Chamber Concert: The Life of Birds

Join Music from Copland House for a musical aviary exploring the journeys, habits, and “personalities” of some astonishingly versatile flying, feathered singers.

The concert takes its name from a work by Mason Bates, the Kennedy Center’s first Composer-in-Residence; calling it a “a web of short but dense moments from the aviary,” the music visits parakeets, flycatchers, and other winged creatures at rest and play, in love, and in flight. Birds of Paradise by former Manhattan School of Music President Robert Sirota evokes the scintillating sounds of the stunningly multi-colored birds that live deep in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea, and is paired with a vivid film by the Cornell University Ornithological Lab of these birds in their native habitats. The program also features Lukas Foss‘ classic Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, based on the famous eponymous poem by Wallace Stevens; Tawnie Olson‘s Meadowlark, inspired by the vividly-colored yellow and white birds in their natural Western environments; and a group of early 20th century songs by Amy Beach, Theodore Chanler, and Westchester’s own Charles Tomlinson Griffes (one of the first faculty members at The Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY).