John McLachlan

John McLachlan was born in Dublin where he studied music at the DIT Conservatory of Music, the Royal Irish Academy of Music and Trinity College Dublin. As well as piano and musicology, he has studied composition with Joseph Groocock, William York, Hormoz Farhat, Robert Hanson and Kevin Volans.

Prizes/Awards include numerous Arts Council of Ireland bursaries, commissions and travel grants, the Composers' Apprenticeship Scheme, IMRO travel awards, and first prize in the Sligo Contemporary Music Festival composition competition.

His works have been performed in The U.S.A., South Africa, Peru, Britain, France, Holland, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Moldova, Slovenia, Croatia, Denmark, and around Ireland, with broadcasts in several of these countries.

His works range from solo instrumental to orchestral music, and have been performed by (among others) the National Symphony Orchestra, Opera Theatre Company, the National Chamber Choir, the Degani Quartet, Vox21, Concorde, Sequenza, Traject, Archaeus, Pro Arte, Antipodes, Trio Arbos as well as many prominent soloists including Ian Pace, John Feeley, Darragh Morgan and David Adams.

Career highlights include being a featured composer in the National Symphony Orchestra's Horizons series (2003 and 2008), the National Concert Hall's Composer's Choice series (2004), and representing Ireland at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festivals in Slovenia (2003) and Croatia (2005), the National Arts Festival, South Africa (2006) and the Musica Viva festival, Portugal. Commissioners include the RTE National Symphony Orchestra, Music Network, Lyric fm (for the 2006 AXA Dublin International Piano Competition), the Musica Viva Festival and the National Concert Hall.

His music has been included on the following recordings: on AIC CD 001, CMC CD 4, Irish Contemporary Organ Music (David Adams) and RIAM piano syllabus CDs, while planned forthcoming recordings include discs from John Feeley, The Dublin Guitar Quartet and the RIAM Percussion Ensemble. Many of his pedagogical piano works have been published by the Royal Irish Academy of Music in their piano syllabus anthologies.
 
He is well known as a musicologist, broadcaster and writer on contemporary music having presented numerous radio shows on Lyric fm, given public talks on music, and published over 40 articles in Denmark, Britain, Germany and Ireland (he writes regularly in the Journal of Music: see http://thejmi.com). He was awarded a PhD in musicology from Trinity College Dublin in 2001 for his work on the relationship between the listener's and composer's perspectives on musical structure in the music of Carter, Xenakis, Boulez and Lutoslawski.

As an administrator of the Irish Composition Summer School he has brought major international composers to Ireland to work with student composers. As the Executive Director of the Association of Irish Composers he has organised and curated concerts featuring living composers from Ireland and around the world. These have taken place around Ireland and in Britain, Romania, Switzerland, France, Portugal, Belgium and South Africa. In 2000 he produced the AIC CD November Series. In 2007 he was elected to Aosdána, the state-sponsored academy of the creative arts.

He lives in Inishowen, Donegal, with his wife Helen Haughey and two sons Dan and Garvan.