We celebrate International Women’s Day this year with a stunning programme of music including electronics. We feature the legendary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, one of the greats of contemporary music who sadly passed away earlier this year. Her masterpiece for flute NoaNoa refers to woodcuts made by Paul Gauguin after his return to Paris from Tahiti.

As always, younger composers are included and we give the Irish premiere of Polish composer Oktawia Pączkowska’s not an ideology. This is a protest piece which, in using quoted statements from the far right government, seeks to highlight and question the inequality and underlying homophobia present in modern day society.

We feature three of our finest Irish composers: Linda Buckley who depicts the snowy silences of Alaska, Deirdre Gribben’s piano piece featuring the dawn prayer ritual of an exiled Tibetan monk, and Elaine Agnew’s work for the Aftermath project with an accompanying voice track of victims, survivors and displaced families affected by conflict.

We also feature two New York based composers here: Anna Clyne, whose tape part “comprises a melody and winding sounds from a music box that my father gave my mother in their early days of courting, and the sounds of the carousel and pebbles at Brighton Beach in the South of England—a place of fond memories” and Missy Mazzoli, whose piece is a short but intense response to the following text by Stephen Crane:

Yes, I have a thousand tongues, And nine and ninety-nine lie. Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will, But is dead in my mouth.

not just an ideology (2021) - Oktawia Pączkowska (1996)

A Thousand Tongues (2009) - Missy Mazzoli

NoaNoa (1992) - Kaija Saariaho (1952 – 2023)

The Broken Piece of the Moon (1998) Deirdre Gribbin (1967)

I want to tell you (2013) - Elaine Agnew (1967)

Downward in a freezing earth (2015) - Linda Buckley (1979)

1987 (2008) - Anna Clyne (1980)