NMD26: Come to the Edge

Chamber Choir Ireland
David Young, conductor

Jennifer Walshe The White Noisery
Ben Nobuto BLIP
Cecilie Ore Come to the Edge!
The programme will also include the winning piece in the inaugural Colin Mawby Composition Prize.

Chamber Choir Ireland welcomes guest director David Young for a feast of contemporary choral music at New Music Dublin 2026.

Jennifer Walshe’s The White Noisery is a mixed media electro-acoustic spectacle which, throughout the performance, calls for the use of objects such as sunglasses, a harmonica, dice and an emergency foil blanket.

Ben Nobuto’s BLIP was commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the ‘Pips’ on BBC Radio, which Nobuto uses to explore the idea of standardised time and the imposition of precision on something fluid. The piece is also about radio and the all-at-onceness of digital media:
“Against all this, I imagined the pips as a kind of lighthouse in the storm, an antidote to the chaos, cutting through the noise with something simple and pure.”

Cecile Ore’s Come to the Edge! is about freedom of speech as a fundamental premise in democratic society. The work is dedicated to the members of the Russian feminist protest and performance art group Pussy Riot, with text made up of quotes from the Moscow trial against them, as well as quotes by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, St. Catherine of Siena, Maggie Kuhn, Susan Jeffers, Lenny Bruce, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, William Shakespeare and Harry Belafonte.

The programme will also feature the winning piece in the inaugural Colin Mawby Composition Prize. Established to honour Chamber Choir Ireland’s founding artistic director in the organisation’s 30th anniversary year, the prize will recognise outstanding achievement by one of the young people taking part in CCI’s Composers in the Classroom programme.

Presented by New Music Dublin with support from the Arts Council and in partnership with RTÉ and the National Concert Hall