VANISHING BIRDS (2007)
These four songs for soprano and piano celebrate, and lament, endangered and extinct birds of the Southeastern United States. The texts are drawn from descriptions by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, and from current news items. The first and fourth songs feature the extinct Carolina parakeet, the vibrant bird that was the only parrot native to North America. The second work sets the haunting bird song of the piping plover. And the vampy “Red Cockaded Woodpecker” tells the shameful tale of a pine forest massacre in eastern North Carolina in 2006. |
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