PROGRAM NOTES

Text by E. Pauline Johnson

Sing to us, cedars; the twilight is creeping With shadowy garments, the wilderness through; All day we have carolled, and now would be sleeping, So echo the anthems we warbled to you; While we swing, swing, And your branches sing, And we drowse to your dreamy whispering.

Sing to us, cedars; the night-wind is sighing, Is wooing, pleading, to hear you reply; And here in your arms we are restfully lying, And longing to dream to your soft lullaby; While we swing, swing, And your branches sing, And we drowse to your dreamy whispering.

Sing to us, cedars; your voice is so lowly, Your breathing so fragrant, your branches so strong; Our little nest-cradles are swaying so slowly, While zephyrs are breathing their slumberous song. And we swing, swing, While your branches sing, And we drowse to your dreamy whispering

The Lost Birds

The sky was once full of birds. Magnificent flocks so enormous that they would darken the skies for days as they flew overhead. The most awe-inspiring of these flocks belonged to a bird called the passenger pigeon. At their height, they were the most numerous bird species in North America, with a population estimated at 5 billion. But over the course of a few decades, we eradicated them for food, using nothing but the crudest 19th-century hunting technology. With callous indifference, we simply shot them out of the sky, one by one, until their songs were never heard again.

The Lost Birds is a memorial for their loss, and the loss of other species due to human activity. It’s a celebration of their beauty—as symbols of hope, peace, and renewal. But it also mourns their absence—through the lonely branches of a tree, or the fading echoes of distant bird cries. And like the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine, it’s also a warning: that unless we reverse our course, the fate that befell these once soaring flocks will be a foreshadowing of our own extinction.

To pay proper tribute to these birds, I adopted a distinctly 19th-century musical vocabulary: one based on the tunefulness of folk songs, with a string orchestra accompaniment that’s both soaring and melancholy. And to put their story into words, I turned to four 19th-century poets—Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sara Teasdale.

These women saw their world transform from a pastoral society to an industrial one—one in which humans, for the first time, began disastrously reshaping the environment. And the poems which I selected depict an increasingly fraught world: first without birds, and ultimately without humans. We are now in the 21st century, and our tools for affecting the world around us—emissions, pesticides, deforestation—are more indiscriminate and cruelly efficient. As bird, fish, animal, and insect populations crash around us, we increasingly find ourselves in a silent world—one in which the songs of birds are heard less and less. We hope that the silence can be filled by more voices speaking up on behalf of these lost birds—for their sake, and for ours.

—Christopher Tin

1: Flocks a Mile Wide

"Flocks a Mile Wide" is an ode to the passenger pigeon, a bird that was once so numerous that giant flocks would blacken the skies for days as they flew overhead. Their migrations were a breathtaking sight for the 19th-century traveler— large clusters would form undulating masses that swooped and swerved across the sky, much like the murmurations of starlings still visible today. That magnificent spectacle—of hundreds of thousands of birds carving out organic forms in the sky—serves as the inspiration for the "Flocks a Mile Wide" theme, and the entire story arc of The Lost Birds.

The passenger pigeon flourished until the end of the 19th century, when advancements in technology—notably the railroad and refrigerated boxcar—turned these bountiful flocks into a ready supply of cheap meat that could be hunted almost anywhere and shipped to rapidly growing urban centers. Within a few short decades, through a combination of deforestation and good old fashioned hunting rifles, their population crashed. What was once the most numerous bird in the world—with some estimates placing their numbers as high as 5 billion—rapidly went extinct, and the last wild passenger pigeon was shot and killed by a boy with a BB gun in 1900.

The saga of the passenger pigeon, as well as the extinctions of four other North American bird species, is the basis for a series of bronze statues by sculptor Todd McGrain entitled The Lost Bird Project, along with an accompanying documentary by Deborah Dickson. Alongside the album

The Lost Birds, these form an interconnected suite of artistic works that explores extinction through the three disciplines of sculpture, film, and music.

2: The Saddest Noise

"The Saddest Noise" is a setting of Emily Dickinson's poem "The Saddest Noise, the Sweetest Noise". It begins the story of The Lost Birds in spring: the season of birth and renewal, and a time of year when bird songs flood the skies. But what is ordinarily a joyous sound is now riddled with sorrow, as the songs of the remaining birds remind us of the ones we've already lost. Dickinson's reflections on the birds' songs—at once tuneful, but tainted with melancholy— inspired my musical language for The Lost Birds. Heavily influenced by the vernacular of the 19th-century, the work is both pastoral and romantic, with lyrical melodies and soaring strings. But for all its romanticism and loveliness, there remains a sense of loss that permeates the music: for though the melodies we can still hear are sweet, it is the ones that are lost which we truly wish to hear.

Text adapted from a poem by Emily Dickinson

Between the March and April line—

That magical frontier

Beyond which summer hesitates, Almost too heavenly near.

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise, The maddest noise that grows and grows,—

The birds, they make it in the spring, At night’s delicious close.

The saddest noise I know.

It makes us think of all the dead

That sauntered with us here, By separation’s sorcery

Made cruelly more dear.

It makes us think of what we had, And what we now deplore.

We almost wish those siren throats

Would go and sing no more.

An ear can break a human heart

As quickly as a spear,

We wish the ear had not a heart

So dangerously near.

3: Bird Raptures

One of the most common pairings of birds in literature is the lark and the nightingale. The lark, with its cheery morning song, represents day—while the nightingale's lonesome song summons the night. But while most 19thcentury poets chose to exalt the radiant skylark, Christina Rossetti fixated instead on the nightingale. And in her poem "Bird Raptures", she envelops it in language of nocturnal sensuality. Awakened by the moon (a symbol of femininity), with repeated entreaties to forestall the dawn, Rossetti adopts the voice of lovers who want the night to never end. (See: Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 5.)

But Rossetti's Anglo-Catholic faith was never far in her writings, especially in her latter years. And the title of her poem—"Bird Raptures"—imparts a touch of religious ecstasy to her worship of the nightingale. For this reason, my setting of her poem starts as a hymn—a simple chorale, where all the singers' voices move in tandem to harmonize a melody. But as the song progresses, the voices become less synchronized, and gradually start to resemble the individualized movements of birds in a flock. Voices begin lingering, singing a few extra melismatic notes after the rest of the ensemble lands on a resolved chord. Individual singers break from the ensemble, tugging at their nearest neighbors to follow, as if by magnetic attraction. Soon, the entire chorus and orchestra starts to resemble a murmuration—where individual birds have their own flight paths, but the overall movement of the flock stays contained as a harmonized organism. This flock circles and circles, building in intensity until climaxing on the words 'silent, sweet and pale'—a rapturous exaltation of the night.

Text adapted from a poem by Christina Rossetti

The sunrise wakes the lark to sing, The moonrise wakes the nightingale. Come darkness, moonrise, every thing

That is so silent, sweet, and pale:

Come, so ye wake the nightingale. Make haste to mount, thou wistful moon, Make haste to wake the nightingale: Let silence set the world in tune

To hearken to that wordless tale

Which warbles from the nightingale

O herald skylark, stay thy flight

To-morrow thou shalt hoist the sail; Leave us to-night the nightingale.

For a nightingale floods us with delight.