Explore the intersection of science and art in a music project inspired by the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees.
For this unique project, environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof, along with novelists Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson, selected prose passages and poems on the relations among people and trees, including excerpts from Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. Composers Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner, Stephen Jaffe, and David Kirkland Garner then set these words into linked sequences of music. The resulting work traces a narrative arc from human estrangement from nature to a glimpse of the endless cooperation that knits a forest together. The performance also includes George Crumb’s 20th-century classic Voice of the Whale, inspired by songs of the Humpback whale.