Jennifer Walshe (IE)

About

Jennifer Walshe operates somewhere between composition, vocal performance and visual art, and the results are genuinely hard to categorise. The Dublin born composer and vocalist is best known for pushing extended vocal techniques into wild, conceptually rich territory, and her 2003 piece XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! was ranked by The Guardian as the 25th greatest work of art music since 2000. Her work has been taken up by a remarkable spread of ensembles across Europe and North America, and she has received commissions from institutions including the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Wien Modern, and the Dresden Semperoper. One of her most talked about projects was Grúpat, a two year undertaking in which she invented nine separate alter egos, each a member of a fictional art collective, and produced compositions, films, sculptures and fashion under each of them. The project culminated in a retrospective at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin and the release of two CDs. Since 2016 she has been a professor at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, and as of 2021 she holds the Chair of Composition at the University of Oxford.