD. Since completing his PhD in 2019, he has worked freelance as an arts organiser and composer.
Richard sees the role of the composer as a facilitator of music as much, if not more than, a writer of scores. He organises concerts, arts events and collaborations as artistic director of newCELF, an associate artist at SHIFT Cardiff and a member of the Hooting Cow Collective.
Photo by Max Becker.
Christopher Moriarty
Clarinettist and composer Christopher Moriarty is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. Described by the New York Epoch Times as a “...virtuoso clarinettist...” with “...élan and virtuoso flair” for his début performance as soloist with the New York Sinfonietta at Carnegie Hall, his dual career as performer and composer of art music has gone from strength to strength.
Christopher is a founding member of Ensemble Getögon (Ensemble Goateyes), a new music chamber ensemble focused on the commissioning, performance and proliferation of the work of living composers and artists across a range of genres and disciplines. Their acclaimed début in Stockholm saw the ensemble perform in collaboration with the Irish electronic artist Tadhg Kinsella in the concert series Våra Egna Getter (Our Own Goats), funded by Culture Ireland and Konstnärsnämnden.
Christopher's 'Físeanna an Ghiorria', was commissioned by the pianist Órán Halligan and featured on Halligan's début album 'Visions', alongside previously unheard 19th century music by Irish composers. 'Visions' was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland and released in 2023.
Photo by Laura Sheeran.
Aleksandr Nisse
Aleksandr Nisse is the Titular Organist of the St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin and is of Russian and French descent. As a child he was influenced by the legendary blind organist Helmut Walcha who was his father's teacher and by his blind aunt Danielle Salvignol-Nisse, a student of Jean Langlais and Gaston Litaize. Having studied piano with Valery Krol, Aleksandr went on to study organ with Susan Landale in Paris and continued his keyboard studies with Louis Robilliard at the Conservatoire National de Region de Lyon, where he was unanimously awarded "Premier Prix de Perfectionnement" with distinction. A scholarship for postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London followed where he studied under Nicolas Kynaston and Lionel Rogg.
He regularly performs concerts in Ireland, Switzerland, France and Germany and succeeded in obtaining an award from TU Dublin for a PhD in composition under the supervision of Prof. Gráinne Mulvey. His research area lies in the application of the exact partial pitches of the harmonic series.
His most recent piece NOTINTUNE was commissioned by the Crash Ensemble. A reflection on the impact of digital devices on society. The piece explores what happens when humans, distracted and out of tune with their natural selves and surroundings, lose empathy, a quality without which it is suggested our human civilization might cease to exist.