​Completed in 2025, this chamber cantata for single voice and reader, is a musical and narrative collaboration between composer and poet. Aves is an uninterrupted musical and narrative composition exploring sung and spoken text, and written specifically for countertenor.

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With Aves, we wanted to make a piece about birds, and it began with the discovery that, in common with humans, their hearts have four chambers. Across North America, birds are disappearing. Since 1970, we’ve lost almost three billion breeding adults. One billion alone have vanished from our forests. We didn’t want to mimic the songs of birds or to illustrate their flights; we saw them as kin and took note of their roles in Oral Histories around the globe. We were especially moved by the presence of supernatural birds in the accounts of the Irish monk St. Brendan (484-578) and the English Benedictine monk and historian, the Venerable Bede (circa 673-735). These holy figures show up at the conclusion of Aves.

 

Aves begins with the origin of the world. There is a narrative flow, but time is not linear. It reaches forward into the present, then bends back toward the accounts of miracles and supernatural events in the sixth and seventh centuries on wild, stormy coasts like our own where the colonial language was Latin. In Aves, all times are synchronous; the engine of the world is transformation. This enables us to enter new musical territories. We won’t be alluding to sixth or seventh century monastic compositions from Ireland or England. We’re taking a new path with our sisters and brothers, the birds, who appear in every piece, whose wings will guide us.

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