Professor Gráinne Mulvey
Lecturer
Email: grainne.mulvey@tudublin.ie
Gráinne Mulvey was born in Dublin, Ireland. She studied under Professor Nicola LeFanu and was awarded a DPhil in Composition from the University of York in 1999. She also holds an MA in Composition from Queen’s University, Belfast, under Professor Agustín Fernández, and a BA(Hons) degree from Waterford Institute of Technology, under the late Dr. Eric Sweeney.
She was appointed Head of Composition at Technological University 4 Dublin
Conservatory of Music and Drama in 2001 and was made Professor of Composition in 2018. She has wide experience of teaching undergraduates and postgraduates to Doctoral level.
She has acted as External Examiner for both undergraduate and postgraduate composition at Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, WIT and QUB, Belfast. She has also been involved with composition outreach educational workshops and advanced composers’ composition projects.
She was appointed as one of the Course Directors of the IMRO Summer School of Composition in 2014, 2016 and 2018. In 2001, 2010 and 2011, she was on the adjudicator’s panel for the Guido d’Arezzo Composers’ Composition Competition in Italy. She was adjudicator for the composition submissions for SIME, in Lille, France, in 2016. She has curated concerts for the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland in 2011 and 2012, the Association of Irish Composers concert in May 2016 and a retrospective concert of her work at The Carlow Arts Festival in June 2016. She has also been on many discussion panels involving composition.
Her cello and tape piece Syzygy has been reviewed in Musicology Review Vol 6 and her Trinity Fanfare for two trumpets and organ is published by Prairie Dawg Press, New York. Her two choral works Dead Earth and Sanctus are due to be published by Sulasol Press. Several of her works are now published by the French company, Babel Scores Online. She is listed in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland UCD Press.
Her music has been widely performed both in Ireland and abroad and she has received many broadcasts of her work by radio stations across the globe, including regular broadcasts by RTE Lyric FM, BBC Radio 3 and WPRB 103.
One of her earliest works Étude, for piano (1994), was selected for that year’s International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, an honour that was to be repeated with 2004’s orchestral work Scorched Earth, and in 2015 with Diffractions for orchestra, in Slovenia. She was a featured composer in the 2007 Horizons concert series, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conductor Robert Houlihan, performing three of her orchestral works. She has the distinction of being selected for the ISCM World Music Days in consecutive years with Akanos, for orchestra (Lithuania, 2008) and Stabat Mater, for 17 voices a cappella (Växjö, Sweden, 2009).
She has won various prestigious competitions, notably the RTE Musician of The Future (Composers’ class) in 1994, the Sligo International Festival Composers’ Competition, in 1999 and the St. John’s Memorial University Award, Waterford and Newfoundland in 2003. She received a “most distinguished musician and special mention” at the IBLA International Foundation Competition in 2016. She is a joint winner with visual artist Mihai Cucu, in the Music Video category of The Cutting Edge Film Festival 2016, in the USA, for her electronic piece Proclamation.
She won first prize in the Academia Musica European Composition Competition in Vienna for her ensemble work Interstices and second prize in both the Orchestral with Latitude 52 (rev.2021) and Choral piece Stabat Mater (2003) sections in August 2021. She won first place in the Composition Competition with her piece LUCA in January 2022 in the Franz Schubert Konservatorium Composition Competition World Championship.
She won joint first place in the Franz Schubert European Composer’s Competition in September 2021 with her Cello Concerto Excursions and Ascents (2015) in the orchestral category and second place in the piano category with her piano and electronics piece; Sun of Orient Crimson with Excess of Light (2020). She won two 2nd prizes in tow categoriues of the Academia Musica European Composition Competition in Vienna in 2022. She won 1st Prize and Laureate Absolute Winner prize in the IX Smederevo ULIUS International Piano Composition Competition Category IV, Serbia, for her piano and electronic piece Sun of Orient Crimson with Excess of Light in 2022.
