Bio

Irish composer Ciarán Hope studied composition at the DIT Conservatory of Music with Joseph Groocock and Eibhlis Farrell, and at the Prague Conservatory with Ladislav Kubik before attending the UCLA film scoring programme. The composers burgeoning career was later recognized by American royalty association BMI, who awarded him a place on their prestigious Conducting Workshop where a select group of 8 composers from their 400,000 membership, were given the opportunity to spend two weeks working intensely with a conductor and live musicians.

A recipient of numerous composition awards including the International Solstice Composition Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship in Film Music, a National Training Commission for Film and Television Bursary, an Arts Council of Ireland Postgraduate Award and the IMRO prize at the RTÉ Musician of the Future, his music was also a finalist at the International Clarinet Association Composition Contest and the International Song for Peace Contest and he worked as part of the orchestrating team on the score of the Hollywood feature film The Insider, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

His music has been performed at International showcases such as the Electro-acoustic Music Festival of Cadiz, the Symposium of Brazilian Computer Music, the Beijing Modern Music Festival and the Logan Chamber Music Series in the Chautauqua Institute, New York, while his film scores have been heard at over 40 International film festivals.

He has given master classes on composing for film at a variety of venues including Trinity College Dublin, the Dundalk Institute of Technology, the University of Colorado at Denver, the Kerry Institute of Technology and the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan. His first album, Étude in Film Score, made the top 40 sales at CDBaby.com in its first month and a track from the album was selected for inclusion on an exclusive, limited release CDBaby promotional CD due to the album’s success.

He has received commissions from organizations and ensembles such as the Czech Clarinet Quartet and Latvian Ministry of Arts and Culture while his recent commissions for youth orchestra have premiered on the main concert stage at Euro Disney and the Church of Sainte-Merri in Paris 2012 and in Verona Italy during the spring of 2013 and the reaction from the performers, parents and audience has been phenomenal.Later in 2013, Ciarán was awarded the position of Composer in Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, where he spent 3 months working on a suite for orchestra and a new opera on the life of Robert Emmet. Since being awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Project Bursary Award to write a new violin concerto for violinist Cora Venus Lunny, violinist and composer have been collaborating closely on the new concerto, with Ciarán undertaking residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Artists retreat in Co. Monaghan and the Cill Rialaig Artist Retreat in remote Co. Kerry to work on the concerto, with the kind support of a Tyrone Guthrie Centre regional Bursary Award and a Cill Rialaig Residency Award. The recently completed concerto will be getting its first performances this year.

Ciarán has completed the original film score for the Hollywood Film "The Letters" based on the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Written over the course of a last year and recorded with the Macendonian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Mother Teresa's home town of Skopje Macedonia and the New Dublin Voices Choir in her spiritual birthplace of Dublin Ireland, the score is available through Sony Classical.