David Fennessy

With an eclectic but distinctive style, David Fennessy has gained attention as a composer both in his native Ireland and in Scotland, where he was partly trained. He composed a trilogy of orchestral works inspired by the diaries of film director Werner Herzog during the making of the epic film Fitzcarraldo. Fennessy was born on July 23, 1976, in Maynooth, near Dublin. His musical career began as a guitarist in a rock band, and at 15, he took up classical guitar. His first inkling that he might become a composer came when he brought 20-minute instrumental tunes to band rehearsals and found his bandmates unimpressed. He attended the Dublin College of Music, but a bout with tendinitis signaled the end of his guitar career, and he became interested in composition. Fennessy moved to Glasgow, Scotland, in 1998 and enrolled at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, studying composition with James MacMillan. After he finished his master's degree, he was invited to join the school's composition faculty, where he has taught since 2005. Fennessy's music has earned several important honors, including a finalist slot for the Philharmonia Orchestra's composition prize in 2004 and a Dewar Arts Award that allowed him to spend 12 months in Germany studying composition in 2006 and 2007. The year 2010 brought breakthroughs for Fennessy: the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra (now the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra) commissioned his orchestral work BODIES, and another commission, for La Rejouissance - La Paix, came from Ensemble Modern. He has stated that his works do not take up a consistent thread; rather, each one seeks to solve its own set of problems, yet they are linked by a distinctive ambition and intensity. Fennessy's orchestral work Ground brought together pibroch music (a Scottish Highlands genre) with a recording of the heartbeat of the composer's unborn daughter. Conquest of the Useless, the three-part work based on Herzog's writings, was premiered in Dublin in 2019. As of 2020, six of Fennessy's works had been recorded, including Panopticon, for cimbalom and orchestra, which embodied the designs of old prisons where the inmates could all be seen from a central watchtower. That work appeared on a 2019 collection of Fennessy's music issued by the NMC label.
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