At the 2026 Grammy Awards, two Princeton faculty members won. For Professor Donnacha Dennehy, this was his first time. He sat down for a lengthy interview with The Daily Princetonian.
In November, Professor of Music and director of the Sound Kitchen, Donnacha Dennehy turned off his phone, brushing aside the hope of a Grammy nomination with the thought “Oh, I can’t let this distract me.”
Losing himself in his work, like he usually does, Dennehy composed the whole morning. Then, he caught sight of his wife outside of his window, exuberant. His work, “Land of Winter,” had just been nominated for a Grammy.
“I saw my wife jumping up and down outside the window going, ‘We’ve been nominated for a Grammy!’ And that’s when I found out,” Dennehy told the ‘Prince’ in an interview.
A little under two weeks ago, Dennehy and his wife sat in the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles where he won the Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. He proudly shares this award with his wife, who played First Violin, Alarm Will Sound, the ensemble group which performed the piece, and composer Alan Pierson.
Before winning the Grammy, Dennehy’s “The Land of Winter” had been named one of The New York Times’ Best Classical Music Albums of 2025. Dennehy views his work as an elevation of the classical form.
“I suppose I’m always trying to create a new musical world each time I sit down to write,” Dennehy said.
The album, a seasonal epic in 12 movements invoking the Irish year, with each movement correlating to a month, is rooted in Dennehy’s own Irish roots and his attempt to write a piece that “merges between electronic and acoustic.”
The 12-part, hundreds of pages, and hour-long work primarily draws on how “one perceives the time through the year and its relationship to light as I’ve known it in Ireland,” Dennehy explained. “The way it expands and contracts more dynamically than here in New Jersey.”
Having grown up in Dublin, Dennehy was influenced much by Irish music, both traditional and contemporary, which he said is “in [his] bloodstream.”
His father, who was an insurance clerk by day and radio playwright by night, also played an influence. He even tried to write a Eurovision pop song with his father, who wrote the lyrics.
By age 10, Dennehy knew he wanted to be a composer.
“I used to record myself playing into a tape recorder, transcribe it, and then make compositions out of it,” he told the ‘Prince.’ “I decided around nine or ten, rather foolishly, that I was going to become a composer. And I did. It’s kind of amazingly single-minded.”
After an extended musical academic journey, which included Trinity College Dublin, a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Illinois, and a stay at the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, Dennehy has enjoyed an equally lengthy music career, which culminated in a full-time Princeton position in 2014 — a job he loves.
When asked about whether any Princeton influence is in his music, Dennehy admitted that “there has to be,” specifically in the dynamic of each monthly movement.
“I feel that my experience of East Coast winters has definitely influenced some of the harshness in February, for instance, whereas February is more gentle in Ireland,” he said. “And September, you feel this kind of panic of business in the piece, and I think that’s rooted to my passing the year now for a very long time according to the academic calendar.”
He also added that, “In September, everything, after a kind of slightly lazy, hazy August, shifts right back into gear,” and that there is a bit of both his Irish and American lives in the piece.
“Everyday life influences your everyday life. Both Princeton and America, living here now, my children growing up as first-generation Americans, and all that, of course, influences me, and I think will come out in future works,” Dennehy said.
Of Dennehy’s two magna operas commissioned by Alarm Will Sound, the “Land of Winter” is his purely musical work. Whereas “The Hunger” is a multi-sensory, multi-media project about the famine in Ireland, a complex socio-historical event, “Land of Winter” is “purely abstract music.”
You could listen to it entirely without knowing any of the thinking behind it, and just lose yourself in the sounds of it,” Dennehy explained.
Dennehy composed the piece from the end of 2021 to August 2022. Alarm Will Sound’s first rehearsals for it were in September 2022 at Princeton.
He noted that “they were intense rehearsals, and I remember some of the particularly lower strings going ‘this is impossible,’ because I had written all these very detailed harmonics that they had to play quite fast.”
“There was a lot of like, ‘Oh, we can’t do this.’ And it was like, ‘Oh no, no, you can do it this way and this way.’ And eventually, it worked out. And then it just completely was clicking and clicking,” Dennehy said.
The piece would then premier September 2022 in Germany, be recorded in October 2023, and would be published at the end of 2024.
In many ways, overseeing Alarm Will Sound’s rehearsal of the piece was similar to teaching a seminar — “There is something where rehearsals are like a seminar class, let’s say, more than a lecture,” Dennehy said. “The lecture is more of a performance to some degree, right? Whereas the seminar is where you’re sometimes discovering some elements in the material you hadn’t absolutely prepared for.”
“There’s the preparation, but then you also start to understand things in a slightly different way, and that’s kind of what happens in a rehearsal,” he added.
The version of the piece that won the Grammy, Dennehy said, was about 95 percent the same as it was originally. That other five percent was the product of years of hard work and meticulous editing.
“Making adjustments, changing dynamics, cutting out some things, making something last longer — I was doing that right into the recording process,” Dennehy said. “[Alarm Will Sound] went and performed it in Germany, then they did more performances back in America, and each time I would make slight revisions.”
“By the time we came to record it — we recorded it in Chicago — and even there at the concert, in the rehearsals for the concert before the recording, I still made some adjustments. Probably, I would still, but now it’s recorded,” he added.
For Dennehy, though, the victory is less in the award and more in the pursuit of innovative art.
“It’s sort of a crazy event,” he said, regarding the Grammys. “I think that art is art, and competitions, you know, we can’t take them too seriously. It’s not like horse racing.”
“It did feel like nice recognition for the work, but I can think of great works of art that have received no prizes,” he added.
For students who are interested in a career in music and composition, Dennehy said that the most important part is the love of the work.
“I almost never had any sort of plan of a career. It was just purely the love of it that drove me. And I think, sometimes, if you have a passion for something, then sometimes the practicalities can work out,” he explained.
“You devote so much of yourself, so much of your energy to it, and I think that’s the essential thing — that it fills you with a kind of wonder and excitement. And if it continues to do that, that tells you something.”
Todd Bashore, the other Grammy winner from Princeton, also sat for an interview with the ‘Prince.’ Read it here.
Luke Grippo is a head News editor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from South Jersey, and typically covers high-profile interviews and University and town politics. He can be reached at lg5452[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.