Irish composer Gráinne Mulvey is born on March 10, 1966, in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. Her music is timbrally and rhythmically complex — a legacy of her work in the electroacoustic field. Her microtonally-inflected language derives ultimately from the natural harmonic series, placing her somewhat in the spectral tradition.

Mulvey studies with Eric Sweeney at Waterford Regional Technical College, Hormoz Farhat at Trinity College Dublin and Agustín Fernández at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 1999 she gains a DPhil in Composition at the University of York under Nicola LeFanu. In 2001 she is appointed Head of Composition at Dublin Institute of Technology Conservatory of Music and Drama.

Mulvey is appointed as one of the Course Directors of the IMRO Summer School of Composition in 2014. In 2001, 2010 and 2011, she was on the adjudicator’s panel for the Guido d’Arezzo Composers’ Composition Competition in Italy. She has curated concerts for the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland in 2011 and 2012, the Association of Irish Composers in May 2016 and a retrospective concert of her work at The Carlow Arts Festival in June 2016.

Mulvey’s music has been widely performed both in Ireland and abroad and her works have been broadcast by radio stations across the globe. One of her earliest works Étude, for piano (1994), is selected for that year’s International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, an honour that is to be repeated with 2004’s orchestral work Scorched Earth, and in 2015 with Diffractions for orchestra, in Slovenia. She is a featured composer in the 2007 Horizons concert series, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conductor Robert Houlihan, performing three of her orchestral works. She has the distinction of being selected for the ISCM World Music Days in consecutive years with Akanos (Vilnius, Lithuania, 2008 and Växjö, Sweden, 2009).

In April 2010, Mulvey is elected to membership of Aosdána, the State-recognised affiliation of creative artists in Ireland. A CD Akanos & Other Works, dedicated to her recent work, is released in February 2014 on the Navona label.