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Waimea Consort Concert ------------- Sunday May 1st, 2005 - 4pm Davies memorial Chapel (HPA Upper Campus) - Waimea/Kamuela |
After a well-attended and highly praised performance of Medieval music and love songs for Valentine's Day, the Waimea Consort, a 12-singer a cappella vocal ensemble, will be back in concert on May 1st with an exciting program entitled "It's all about birds". While scholars are still debating about the origin of music and how our brain makes us receptive to music, there is, as far as we know, no culture on this planet without music of some sort. This fact puzzled Charles Darwin himself, who wrote: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed." Actually, humans are not the only living creatures with musical aptitudes. Birds, too, compose songs with similar features as those found in human compositions. Darwin also added that the origin of music could have its roots in "man imitating the sounds of nature". With birds some of nature's best musical performers, to see so many musical pieces about birds does not come as a surprise. With this new program, the Waimea Consort will take you on a journey through five hundred years and five languages to discover some of the most exquisite songs ever written about birds. Though starting with "Cucu! Cucu!", a 15th century Spanish song, and ending with Mendelssohn's "die Nachtigall", the program will mostly feature English and Italian madrigals and French Renaissance chansons. Among the many birds you will hear about, the swan, the nightingale and the cuckoo will have a place a choice. The swan, said to sing only when feeling death approaching, will be the title bird of a magnificent five-part song by Arcadelt, a hit in 16th century Western Europe, with another version on the same text by an Italian composer a century later. The cuckoo, with its habit of using others' nest and its easily mimicked song, is a likely character in any piece about marriage and faithfulness, a subject of many chansons. The bird that sings so sweetly at twilight, the nightingale is singing of love but is also the symbol of the connection between love and death, which inspired poets and composers alike. Delightful songs will be performed honoring the nightingale, a bird not only heard in England, but also all over Europe as uscignolo, rossignol, or Nacthigall. These birds, with many others, have inspired the finest composers of the Renaissance and the Baroque era, many of them featured in this "It's all about birds" program: Encina, Fevin, Weelkes, Bartlet, Monteverdi, Gibbons, Vecchi and. William Byrd (no pun intended), whose songs will feature the nightingale, the hawk and the eagle. To illustrate the idea of music being rooted in the imitation of the sounds of nature, the Consort will perform two imitative pieces by Janequin, obviously inspired by the birds themselves: "le chant de l'alouette" (the song of the lark) and "le chant des oiseaux" (the song of the birds). Short notes in rapid succession and syncopated onomatopoeias interleaved with smooth melodies make for complex but enchanting a-cappella vocal polyphony. A concert as diverse as the song of birds! The concert is on Sunday, May 1st at 4pm in the Davies Memorial Chapel at HPA (Upper Campus) in Waimea. The concert is, as usual, free and worth a trip up-hill from either side of the Island. |