The American chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound maintains a notably expansive catalogue that stretches across modernist explorations into music shaped by pop influences. Premieres of pieces by leading figures in contemporary composition have formed a core part of its activity, alongside frequent emphasis on multimedia presentations that examine connections between sound, additional art forms, and conceptual themes. Releases have appeared on Canteloupe, Nonesuch, and further imprints focused on recent music, among them the 2024 Nonesuch disc Donnacha Dennehy: Land of Winter.
Established in 2001 at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, the ensemble comprises twenty musicians whose training spans composition, improvisation, jazz, popular idioms, early repertoire, and global traditions. Its recording history commenced without delay, with contributions to collections centered on Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet in 2001 and on Tehillim and The Desert Music in 2002. From 2004 through 2007 the group held an artists-in-residence post at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and received ASCAP’s Concert Music Award in 2006. In 2010 it launched a sequence of widely noted multimedia endeavors, beginning with a collaboration alongside the visual collective Dirty Projectors on “The Getty Address,” a piece drawing on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; the program was presented repeatedly, once at Disney Hall in Los Angeles. That same year marked the start of an extended residency at the Mizzou International Composers Festival in Columbia, Missouri, linked to the University of Missouri School of Music.
Subsequent landmark projects have encompassed “1969” (2011), which wove together works by creators active in that year such as John Lennon and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and “Ligeti” (2014), a biographical presentation that traced the composer’s output via music, text, and visual elements. Also in 2014 the ensemble inaugurated the continuing “Alarm System” initiative, which unites the group with additional artists for joint creations, among them the progressive jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood. World premieres have been entrusted to Alarm Will Sound by numerous prominent composers, including John Adams, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Augusta Read Thomas. Since 2005, when the musicians partnered with electronica artist Aphex Twin on the album Acoustica, recorded projects have mirrored the ensemble’s current repertoire and have appeared chiefly on Canteloupe and Nonesuch. In 2020 the group participated in the Nonesuch release of The Hunger, an opera composed by Donnacha Dennehy; this formed part of a series of recordings devoted to Dennehy’s music, another of which is the 2024 Nonesuch album Donnacha Dennehy: Land of Winter.
