Composer
Jennifer Walshe
MARSBiography
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Her opera Libris Solar was commissioned and produced by Irish National Opera as part of 20 Shots of Opera in 2020. Many of Walshe’s recent projects focus on the planet Mars, using it as a lens to think through the most pressing issues of our time. Notable projects from this series include MARS I, for Klangforum Wien, and Some Notes on Martian Sonic Aesthetics, 2034-51 for Ensemble Modern, culminating in MARS (2025) for INO. Walshe has worked with AI for over a decade, and her book 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music was published by Unsound in 2025. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, was released on Tetbind in 2020. The album uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. In the Merry Month of May, Walshe’s duo album with Tony Conrad, was released in 2024. Walshe is Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford.
July 2025