The Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford has announced the appointment of Irish composer Jennifer Walshe as the new Professor of Composition in association with Worcester College.

Walshe is renowned for her work as a composer and performer, including works such as EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT with the Arditti Quartet, the solo work ALL THE MANY PEOPLS, the many strands of her Aisteach project, and her work under the artistic collective Grúpat. Recently, she premiered Ireland: A Dataset at the National Concert Hall and TIME TIME TIME at the Borealis Festival in Norway. Recent recordings include A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol 1: Ancient to Renaissance, ALL THE MANY PEOPLS and The Golden Cassette.

Walshe is a previous recipient of the British Composer Award for Innovation. She was elected to the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Berlin in 2019, and last year was elected to the Irish academy of artists, Aosdána.

Commenting on the appointment, the University of Oxford said:

Professor Walshe’s research output is widely seen as trailblazing in the overlapping fields of composition, performance, video and text, resulting in works for orchestras and ensembles; musical compositions created and disseminated by, through and ‘about’ the internet; a host of new projects created using artificial intelligence; and a completely fictional history of avant-garde music and art in Ireland. The radical nature of Professor Walshe’s work has meant that it defies categorization within the contemporary classical music world.

Walshe previously lectured at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart, where she co-designed the MA in the Theory & Practice of Experimental Performance. She also taught at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, La Biennale di Venezia and Ostrava Days.

Last October, Alex Ross in the New Yorker wrote: ‘The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe nails down, better than any artist I know, the antic, raucous, confessional, sordid, semi-sublime texture of modern digitized life.’

From Dublin, Walshe studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and with Kevin Volans in Dublin. She graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition.

For more, visit www.music.ox.ac.uk.