Peter Fahey

Peter Fahey is the winner of ACO’s 2012 Annual Underwood Commission, which he won for his work Impressions. Born and raised in Ireland, Fahey studied composition with Eric Sweeney at the Waterford Institute of Technology, with David Horne and Anthony Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, and, informally, at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar, Germany. He has also attended the Darmstadt Festival; the TACTUS Young Composers’ Forum, Belgium; the Weimarer Meisterkurse Kompositions-Workshop; and the Aspen Music Festival and School Advanced Masterclass Program. Fahey moved to the U.S. to study with Roberto Sierra and Steven Stucky at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and in spring 2012 was an exchange scholar at Columbia University. In addition to ACO, Fahey has worked with the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Continuum, Ensemble Musiques Nouvelle, iO Quartet, the Royal Northern College of Music Symphony Orchestra, and Talea Ensemble. Fahey is the winner of a number of other awards for composition, including the Stephen Kaske Fellowship at the 2012 Wellesley Composers Conference, the 2012 Robbins Family Prize in Composition from Cornell University, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Susan and Ford Schumann Fellowship at the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Franz Liszt Stipendium from the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar, and a number of awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. For more information, visit www.peterfahey.com.

A Mirror to Kathleen’s Face
In his piece for ACO, titled A Mirror to Kathleen’s Face for orchestra and electronics, Fahey derives musical material from a recording of an account by a former resident of the Industrial School system in Ireland. He explains, “Structurally, I have created a large ‘mirror image’ to reflect the musical and the extra-musical material of the piece.” This is Fahey’s first commission from a professional orchestra.