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"The Great Hunger" (2017) was inspired by, and is based upon, Patrick Kavanagh's 1942 long poem of the same name. The work explores a number of themes which are important to the poem, from the principal figure of Maguire, the peasant farmer whose life's travails are at the poem's core ("a man whose spirit is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time"), to ideas of faith, loneliness, family, lust, and work.
The first three notes of the piece, a recurring motif, are from the (once) notorious Sex Pistols song "God Save the Queen", towards the end of which Johnny Rotten belts out the words "no future" on those very notes. This relates to a line in the poem's 5th section - "There is no tomorrow; // no future but only time stretched for the mowing of the hay".
Other musical motifs reference Maguire himself, his mother, the church, work, and sexual desire. The poem is a damning indictment of the hard life of the peasant farmer, and of the fantasy that abounded in more cultured quarters that the peasant's lot was a happy and fulfilling one.
"The Great Hunger" was commissioned by Walled City Music with funds from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and was premiered by Trio Festivale in Memphis, USA, in September 2018.