Darragh Kelly is a composer and musician. He is interested in the ineluctable dialectics of the virtual vs the actual, subject vs object, the bathetic, cyborgism, hybridity, the ecstatic, new music's ageing, and tonality's afterlife. His work makes use of AI, seeking to re-embody the output of machine learning tools and treat these systems as external organs of the body—a body in excess.
Collaborators and performers have included Crash Ensemble, Heather Roche, The Smith Quartet, Darragh Morgan, Peter Brötzmann, Psappha Ensemble, Carla Rees, Michelle O'Rourke, and Elizabeth Hilliard. He received the 2018 West Cork Music Composition Prize for his work for string quartet, Blue, partly based upon the film by Derek Jarman. He is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre. In 2021, he received the Arts Council of Ireland Music Bursary, funding research and training in machine learning. He was awarded the Arts Council Next Generation Award in 2022, receiving €25,000 to support his work and research.
Darragh was a committee member for the Irish Composers' Collective for three years. He has studied at Trinity College Dublin and works with the Royal Northern College of Music's Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music, PRiSM.
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Press:
2022 Reflection on Penelope by Stephen Graham
2022 podcast interview for Contemporary Music Centre (m7s51)
2021 radio interview for RTÉ's Culture File
