Alex Dowling is an award-winning Irish composer and producer whose work spans from acoustic ensembles to live electronics and opera.
Recent projects include a commission from Irish National Opera to create a work for boy soprano as part of their 20 Shots of Opera project and a theatrical collaboration for the show ‘There’ at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His album of electronic vocal works, Reality Rounds, was released on Carrier Records and is described as “an enthralling trance of live-processed vocals and synthesizers" (The Road to Sound). His music has been performed by ensembles internationally including the Irish National Symphony Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, Prism Saxophone Quartet, orkest de ereprijs, and Mivos String Quartet, and has been featured at festivals including Bang on a Can, MATA, and the Young Composers Meeting, Netherlands. He has written music for theater and laptop orchestra, and his audiovisual installation Bodysnatcher was exhibited at the Eyebeam Gallery, NY and toured many other countries. As part of his sound design/production work, he created the electronic music for the operas TRADE and Mary Motorhead by Emma O’Halloran that were showcased at the PROTOTYPE 2023 festival in New York and at LA Opera REDCAT.
Dowling was recently named a MacDowell Fellow and an artist-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Awards include the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Jerome Hynes Composer Award, and the West Cork Chamber Music Composition Award. He has an MPhil in Music & Media Technology from Trinity College, Dublin and studied composition as a PhD fellow at Princeton University. He is currently composer-in-residence with Irish National Opera as part of their INO Studio. Upcoming projects include a new operatic work as part of this residency and works for the San Francisco-based string quartet Friction and the electric guitar quartet DITHER.