to Alauda arvensis: sound offerings | Sound Installation | 2023
to Alauda arvensis: sound offerings
(8’44”) | piano, violin, voice, field recordings
sound offerings is a sound art piece that works to invert the parasitic relationship between man and nature by making a sonic offering to the flora of the "Dimitrie Brândză" Botanical Garden in Bucharest, Romania. Nature has been and is mined by musicians and artists in addition to being literally mined for resources. They seek inspiration from the sublime beauty of pastoral landscapes, or messianic birdsongs. Exhibit A: Ciocârlia, a Romanian folk song named for and inspired by the flitter-flighting voice of the skylark (Alauda arvensis) to whom Shelley addressed a poem in 1820 in which he called the bird’s song, “harmonious madness.”
Shelley was an English Romantic poet. 69 years later a dark-skinned Romani pan-flutist named Angheluș Dinicu composed a piece called skylark “Ciocârlia,” and performed it for the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower. An emblem of France accompanies an emblem of Romanian-ness, by a Romani man who may have been enslaved or at the very least descendant of slaves. What did the skylark mean to him? To Shelley? Is nature universal?
sound offerings features piano, violin, voice, and field recordings from Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, blending fragments of melodies written by Romani musicians, improvisation, with the sounds of nature—lapping water, bird wings flapping, insect buzzing. The piece imagines a shift in subject-object relationship between human/nature, or beholder/beheld, through a sonic piece intended for consumption by nature that counterposes the misuse, disregard, destruction, and depletion of the natural world by man in the contemporary world order.