Ciaran Hope

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Ciaran Hope (born 4 August 1974 in Dublin) is an Irish composer who writes orchestral, choral, and film music. He has scored Hollywood films such as Screw Cupid, Truth About Kerry, and The Letters, a film about Mother Teresa. He also writes concert music, including a violin concerto for Cora Venus Lunny and a clarinet quartet for the Czech Clarinet Quartet. His vocal works have been performed by choirs around the world, including Pfizerphonics and Ireland’s Voci Nuove, the country’s 2016 choir of the year.

Hope grew up in the Meath village of Dunboyne. His mother Kitty was a violinist and violist who taught music, and his sister Grainne is a professional cellist. He showed an early love for the clarinet and for composition. He studied mathematics and engineering at Trinity College Dublin, while continuing to study music with Ladislav Kubík at the Prague Conservatory and the Czech American Summer Music Institute. He earned a Master’s degree in Engineering and Music from Trinity in 1998.

After winning the IMRO Prize for the composition Diptych at RTÉ’s Musician of the Future, he moved to Los Angeles to study film scoring at UCLA on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1999 he worked as part of the orchestrating team on The Insider, which was nominated for a Golden Globe. In 2013 he became Composer-in-Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, where he wrote music for children’s orchestras and an opera about Robert Emmet’s time in France. He began work on the score for The Letters in 2013; it was recorded in Skopje, Macedonia, and in Dublin, and released by Sony Classical in 2016, together with Leona Lewis’ Run.

Hope later earned an MBA at University College Dublin in 2017. In 2021 he announced a senior role as Director of Innovation and Experience Design at Ernst & Young. He is married to Irish actress Rebecca O’Mara and is the brother-in-law of actor Jason O’Mara.