Rhona Clarke, Irish composer and pedagogue, is born into a musical family in Dublin on January 21, 1958.

Clarke sings in a women’s choir from age 14 and is an outstanding piano pupil at the College of Music (now the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama), Dublin. She studies music at University College Dublin (UCD), earning a Teacher’s Diploma in 1978 and a BMus in 1980. She teaches at a number of schools in the Dublin area. When she participates in the Ennis Composition Summer School in 1985, she is introduced to the music of continental composers such as Luciano Berio and Witold Lutoslawski, which leaves a lasting impression.

Some of Clarke’s early works receive awards, such as the Six Short Piano Pieces (1982), which wins the composition prize of the Feis Ceoil, and the choral work Suantraí Ghráinne (1983), which wins the Seán Ó Riada Memorial Trophy at the 1984 Cork International Choral Festival. For Sisyphus (1985) for flute, clarinet and string trio she receives the Varming Prize, which is awarded only every four years to an Irish composer under the age of thirty. She completes her first orchestral score in 1991 (A Great Rooted Tree). In 1992, she receives a Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). She is a lecturer in music at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University (DCU).

Clarke receives commissions from RTÉ, the Cork International Choral Festival, Concorde, Music Network and the National Concert Hall, among others. Her work is performed and broadcast throughout Ireland and worldwide. In January 2014, she is the featured composer in the Horizon Series of contemporary music by the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ. For this event, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra commissions her orchestral composition SHIFT (2013). Since 2009 she has been collaborating with visual artist Marie Hanlon, including short experimental films with music, live music with visual projections and joint exhibitions, one example being the joint exhibition DIC TAT at the Gallery Draíocht, Blanchardstown, Dublin, July-September 2014.

Clarke is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists.

Clarke’s output includes choral, chamber, orchestral and electronic works. Her calm and evocative music in the early Suantraí Ghráinne creates some curiosity at its 1984 performance. Early chamber works such as Sisyphus (1985) and Purple Dust are characterised by wide-spaced harmonic settings of a rather sparse tonal material. Some aleatoric passages alternate with more strictly notated pitches and a rather limited degree of dissonance. In Gloria Deo (1988) for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra she combines modal influences from Renaissance music with free atonality. Since the early 1990s she has been exploring the possibilities of electroacoustic music, winning an award at the 1992 Dublin Film Festival for her electronic score Whaling Afloat and Ashore. Her recent orchestral score SHIFT reflects her experiences in electroacoustic processes: “Extended techniques, deliberately avoided in previous work, are embraced here using harmonics and noise elements in strings, and bowed, timbral effects on percussion. In a single, fifteen-minute movement, transformations in colour and texture vary from slow and intense in the opening section, to sudden and harsh later in the piece.”