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Gribbin read music at Queen’s University, completed a Masters at Guildhall School of Music and Drama London, and studied with Per Norgard in Copenhagen. She took Doctorate studies in composition at Royal Holloway University of London and is a Fulbright Fellow, residing at Princeton University in 2000. After her appointment as Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge 2002-2004, she became Senior Fellow in Composition at Trinity College of Music London and has given lectures at The University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Berkeley, California. She was appointed as Artistic Director of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, spnm 2003-5. She serves on the Board of The International Society for Contemporary Music, ISCM Britain and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, RSA.
Her first composition The Isamnion Fragments was premeired by London Brass at Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1991 and in the same year she won The Huddersfield Festival Composition Prize performed by pianist Joanna MacGregor. After the success of her opera Hey Persephone! 1998, her music has been widely programmed by leading international orchestras and ensembles. She was featured in The New York Sunday Times talking about how growing up in Belfast affected her work Unity of Being, a peace anthem for Northern Ireland, which was amongst the first international performances of music in New York in October 2001 post 9/11.
Gribbin has written over forty works and has been featured at Gaudeamus Festival Amsterdam, Radio France, Kiev Festival, Danish Radio, Prague and Budapest Festivals, Pablo Casals Festival and Elvis Costello’s Meltdown Festival London. Her music is available on CD on the Sound Circus and Black Box labels.
Recent Gribbin works include Te Deum, commissioned for the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge for the installation of the new Master, Sir Martin Rees. Mare Tran Crossing the Sea, premiered by Alison Wells and The Irish Chamber Orchestra. Yeats Sang, commissioned for the 150th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland, Speakers Corner for The RTE Vanbrugh Quartet and Joanna MacGregor, What the Whaleship Saw performed by The Symanowski quartet, and Venus Blazing which will tour the UK in the Spring 2005 with violinist Ernst Kovacic, Britten Sinfonia conducted by Pierre Andre, with lighting by Bruce Springstein’s lightning designer Jeff Ravitz and directed by Lou Stein.
© 2005 Deirdre Gribbin
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"To place a new work between these masterpieces was to measure it against giants.
Yet, extraordinary as it may seem, Deirdre Gribbin’s What the Whaleship Saw seemed every bit as mesmerising as the Haydn or Bartok."
Richard Morrison
June 2004 The Times