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It's hard to tackle the immense topic of America as a whole in a short piece, with its complicated history and its splintered present. Perhaps inspired by the fact that the original hymn for America the Beautiful was composed in New Jersey, I sought a way into this piece by reflecting on my own ever-deepening personal connections with the country as an immigrant who came here for good when I was well and truly in the midst of my adult life. I never - ever - expected to end up in New Jersey one day. It kind of happened by accident. But now it is completely tied up with the childhoods of my children. They are as much New Jerseyan as they are Irish or anything else, and my daughter especially so, as she was born here too. They have an attachment to the place, and already my thinking of them is suffused with the memories of passed and passing New Jersey summers, a kind of feeling of summer that does not really exist in Ireland. Maybe everything I write has this sort of existential bittersweet edge to it, but here it passes quite beautifully for the most part, like a fading Polaroid.
Called ‘thrilling’ by the Guardian and ‘arrestingly beautiful’ by the New Yorker, Donnacha Dennehy’s music has featured in festivals and venues such as the Berliner Festspiele; Edinburgh International Festival; Beethovenfest, Bonn; Royal Opera House, London; Carnegie Hall, New York; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Barbican, London; the Huddersfield Festival and BAM, New York among others. In addition to a trilogy of operas with the writer Enda Walsh, recent large-scale works include Land of Winter for Alarm Will Sound, Tessellatum, a microtonally shifting 40-minute piece for strings, The Hunger, a docu-cantata, and a violin concerto for Augustin Hadelich that has received performances in Europe and the US. The Konzerthaus Orchester gave the German premiere, conducted by Joanna Mallwitz, at MusikFest Berlin in the Autumn of 2023. Portrait albums of his music have been released by Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe, NMC and Bedroom Community. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 and is now a professor at Princeton University.
As the artistic director of Center for Musical Excellence, I am always on the look out for new and undiscovered talents. They come to me, sometimes, by my colleagues’ recommendations and other times through young artists’ own research about our organization. Tyson Davis and Andrew Bambridge are currently on our roster of CME Young Artists, whom we mentor. Patricio Molina is a CME alumnus. Theo Chandler, Ji-Young Ko, and Daniel Newman-Lessler applied for our Grant program, and I got to know their work through that process. I decide on young artists when I notice a deep passion and drive within them, plus a certain kind of sparkle in the personality and lots of humility. In addition to musical talents, I believe these are the qualities that will take the young artists far. CME’s motto is "Moving Musicians Forward". I’ve chosen our Discovery Composers based on these qualities, whom we felt we could easily move forward.
- Min Kwon