Alarm Will Sound and Eartheater: The Hunger

Alarm Will Sound is “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene” (New York Times). A 20-member band committed to innovative performances and recordings of today’s music, they have established a reputation for performing demanding music with energetic virtuosity. 

With classical skill and unlimited curiosity, Alarm Will Sound takes on music from a wide variety of styles. “Stylistically omnivorous and physically versatile” (The Log Journal), their repertoire ranges from European to American works, from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced. Since its inception, Alarm Will Sound has been associated with composers at the forefront of contemporary music. The group itself includes many composer-performers, which allows for an unusual degree of insight into the creation and performance of new work. 

Alarm Will Sound is the resident ensemble at the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Held each July at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the festival features eight world premieres by emerging composers. In 2013-14, Alarm Will Sound served as artists-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Alarm Will Sound may be heard on thirteen recordings, including its most recent, Splitting Adams, and the premiere recording of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. Acoustica, their genre-bending, critically-acclaimed album, features live-performance arrangements of music by electronica guru Aphex Twin.

Maureen O’Rourke Murphy was the Joseph L. Dionne Professor of Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education, Health, and Human Services at Hofstra University until her retirement in December 2016. A past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Murphy was one of the six senior editors of the prizewinning Dictionary of Irish Biography, published in nine volumes and online by the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press in 2009. She directed the New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum Project (2001), which won the National Conference for the Social Studies Excellence Award in 2002; she was the historian of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City. She is currently the historian with John Ridge of the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary/Watson House Project.

Murphy has edited a host of Irish books, including Irish Literature: A Reader (1987, rev. ed. 2006) with James MacKillop and Asenath Nicholson’s Annals of the Famine in Ireland (1998), to name but a few. Murphy has been awarded honorary degrees by the State University of New York at Cortland and by the National University of Ireland. She received the President of Ireland’s Award for Service in 2015.