DEIRDRE GRIBBIN - IRELAND
BORN 24 MAY
"Deirdre Gribbin is a charismatic and intriguing new voice in contemporary music."
Paul Conway - The Independent Deirdre Gribbin is a composer from Northern Ireland.
Gribbin was born in Belfast. She studied at Queen's University Belfast where, at the age of twenty, she began to compose. Further studies were in London and in Denmark (the latter with Per Nørgård). Her first professional success came in 1991, when her piano piece Per Speculum in Aenigmate won the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Composition Prize.
Subsequent major works have included the piano quartet Jack B. (inspired by the work of the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats), the piano trio How to Make the Water Sound, the opera Hey Persephone!, the violin concerto Venus Blazing and the clarinet concerto Celestial Pied Piper, the latter composed in New York where she was a Fulbright Fellow in 1999-2000. Several of her works respond to the political climate of her homeland, such as the ensemble piece Tribe, the orchestral work Unity of Being, and her epic percussion concerto Goliath, premiered at the Belfast Festival in 2006.
She won an award in the 2003 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers with her orchestral work Empire States, and an Arts Foundation Award for her first opera, Hey Persephone!. She was Artistic Director of the London-based Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) from 2003-05. Richard Morrison of the Times wrote of her in June 2004: "This Belfast born composer is one of the most original thinkers in years."
Her music has been performed at The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York. Empire States for orchestra was an award winner in the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. She also won an Arts Foundation Award for her prestigious opera Hey Persephone! for Aldeburgh and Almeida Festivals. Deirdre has been exploring links between music and genetics at Sanger Institute, Cambridge and UCL London developing music codes from human DNA. She is a Sir Winston Churchill Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and a Leverhulme Overseas Fellow. (see events pages)
She is Artistic Director of 'Venus Blazing Music Theatre Trust', working with young people with learning disabilities.
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DONIA JARRAR - USA
BORN 24 MAY
Dr. Donia Jarrar is an Arab and Muslim-American composer, pianist, scholar and interdisciplinary artist. Her music spans the genres of classical, electronic, experimental and pop, with improvisation as a key element of her performance practice. Born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian-Greek mother, who grew up between Kuwait, Egypt, the West Bank, and the United States, her personal experiences have strongly shaped her compositional voice, leading her to explore themes of intergenerational memory, trauma, identity, exile, displacement, and cultural narrative in her work.
She received her Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Michigan.
Jarrar was recently awarded the 2019 Discovery Grant for Female Composers from the National Opera Center of America for her work Seamstress, a documentary multimedia opera based on oral history interviews conducted with Palestinian women and girls from her community. She is also currently the only woman to be awarded First Prize in the Marcel Khalife Competition for the Young Palestinian Composer (40 and Under) for her work Border Crossings, a programmatic piece for voice, spoken word and orchestra describing her family’s flight out of Kuwait as refugees of the Gulf War. She has been commissioned by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and is a featured musician on the Emmy-award winning series Arab American Stories. The film version of Seamstress also premiered at the 6th DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival. Her music has been featured in Reorient Magazine and MidEast Tunes: Music for Social Change, and her solo piano work “Perpetual Dance” was recently released on disk and iTunes on the compilation album project Letters to Palestine. Whether recording audio samples and interviews on the streets of Cairo in Tahrir Square or between the bars of a caged turnstile at a military checkpoint, her electronic music heavily features found sound within occupied public spaces, and has been published online at Textsound and featured in documentary shorts including Egyptian filmmaker Laura ElTantaway’s “Crazy for Sisi.” Jarrar has presented at several panels, forums and festivals in the U.S. and abroad, most recently in an interdisciplinary dance and multimedia improvisational work as part of the New Arab American Avant Garde panel at DIWAN’s forum for the Arts, and her work as a translator during the January 25 Egyptian Revolution led to her being invited to present as a TEDx Fellow at the University of Michigan. She is also a juror for the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival.
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