Music

Recorded the morning of March 30, 2024 in Lasalle, Quebec. A couple of geese fly by, including one emitting a curious multiphonic tone . Mourning doves come close to the foreground near the end of this recording.

A carolina wren turned up in my Lasalle (Quebec) neighbourhood on the morning of March 30, 2024. It comes here to the foreground, amid a chorus of red-winged blackbirds, gulls, house sparrows, starlings and a robin who seems to be the main actor of the show.

My local robin in Lasalle, Quebec, utters its dawn monologue as it approaches from the right side of the sound spectrum. Recorded Sunday march 30, 2024, between 5:30 and 6:00.

A recording of these birds late morning on July 4, 2021, in my local shoreline in Lasalle, Quebec. Gives an excellent exeample of the richness and diversity of song sparrow songs, and the complementary contribution that yellow warblers make to give a multi-layered quality to the soundscape.

This is the symphonic poem from whom I extracted a passage in my redstart mashup. Its title means in Lithuanian summers of Nagys, referring to the Lithuanian poet whose verses the piece is inspired from. It is based on a poem by Henrikas Nagys called “Vasaros” (summers), from the series “Mano žemės paveikslai” )pictures of my land). I conserved his paintings of the landscapes and adapted the whole picture to my experiences of North American woods here in Quebec. We start among the gardens of a community nestled in a lush forest with notably sunflowers, lyndon trees, robins and a song sparrow, and we end up traveling through a hilly rural road that takes us through the surrounding woods where we meet American redstarts and Swainson’s thrushes.

A conceptual mashup of a passage from my Symphonic Poem, Nagio Vasaros, nestled within a recording of sonbirds called American Redstarts from the nature Park of the woods of Île Bizard, just off the Montreal island to the Northwest. These American redstarts were the inspiration of some of the harmonic and thematic material for the piece. The intention is to make the musical case of the loud whispered songs of American redstarts, which house lots of tones that could be interpreted harmonically as dense chordsas played here by the higher-register string instruments. You will be carried gradually from those woods into the orchestra and back. At one point, the redstarts and the orchestra talk to each other. Other featured birds include a song sparrow and chickadee, who seem to echo one of the more humanly-singable melodies of the piece.

Recorded bird song session at Ferme Beauchamp, a historic farm preserved now as a protected nature area. It is a grassland habitat nesttled in the middle of the woods along the Rivière Rouge. The foreground features a bobolink, an emblematic bird of this area. Also sharing the foreground is a yellow warbler (quinticential bird of our valleyes), at one point a barn swallow, 2 red-eyed vireos, and a least flycatcher. A song sparrow bellows out one sentence in this recording.

Crossover