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** Coming Together Festival June 2026 **
The *Coming Together* Festival unfolds across five concerts in two days, tracing connections between past and present, protest and prayer, fragility and power. An All Festival Ticket gives you the complete journey—Furrer’s visionary works, Rzewski’s political minimalism, Frey’s stillness, Partch’s surreal road music, and Davóne Tines’ transformative *Mass*.
It seems only yesterday, or it seems like forever, but Louth Contemporary Music Society is celebrating its twentieth birthday at midsummer next year. The programme looks back a bit. In 2006 the British pianist Joanna MacGregor kicked things off with a programme entitled ‘Blues, Spirituals and Bach’. In 2026 the final concert features the stunning American singer Davóne Tines in his interpretation of the mass, which is, as LCMS’s founder-director Éamonn Quinn puts it, ‘basically Spirituals, new tunes and, er, Bach’.
Under the banner ‘Coming Together’, the 2026 festival will have the present and the past coming together, with brand new pieces and others dating back to the 1930s, though rarely heard in Ireland.
Like every time LCMS puts on a show, it’s also about all of us coming together: people from Louth and visitors from far afield, the cognoscenti and the curious, drawn by the knowledge that whatever this outfit presents will be worth hearing, drawn also by the rare opportunity to be with other people in a simple place simply being quiet and listening.
Being with the music. Music that’s with us as we try to find our way through these wretched times. Coming together. There’s nothing like it.
Dates for your diary are the evening of Friday June 19th and the afternoon and evening of the next day. Featured composers include Beat (pronounced as in ‘beatific’) Furrer from Vienna, who made a splash last year with his intimate, intricate pieces for chorus. This time he brings with him songs of one sort or another, all gently suggesting that, whatever we know, we might want to think again.
Singers and instrumentalists from the cream of young talent will be taking part, including some from Ireland. One of the blessings LCMS regularly brings is to enliven the experience of musicians here as well as audiences.
Also making a happy return to Louth is the Swiss composer Jürg Frey, master of a finely nuanced minimalism. He’ll be here for a performance of his String Trio, as engrossing and rewarding as an unhurried wander with friends.
There’ll also be a rare chance to hear the raw strange music of Harry Partch, who spent most of his life on the road while going far off the beaten path in his compositions. Western music, he believed, had been moving further and further off course since the Renaissance. We needed to recover the tiny intervals in the cracks between the piano’s keys. We needed to discover a new kind of harmony. Listen and you might start to agree.
‘Coming Together’ is also the title of a piece we’ll hear by another American, Frederic Rzewski: politically charged, enraged but also in a way joyous, music that stands and shouts. As we, too, might want to do.
**Concert 1 – Friday 19 June, 7:30pm, St. Nicholas’ Church of Ireland**
The festival opens with music by Beat Furrer, performed by Cantando Admont and a remarkable group of soloists. Works include *Lied*, *Canti della tenebra*, and a brand-new LCMS commission. After the interval, Frederic Rzewski’s *Coming Together* channel political resistance with hypnotic power, joined by narrator Olwen Fouéré.
**Concert 2 – Saturday 20 June, 1:00pm, Dundalk Gaol**
Jürg Frey’s String Trio in Dundalk Gaol—Francesco Dillon, Danusha Waskiewicz & Darragh Morgan weave hushed intensity in an atmospheric midday setting.
**Concert 3 – Saturday 20 June, 3:00pm, St. Vincent’s Chapel**
Cantando Admont return with an all-Furrer programme: *in mia vita da vuolp*, *Lotófagos*, and *Prophezeiungen*. These vivid chamber works explore disintegration, memory, and prophecy—intimate, unsettling, and luminous.
**Concert 4 – Saturday 20 June, 5:00pm, The Spirit Store**
A surreal travelogue from hobo America. Harry Partch’s *U.S. Highball* and *10 Lyrics of Li Po* are performed on adapted instruments by Charles Corey and Luke Flanagan. Inventive, strange, and deeply human, this is music of the open road. A U.S. Highball cocktail—alcoholic and non-alcoholic varieties—will be available for the journey.
**Concert 5 – Saturday 20 June, 8:00pm, St. Nicholas’ Church of Ireland**
The festival closes with American baritone Davóne Tines in his *Recital No. 1: Mass*. Incorporating J.S. Bach, Caroline Shaw, and Spirituals, it reframes the mass as a meditation on belief, identity, and transformation—a profound ending to *Coming Together*.
