Alarm Will Sound and Eartheater: The Hunger

Featuring Katherine Manley and Iarla Ó Lionáird

The “stylistically omnivorous and physically versatile” (The Log Journal) Alarm Will Sound celebrates the release of their recording of Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger on Nonesuch Records with a special performance at one of New York’s most esteemed concert halls.  

The Hunger concerns itself with the Great Irish Famine of 1845–52, which transformed Irish society irrevocably, resulting in the loss of approximately one million people to death and another million to emigration. Asenath Nicholson, an American so moved by the waves of immigrants arriving in New York that she travelled to Ireland to bear witness. Her astonishing first-hand, published account, "Annals of the Famine in Ireland," is The Hunger’s main narrative thread. 

The Hunger will be presented alongside Eartheater's When Fire is Allowed to Finish, creating an evening of music centered around historical accounts of personal loss. 

Talk-back

Please join us immediately following the concert for a twenty minute discussion on stage with Donnacha Dennehy (composer, The Hunger), Alan Pierson (artistic director, Alarm Will Sound), and Sister Mairead Barrett of INN (Interfaith Nutritional Network), moderated by Dr. Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, historian and author of Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine.

This evening is part of Kaufman Music Center’s Ecstatic Music series, curated by Judd Greenstein and celebrating its 10th season, which exclusively presents new work resulting from collaborations.

"No series has better instincts in fomenting post-genre alchemy than the Ecstatic Music Festival."—Stevie Smith, The New Yorker