Jennifer Walshe: “The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, was released on Tetbind in 2020. The album uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was recently profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

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Presents “A Late Anthology” Live. 

Jennifer Walshe’s A Late Anthology, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, is an album released in 2020, is built on 841 samples of her voice generated by Dadabots using Sample-RNN. Walshe took those samples and mapped the development of the network’s understanding of her voice onto the history of early Western music. Machine learning is used as a filter to listen to the history of early Western music; Western music history is used as a filter to listen to machine learning. Here Walshe performs with and through the material used to build the album, singing Gregorian chant, troubadour songs, music by Dowland, Gesualdo, Palestrina and others, re-training her voice and exploding it into historic spaces, allowing it to resonate through models of the cathedrals and churches this music was originally sung in.