Elastic Harmonic by Donnacha Dennehy

Dennehy founded the Crash Ensemble in 1997 to concentrate on the newest music exploiting multimedia and it was for their first concert that he wrote the uproarious and infectiously upbeat Junk Box Fraud. The piece is described by the composer as “a celebration of junk and an inquiry into our relationship with technology”. The vocalists—one of whom has her hair dyed blue and the other red—make percussive rhythms and noises accompanied by piano and tape playing a steady stream of sixteenth-notes, cross-accents and off-beat stabbed chords, creating an angular feel. The text was specially written by the Donnacha’s father, Denis.

To use the composer’s own words, “There is a whiff of high-class vandalism about my work”; combining traditional sonorities and instrumentation with driving rhythms, inventive wordplay, electroacoustics and experimental styles of composition, Dennehy’s work is vibrant, original, sometimes challenging and refreshingly different.

'Giddy, visceral urban techno avant-gardism' Gramophone

Donnacha Dennehy’s music has been featured in festivals and venues around the world. Returning to Ireland after studies abroad, principally at the University of Illinois, Dennehy founded Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s now-renowned new music group. He joined the music faculty at Princeton University in 2014. In recent years, Dennehy has concentrated especially on large-scale musico-dramatic works.

donnachadennehy.com