PROGRAM NOTES

4: A Hundred Thousand Birds

Sprightly and magical, "A Hundred Thousand Birds" is a setting of Christina Rossetti's poem by the same name. It's a celebration of the nightingale: the bird most adored by Romantic era writers as a symbol of mother nature herself. A summer bird, its nocturnal song was imbued with mystical qualities, both transformative and intoxicating. And in Rossetti's poem, which contrasts the single nightingale with the hundred-thousand daylight birds, its lonesome qualities epitomize the Romantic idea of the solitary artist in nature. My setting of the piece is inspired by English folk song, employing both the simple melodic structure and modal harmonies associated with pastoral music. Using the vernacular of folk songs helps place The Lost Birds firmly in the context of the late 19th-century: a golden age of folk music preservation, when musicologists in England and North America criss-crossed their countrysides, transcribing and cataloging folk songs in towns and villages everywhere. It is this same era when rapid industrialization and the rise of cities first started reshaping the natural environment with disastrous consequences, leading us down our current path of widespread loss of biodiversity.

Text adapted from a poem by Christina Rossetti

A hundred thousand birds salute the day: —

One solitary bird salutes the night: Its mellow grieving wiles our grief away, And tunes our weary watches to delight; It seems to sing the thoughts we cannot say, and to set them right; Until we feel once more that May is May, And hope some buds may bloom without a blight. A hundred thousand birds salute the day: —

One solitary bird salutes the night: This solitary bird outweighs, outvies, The hundred thousand merry-making birds

Whose innocent warblings might make us wise Would we but follow when they bid us rise, Would we but set their notes of praise to words And launch our hearts up with them to the skies.

5: Wild Swans

The Lost Birds is a musical memorial to extinct bird species. But it also carries a darker message: like the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine, the extinction of birds is a preface to the extinction of humans. And thus, the album is split into two halves: the story of the loss of birds, followed by the story of the loss of humankind.

"Wild Swans", a setting of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, ends the first half of The Lost Birds. Told from the point of view of the poet, it starts with the sound of bird cries: gradually approaching from a distance, until they pass overhead, triggering feelings of longing. After an instrumental interlude, and the narrator's impassioned declaration of freedom, the song ends as it started— with the cries of wild swans receding into the distance, foreshadowing their demise.

The migration of swans signifies autumn; and in turn, autumn signals the gradual fading of nature. But beyond their seasonal association, swans themselves have a storied place in literature, often imbued with magical properties. Across myths and legends from every culture, no other bird is transformed into a human as frequently as a swan is— thereby reinforcing the notion that the extinction of birds is synonymous with the extinction of humans. But folklore has also given us the metaphor of the 'swan song'—the final work of an artist or musician before their death.

It comes from the ancient belief that the swan stays silent its entire life, only to sing a beautiful song just before it dies. "Wild Swans" is thus the emotional heart of The Lost Birds— one final, impassioned cry, before the birds' songs recede into the long silence of extinction.

Text adapted from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cry...

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over. And what did I see I had not seen before? Only a question less or a question more; And what did I see? No less, no more, and Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying wild. Come over the town again, trailing your legs and crying!

I looked inside my Tiresome heart, forever living, forever dying, House without air, I leave and lock your door. Forever more I leave you.

Wild swans, come over the town again, trailing your legs and crying

6: Intermezzo

Reprising the theme of Flocks a Mile Wide, "Intermezzo" is an ode to the last passenger pigeon to die in captivity. Named "Martha", she lived in a Cincinnati zoo all by herself until her death in 1914. Her story, and the stories of many similar birds who were the last of their kind, follows a familiar trajectory: the lone survivor of the species sings their song, desperately searching for a response, only to be greeted by silence. And as she gives her final performance, her melancholy song trails away, diminishing with anguish, and ultimately fading into an eternal silence. The song is now lost forever.

Today the passenger pigeon is one of the most spectacularly tragic examples of human-induced ecological collapse. It serves as a warning that if we could wipe out the most populous bird in the world with nothing by 19th-century hunting technology, how much damage can we now do in the 21st century? "Intermezzo" marks the start of the second half of The Lost Birds—one in which the focus is no longer on the extinction of birds, but instead on the extinction of humankind.

7: Thus in the Winter

We are now in a cold, bleak winter, and the absence of birds is best expressed through the lens of the lonely tree, who witnessed the gradual disappearance—one by one—of the birds that used to sing from its boughs. To capture the desolation of this imagery, taken from Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why", I adopted a musical approach inspired by the simple monophony of plainchant. Stark, isolated melodies gradually evolve and intertwine, until their woven layers adopt the contrapuntal shape of a Renaissance madrigal. More and more voices join the chorus, their motion overlapping like birds forming a flock, until all at once their calls reach a climax on the word 'cry'—a plaintive echo of the final bird cries in "Wild Swans".

The movement finishes with harmonic ambiguity, followed by an immediate, uninterrupted transition into the next movement. In the same way that species die out in the real world, the end chapters often come in quick, brutal succession.

Text adapted from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more. But the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a pain For unremembered birds again That will not wake at midnight with a cry

8:

A setting of one of my favorite childhood poems, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is inspired both by the apocalyptic WWI context in which it was originally written, but also by Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name. Originally published by Sara Teasdale in 1918, it was introduced to a world in which humans, for the first time, could see palpable examples of their own extinction—both through the terrible human cost of the Great War, but also from the 1918 flu pandemic.

The poem portrays a post-human world: one in which society has crumbled, and mother nature has established a new order, indifferent to the extinction of humankind. It is only in such an imagined world where robins and swallows might still sing their songs, which suggests the unthinkable—that perhaps the earth can only thrive in the absence of humans. Following a thunderous instrumental interlude representing an extinction event, we have a 'transfiguration' moment: where echoes from previous movements drift through in a primordial state, like a feverish dream on a dying person's deathbed. The movement ends on a wispy, minor-key evocation of the "Flocks a Mile Wide" theme; a distant memory of the life that once thrived around us.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white, Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

Not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

(The sunrise wakes the lark to sing…