Performers
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About
Forsyth is a new collective of Boston-based musicians Kate Knudsvig, Erin Shea Hogan, Kat Wallace, and Helen Kuhar, bringing together remarkable vocal harmonies, adventurous instrumentation, and a deep love of Celtic musical traditions.
Individually, these four musicians have traveled some impressive musical roads. Their résumés include Carnegie Hall and Boston Symphony Hall, Celtic Thunder, the Boston Celtic Music Festival, and collaborations with members of the Silkroad Ensemble. Kat Wallace is known to Caffè Lena audiences for her fiddle playing with Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light. The members’ backgrounds span Irish traditional music, classical performance, Americana, contra dance, jazz, folk, and world music.
Put them together, though, and something entirely their own emerges. Forsyth takes traditional songs and melodies and approaches them with four sets of ears, four musical histories, and four voices. Fiddle, guitar, tenor guitar, and other instrumentation weave around rich vocal arrangements as the group reimagines centuries-old material alongside original songs that sit naturally within the tradition.
Formed in January 2025, Forsyth has moved quickly—selling out shows, performing and teaching at festivals including the Maine Celtic Celebration and Baltimore Old-Time Festival, and building an enthusiastic following beyond their Boston home.
In January 2026 the quartet recorded their debut album at Great North Sound Society; the album is due for release in early 2027. This is an especially exciting moment to hear a young band whose musical identity is taking shape right before our ears.
At the heart of Forsyth is the thing folk music has always done best: taking something handed down to them, adding their own lives and voices, and passing it along changed but still connected to where it came from.
Come meet Forsyth at Caffè Lena. We have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot more about them.
Sample song / Livestream:
Stream this show live at Caffè Lena TV. Livestream available for $5 — 100% of live stream ticket sales on CaffeLenaTV benefit the artists.