She has received commissions and performances, notably from Concorde and Jane O’Leary, (who have championed her music both in Ireland and abroad, receiving four commissions), the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, the Northern Sinfonia (UK), the Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra, the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, the Hradec Králove Philharmonic Orchestra (Czech Republic), Orchestre De Lorraine, France, pianists Cheryl Pauls (Canada) and Slawomir Zubrzycki (Poland), Matthew Schellhorn, (UK), David Bremner, (UK), soprano Elizabeth Hilliard, the Chamber Choir Ireland, the Bruce Gbur Bassoon Ensemble (USA), the TampereRaw Ensemble (Finland), trombonist Barrie Webb, BlackHair (UK), the Sepia Ensemble (Poland), flautist Joe O’Farrell, cellist Martin Johnson, (principal, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra), ACME Palomar Ensemble (USA) with both Arachnid, and then Interstices performed in Feb. 2013, Hard Rain Soloists Ensemble, MISE-EN Ensemble, Platypus Ensemble, among others.
She has attended many composition courses over the years, studying with Peter Maxwell Davies, Jonathan Harvey, Louis Andriessen, Kaija Saariaho and Boguslaw Schaeffer to name but a few.
Both Scorched Earth and Akanos have been broadcast widely throughout the world, and she was the subject of an in-depth profile on Swiss Radio in 2008 and a programme of her major orchestral pieces was aired by Slovenian Radio in 2009 and by Bernard Clarke of Nova, RTE Lyric FM in 2015.
Horizons Series 2015 featured two orchestral works: Diffractions (2014) and Excursions and Ascents, (2014), a cello concerto for Martin Johnson, which were performed by the RTE NSO, conductor, Gavin Maloney.
Two of her pieces: Sextet Uno and Rational Option Insanity, have been recorded by the Concorde Ensemble, on the Black Box label in 1999. Her Soundscape for violin, cello, percussion and tape, was issued on CD by the Avantgarde Akademie in Schwaz, Austria in 1996. Akanos was included on the CD Contemporary Music from Ireland, Vol 7 (CMC). Her piece Calorescence, (2013), for piano is released on the new CMC label: New Music: New Ireland Vol. 2. The Gothic CD released by the pianist Mary Dullea, includes her piece Étude.
Phonology Garden and Eternity Is Now, recorded by soprano Elizabeth Hilliard, have been issued on the CD Sea To The West Metier Label. Her portrait CD Akanos is out on the Navona label Cat: NV5943 by PARMA Recordings Llc, since February 2014. Her piece for installation Aeolus was released in 2018 on the Metier Label and another piece Proclamation was released on the Audior 5 volume of electronic music in Italy, Dec.
2018. She won placements on CDs for her pieces: Interference Patterns, Interstices and The Shoulder which were released by RMN Music Ltd in September 2018 and in 2020. Her piano piece The Thriving Port of Ros XII was released by the New Ross Piano Festival Committee in September 2018, her Great Women was released on the Métier label in 2021 and LUCA was released by Diatribe Records in 2021 also. A piano piece will be released by Duncan Honeybourne on Prima Facie Records. Petrichor Records released Diffractions and Phonological Loop. Her music has been performed in the UK, Poland, France, Japan, Canada, and Germany during 2015, 2016 and 2017. Other performances during 2018 to 2022 included the countries: Ireland, Scotland, France, Denmark, Vienna, Budapest, Paris, Kassel in Germany, Manilla in the Philippines and the US. She is represented by the CMC Ireland, AIC, IMRO, IAWM, (International Alliance for Women in Music,) BabelScores, Contemporary Music Online Library, Donne In Musica and is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s organisation of creative artists and was elected to the Toscaireacht in 2019.
Her latest pieces commissioned by Director Fergal Dowling, of Dublin Sound Lab and the Music Current Festival, include P9 PBH performed by the Splinter Reeds ensemble with electronics and Entry and Exit Wound by Joe O’Farrell (flutes) with Gráinne on electronics for the last Music Current Festival in 2022. Her piece (Round of Applause) featured in visual artist Fion Gunn’s VR piece called Roller Coaster was exhibited for a month at the NAMOC in Beijing, China during February until the 1st of March 2022. She has recently been commissioned to write a piece for the Finding A Voice Festival in Clonmel, Music Network Ireland and Carloiw Arts, Ireland. She has been commissioned by Fergal Dowling, Director of Music Current to write for the violinist Darragh Morgan and she is writing for the Airborne Ensemble, the Sepia Ensemble and ACME are interested in new pieces for 2023/24.
Email: info@grainnemulvey.com
website: grainnemulvey.eu