The Lark Unending by David Donohoe

‘The Lark Unending’ by David Donohoe.

Performed by David Donohoe (electronics), Susan Geaney (flutes) & David Lacey (percussion)

with special guest Dennis McNulty

David Donohoe presents ‘The Lark Unending’, a new composition based on field-recordings of breeding Skylarks made earlier this year in the Glenasmole valley.

Composed for trio of Susan Geaney (flutes), David Lacey (percussion) and David Donohoe (electronics), the performers will be embedded in and responding to a diffusion soundscape originating from the songs of individual Skylarks, creating an intensely immersive, emotional and physical experience utilising a frequency spectrum from deep bass to glistening highs.

The Skylark’s song feels like liquid gold, shimmering to ground from above, the bird invisible against the sky. Closer listening reveals a dense and complex structure of sequential phrasing, repetition and mimicry, individual birds having their own vocabularies of phrases & rhythms from which they extemporise.

With Skylark numbers in significant decline through habitat loss, intensive farming practices, plantation forestry & exhaustion of bog vitality, ‘The Lark Unending’ is offered as both a monument to this particular time of catastrophic ecological decline and a call of hopeful defiance – a rallying call for us to engage actively with the biodiversity crisis.