The composer Linda Buckley has been elected to Aosdána. Buckley was among five artists elected via postal vote for the association’s General Assembly, including novelist Anne Enright, performance artist Amanda Coogan, sculptor Rachel Joynt, and painter Diana Copperwhite.

Buckley is one of Ireland’s leading composers. From the Old Head of Kinsale in Cork, she studied music at University College Cork followed by a Masters in Music and Media Technologies and a PhD in Composition at Trinity College Dublin. She has written for orchestra, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Dresdner Sinfoniker Orchestra, and a range of chamber ensembles (among them Ensemble Mise-En and Crash Ensemble) as well as electroacoustic works and compositions for theatre and film. She featured on the first Ergodos CD with her work Dubh in 2010, and this was followed by Immersia a year later on the same label. She has since released a number of recordings and featured on others, including Changeling (2016), Moog Residency with Jonathan Nangle (2018), and String Ogham by Caimin Gilmore (2020). Recently, she released From Ocean’s Floor (2020), featuring Iarla Ó Lionáird and Crash Ensemble and which was the Guardian’s ‘Folk Album of the Month’, and her work Azure was recorded by the Icebreaker ensemble. Her short opera Glaoch formed part of Irish National Opera’s ‘20 Shots of Opera’ series.

The musicologist and critic Bob Gilmore previously wrote in the Journal of Music that Buckley’s work ‘engages with an area of experience that new music is generally shy of, which, simplified and reduced to a single word, I’d call ecstasy. … an emotional response to the world that sees the bright places of life as clearly as the dark.’

Buckley was formerly composer in residence at RTÉ Lyric FM and in 2017 was appointed Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She has recently written a score with her sister, composer Irene Buckley, for Nothing Compares, a film about Sinéad O’Connor by Kathryn Ferguson, and last weekend her work Fall Approaches was performed by Luminosa in Galway.

Aosdána has a membership of 250 and includes composers such as Gerald Barry, Donnacha Dennehy, Jane O’Leary, Bill Whelan, Dónal Lunny and Jennifer Walshe.

For more, visit www.lindabuckley.org.