Trad maestros Martin Hayes and Brian Donnellan to open Other Voices Derry with special Guildhall concert

Hayes is one of Irish traditional music’s most significant talents. Rooted in his native East Clare, he continues to shape the music’s future through projects including The Gloaming, The Common Ground Ensemble and the Martin Hayes Quartet.

He is artistic director of Cork’s Masters of Tradition festival and co-curator of the Marble Sessions at Kilkenny Arts Festival.

He will share the Guildhall stage with Donnellan, a concertina and bouzouki player from Co. Clare, whose playing creates a deeply nuanced dialogue with Hayes — music shaped by awareness, breath and an oral tradition that is both rooted and contemporary.

Taking place from 7.30 to 10pm on Thursday, September 24, tickets are now available from Eventbrite at £25 + booking fee.

The festival has also announced details of its Soundings programme that will run in The Playhouse on Saturday, September 26, from noon to 5pm.

Soundings is a cultural forum that brings together artists, writers, makers, thinkers, civil society leaders and others to explore some of the defining questions of our time through the lenses of culture, community, and civic imagination.

Soundings programme notes

12 noon - Doors Open/Welcome

12.30pm - The Spaces That Make Us

The gig venue, the youth club, the dancefloor. For generations of young people in Derry and beyond, these were the places where it all happened, essential third spaces to meet, to showcase talent, to bridge divides, and to just be. The rooms where subcultures are born, where unlikely friendships form, and where a city's young people come to find themselves and each other.

As these spaces disappear, lost to rising costs, changing priorities or institutional neglect, we ask what it is that we stand to lose, and whether the DIY spirit that conjured them in the first place might yet inspire a new generation to build them anew.

With Claire Hall, Oh Yeah Music Centre, Belfast; Gareth Stewart, Other Voices/Music City Derry Music Producer & Promoter and co-founder of Celtronic; and Emma Warren, music journalist and author (Up The Youth Club: A Love Letter). Hosted by DJ and producer Cóilí Collins.

1.30pm - A Place of Our Own Imagining

Stories have always helped us make sense of who we are, where we come from, and the places we have not yet been. They carry us across boundaries of geography, experience and imagination, inviting us into lives beyond our own.

They inform our understanding of place, challenge inherited narratives, preserve memory, and open up new ways of seeing ourselves and one another. Stories are inseparable from the places and communities from which they emerge. They are born of history, circumstance and imagination, reflecting both the possibilities and the challenges of the worlds they inhabit.

Bringing together writer and filmmaker Myrid Carten (A Want in Her); writer and essayist Darran Anderson (Imaginary Cities, Inventory: A Memoir) and screenwriter and author Ailbhe Keogan (Trespasses, Bad Sisters) in conversation with author Séamas O'Reilly (Prestige Drama, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?), this discussion explores the relationship between storytelling, identity and place. From the places we leave to those we return to, from memory and belonging to imagination and reinvention, the conversation considers how artists reflect the worlds they inherit, and, in turn, help imagine new ones.

2.40pm - Derry: A Border City Facing the Future in a Reshaped Europe

When Other Voices last came to Derry in 2013 and 2014, the city was tingling with possibility and energy. The Peace Bridge was newly opened, the city had celebrated its year as the UK's 2013 City of Culture, the UK was still in the EU, and Irish-British relations were, quietly, in good shape.

Twelve years on, we return to take stock. Much of that feeling of optimism seems harder to locate now. Political paralysis, a shrinking arts ecology, and the aftermath of Brexit make their mark on a city that was promised so much. It feels like that Derry instinct to say ‘wise up and just get on with it’ is becoming harder to find. Yet Derry's defiant and creative spirit and voice remain undimmed, and the questions it poses about identity, belonging, and possibility are as alive as they have ever been.

Tony Connelly, RTÉ's Europe Editor, joins journalist and author Aoife Moore to map where Derry sits today within the region, on this island, and within a Europe and a global order that are fundamentally reshaped since we were last here. What does this changing landscape mean for this border city in a post-Brexit landscape, and what might it offer communities still brimming with potential and asking what Derry might yet become?

3.40pm - ‘A Change in the Tarmac’ by Caolán Austin

Caolán Austin’s piece, 'A Change In The Tarmac', is an invitation to the listener to reflect on the 105-year history of the border in Ireland. Against the backdrop of electronica, ambient & contemporary-classical music, Caolán weaves together fragments of found sound, interviews & archive recordings. The result is an unfolding of memories and personal interactions that draw the listener closer to the smaller, more unspoken aspects of border life; highlighting the profound impact a border has on its surrounding communities.

4.10pm - In Conversation with Kate Nash

BRIT Award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has never shied from speaking her mind, using her platform for causes from independent artists' rights to trans allyship. Now, that same instinct has turned toward her own Irish heritage, weaving it into her music and bringing a history rarely spoken about in the UK into public view.

At Soundings, she sits down with arts journalist, filmmaker and disability rights activist Louise Bruton to talk activism, identity and the stories we choose to tell.

Entry to Soundings is free but registration is required, as capacity is limited. Full details and registration are available on https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/soundings-at-other-voices-derry-2026-tickets-1999511925996