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Stories   >   Christopher Tin and VOCES8 team up to remember extinct birds / yourclassicalMPR

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Christopher Tin and VOCES8 team up to remember extinct birds / yourclassicalMPR

Posted: November 3, 2022
yourclassical - interview

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.


yourclassicalMPR writes…..Composer Christopher Tin and the British vocal ensemble Voces8 were introduced to one another by their recording engineer about a decade ago. Ever since that first meeting, Tin has been looking for an opportunity to collaborate with the singers. They were finally able to come together on a project called The Lost Birds.

“The main overture of The Lost Birds is actually a melody that I'd written years ago for a documentary about bird extinctions,” Tin said. “This subject has been on my mind for more than ten years. This one little tune that I wrote 11 years ago has stayed as something that I wanted to expand upon in a choral requiem format. I finally got the chance to do that with Voces8 during the pandemic.”

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