Amanda Feery
From Ashes [2019]

Commissioned by the National String Quartet Foundation with funds from the Arts Council of Ireland

Performed by the Ficino Quartet
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 19th January 2020 (live audio recording)

From Ashes was part of NSQF’s Beethoven Reflected project in spring 2020 which featured a series of specially designed programmes marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).

One of four works written to be played intertwined with Beethoven’s A minor quartet Op.132, From Ashes opened that concert, tracing over faint grainy remnants of the Beethoven quartet – an archaeology of sound, emotion and meaning.

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Amanda Feery is a composer working with acoustic, electronic, and improvised music, having written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, installation, and multimedia.

Amanda holds degrees in Music (B.A.) and Music and Media Technologies (M.Phil) from Trinity College Dublin. Amanda was the Mark Nelson Fellow in Music at Princeton University, completing her PhD in Music Composition in 2019. Her research focused on Kate Bush’s song suite, The Ninth Wave. Whilst in the U.S., she formed collaborative relationships with many ensembles and musicians including Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Mise-en, Bearthoven, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and cellist Amanda Gookin. Closer to home, past collaborators include Crash Ensemble, ConTempo Quartet, the National Symphony Orchestra, This is How We Fly, Chamber Choir Ireland, Dublin Guitar Quartet, Paul Roe, Michelle O’Rourke, and Lina Andonovska.

Her work has been featured at New Music Dublin, First Fortnight Festival, and Dublin Fringe Festival, among others, and she has been composer-in-residence at Bang on a Can Summer Festival, SOUNDscape, and Greywood Arts. Her 2019 residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais focused on recording piano improvisations on public pianos in Paris.

Recent projects include: A Thing I Cannot Name, a 20-minute opera film commissioned by Irish National Opera with a libretto by Megan Nolan; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra; and we could be diving for pearls, commissioned by Gleo Festival. Future projects include a work for solo cello, and a work for ensemble and Virtual Singer software.

Amanda was a 2023 recipient of the Markievicz Award, which is funding the composition of an hour-long radio work, with a libretto by Eimear Walshe, in response to Eamon de Valera’s 1943 radio address, ‘On Language and the Irish Nation’.

Amanda is currently a Lecturer in Composition at the University of Galway.