Fiona Merivale

Finola Merivale is an Irish composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, living in New York. Her music has been performed internationally and featured at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and the Contemporary Music Festival of Buenos Aires. Her works have been played by International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Crash Ensemble, Bearthoven, and musicians of the Chicago and St Louis Symphony Orchestras. In 2021 she was the winner of the National Concert Hall and Sounding the Feminists’ Music Recording Award, a grant that has funded the production of her debut album, Tús. It was recorded by New York-based ensemble Desdemona and is being released by New Focus Recordings in June. Recent awards and honours include the 2021 Fedora Digital Prize for this opera, a music bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland and a four-month residency at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. In 2020, she won the inaugural National Sawdust New Works Commission Competition, and she has recently been commissioned by Music Network and the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Commercial releases of her work in 2022 include EPs of Kenopsia by ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, des os in collaboration with Catherine Sikora and Falling Flames in collaboration with Isabel Lepanto Gleicher and Jessie Cox. Her new work oblivious/ oblivion is featured on Pathos Trio’s debut album for piano and percussion, When Dark Sounds Collide. She studies at Columbia University with George E Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas and Zosha Di Castri.

May 2022