Rose Connolly

Composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist Rose Connolly was born in County Fermanagh. Her unique sound is an idiosyncratic combination of modernist/ contemporary music with inflections of Irish traditional music, folk and Jazz.

As a composer, her body of work includes large-scale and small-scale ensemble work, electro-acoustic, short film/multi-media works and installation audio-visual work also.

As an accomplished multi-instrumentalist in the classical, contemporary and traditional music field, Rose graduated from Music Composition at The Royal Conservatory The Hague.

She maintains a busy performance schedule in Ireland, performing with an array of professional musicians in both traditional and contemporary contexts. She has composed music for the Contempo string quartet, Chantham Saxophone Quartet, Dublin Brass Band and The Residentie Orchestra, The Hague. She has written scores for short animations, and most recently scored the 2019 short animation CTRL + ALT + Z which achieved ‘Best Music’ at the Royal Television Society Awards while the film achieved lots of lucrative success in The Lift- Off Sessions, Galway Film Fleadh and Meet Film Festival.

A more outstanding achievement was winning the Finding A Voice Composition Competition for Emerging Women Composers. Dr. Anne- Marie O’Farrell selected the piece and performed the harp solo as part of the festival in Clonmel. Rose also recently received the Young Musicians Platform award NI in which she received a sizeable grant to record an album which will be released March 2023. After this, Rose will be heard across Irish radio performing and composing for the Ulster Orchestra, The Residentie Orchestra in 2022 and more recently The RTE Concert Orchestra and Crash Ensemble in 2023.