Edward Swan Hennessy (24 November 1866 – 26 October 1929) was an Irish-American composer and pianist who lived much of his life in Paris. In his pre-War piano music, he excelled as a miniaturist in descriptive, programmatic music. After joining a group of Breton composers, he developed a reputation as a "Celtic" composer, drawing on his Irish heritage, and writing in a style that was unique in a French as well as an Irish context. Even though he has been almost forgotten after 1950, his music was applauded by contemporary French music critics including Henri Collet, Louis Vuillemin, Émile Vuillermoz and Lucien Chevaillier. In some works, he used jazz elements and took inspiration from funfairs and industrial noise, anticipating trends associated with the group of "Les Six". Biography Swan Hennessy was born in Rockford, Illinois, of Irish origin and grew up in Chicago. His father, Michael David Hennessy (1837–1919), was a Cork-born former President of the Chicago City Railway Company before he became a lawyer in 1874. Hennessy's mother was Sarah J. Swan (c.1833–1880), a daughter of Joseph Rockwell Swan, an Ohio Supreme Court judge and founding member of the American Republican Party. Before 1870 the family moved to Chicago, where Hennessy grew up. There is no proof for the assertion in Baker's Dictionary that he studied "general subjects" in Oxford, but he may briefly have attended one of the (private) public schools there, before pursuing musical studies in Germany at the Stuttgart Conservatory, 1879–86. Hennessy studied composition in an English-speaking class with the American teacher Percy Goetschius as well as piano with the German teacher Edmund Alwens. Upon completing his studies, Hennessy moved to London (1886–92) where he was married with two children and divorced (1893). Ten years of travel followed, including France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Ireland, with a home base in Italy, before he settled in Paris around 1903. In July 1909, Hennessy was married with Claire, née Przybyszewska (1883–1947), a Polish national he had met in Brussels. Her mother was a cousin of the Symbolist writer Stanisław Przybyszewski. The couple's son Patrice Hennessy (1910–1973) later became a well-known man of letters and an expert on the French Revolution. Although not from Brittany, Hennessy was a member of the short-lived Association des Compositeurs Breton before World War I and continued to mix with their members including Paul Le Flem, Paul Ladmirault, Maurice Duhamel, Louis Aubert, Louis Vuillemin, Lucien