First published on The Journal of Music in Ireland on 12 February 2026.

A recording of ‘Land of Winter’, a work by Donnacha Dennehy performed by Alarm Will Sound and released on Nonesuch Records, received a Grammy Award on 1 February. In this interview, he speaks to Toner Quinn about the work and the award.

For those who have been following the development of the Irish new music scene over the past couple of decades, Donnacha Dennehy’s Grammy Award for the recording of Land of Winter in Los Angeles on 1 February will be another significant milestone. The co-founder of Crash Ensemble, and composer of works such as Junk Box Fraud, Glamour Sleeper, Grá agus Bás, Bulb and The Hunger, as well as his three operas, Dennehy’s impact on the Irish music scene has been enduring. He has also established an international reputation and is now Professor of Music at Princeton University. Dennehy is only the second Irish composer to win a Grammy Award following Bill Whelan’s win for Riverdance in 1997. 

Land of Winter – a major twelve-moment work for ensemble that explores Ireland’s seasons – was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and it won the second category. It was recorded by the group Alarm Will Sound conducted by Alan Pierson and released on Nonesuch Records in November 2024. A review in The Journal of Music in Ireland at the time stated: ‘Dennehy’s ear for scintillating, physically affecting harmony is arresting. In all this, Land of Winter reveals Dennehy as a master of his craft.’

Dennehy attended the Grammy Awards ceremony earlier this month and was more nervous than he anticipated. ‘It dawns on you when you’re there,’ he said. ‘My heart was pounding quite a bit. I wasn’t as relaxed as I was pretending.’ He sees the award as welcome recognition for the work and the performers, but keeps it in perspective:

Art is not horseracing, and you have to consider it in that context too… to be honest, this was the furthest thing from my mind when I was writing this piece.

Donnacha Dennehy and Alarm Will Sound at the Grammy Awards (Photo: Paul Melnikow)

Guggenheim scholarship
Land of Winter was not a commission but rather something Dennehy himself wanted to write. He had won a Guggenheim scholarship in 2021 that allowed him to focus on the work and he wrote it in nine months for Alarm Will Sound, who he had worked with before. He says it had been ‘brewing in me for a while’. The original spark came in 2015 while finalising the mix for his work Tessellatum in Iceland around the winter solstice; it was then the idea for Land of Winter emerged.

It struck me on that day: God, it just feels like Ireland – because the light appears and then it darkens on the shortest day of the year, and I noticed it felt so much more like Ireland. I had moved to America at that stage… but it always struck me, the way the light delineates the year in Ireland, and you feel it…

And of course, the old Latin name for Ireland is Hibernia – ‘Land of winter’. So I wanted to write this piece about the interrelationship between time and light, and how light delineates time, between what I saw as the comforting aspects of recurrent time and the terrifying aspects of linear time. And there was a little quote by Samuel Beckett that resonated with me, which was ‘30,000 nights … hard to believe so few’. These are the kind of impulses – I wanted to write an hour-long instrumental piece that went through each month, thinking of it entirely from the context of how I experience these things in Ireland. 

Over the course of the work’s twelve moments, beginning with the month of December, chords swell and replace each other, and there are even moments when the group shout out the rhythms. The work’s Irish concept is key however. Dennehy says that his ‘clarity about being an Irish artist has been stronger since leaving. That sounds like that’s the classic thing, but it’s true.’ Yet while he draws on his heritage, the universal themes are his focus: ‘It’s taking that local impression and making something more universal rather than something rooted to, let’s say, the Barraduff to Killarney stretch of road. It’s more that I thought of the solstices and the equinoxes translated into overtones in the piece.’ He adds: ‘I don’t feel nostalgic [for Ireland] or anything like that, although I sometimes feel nostalgic for democracy!’

The work was recorded in Chicago and produced by the late Grammy Award-winning engineer Adam Abeshouse, who Dennehy had already worked with. ‘Unfortunately,’ he says, ‘it must be one of the last things that Adam Abeshouse worked on, because he died of cancer within a year. It was terrible – we didn’t even know he was sick at that stage. We made two videos when we released Land of Winter, and one of them we dedicated to his memory.A performance of Land of Winter at the Irish Arts Center in New York in December 2024.

New ideas
Dennehy regards Land of Winter as the latest expression of compositional ideas that have been important to him in recent years:

I have been developing this overtone-based harmony in more and more particular ways for the last decade. And that has hit a kind of summation in Land of Winter. And there’s a kind of sophistication, maybe, in how it is dealt with in that piece that is building upon earlier works, but definitely feels new to me. And the connection between a temporal underlying structure and this pitch thing is quite new in Land of Winter… 

There’s a lot of … expanding and contracting palindromes behind this rhythmically. This is all new in Land of Winter. More and more I follow a kind of poetic structuralism… there’s a poetic intent behind it.

The work has received, even before the Grammy, a number of performances by different groups in Canada and the States, and will be performed at the Arctic Chamber Music Festival in Norway later this month. It will also be performed at New Music Dublin in April.

Dennehy, who returns to Ireland a number of times each year, will attend the performance in Dublin. He usually tries to attend various concerts at the festival and tune in to the Irish scene. What he always notices is the range:

I’m struck by the variety. It’s something I love about Ireland, that there’s not one dominant aesthetic. Aesthetics are in conversation with each other. 

The diversity of music in Ireland was one of the reasons he set up Crash Ensemble, he says, to provide another platform, but he believes there should be more institutional support for Irish composers from larger groups:

I would love to see even more opportunities, though, for new music – at chamber orchestra and orchestral level… I would like to see more platforms. I know it’s a small country, but it’s a very creative country, and it seems only right to me.

Since the Grammys, Dennehy has spent the week finalising a new piece for an upcoming Music Network tour by French accordionist Théo Ould and British-Irish soprano Alison Langer that takes place from 25 March to 2 April.

It’s been good to have that distraction. I’m underplaying the Grammy perhaps. It has been slightly overwhelming. But, you know, I still feel I have a lot of music to write, and that’s always my focus.

Land of Winter is released on Nonesuch Records. Visit www.nonesuch.com.