Birds and Music by...
I work with a concert series that is affiliated with a church in the town where I live. We present four classical concerts, generally chamber music type stuff, each season. Let me see if I can fin an interior shot of the church where these concerts are, as something neat happened last night, but you need to get an idea of what the space is like first...
Okay, here's the place. The congregation built this building in 2001. It's basically a big barn that seats as many as 300 people. There are no pews, just a bunch of chairs, so they can rearrange it however they want. One wall, as you can see, is all windows with unfinished timbers as big as large tree trunks. Outside that window is a copse of birch trees, so it's as though nature is part of the stage. At this time of year, the trees are still bare, and the birch trunks are white. It's a very striking image.
Every once in a while, nature really cooperates with us in our concerts. One concert I remember, a pianist was playing a Beethoven sonata. During the last movement, which was very fast and stormy, the wind whipped up and was blowing the birch trees all over the place. But the best one was during a gentle passage in a piano piece by Debussy -- a deer appeared outside the windows, and wandered slowly by, grazing as it went. I wish I had been there for that one, but I missed it.
The last piece on the program last night was a song called "Primary Colors". As the singer started to sing it, two bluejays flew down and started cavorting in the trees on the left. Then, two cardinals arrived on the right. They started flying around, sort of playing with eachother, these bright blue and bright red birds in the white trees. All during the song called "Primary Colors"!
The singer finished, and we all applauded. She then went into an encore, the spiritual "Deep River". Three of the birds had flown away, but one of the cardinals stayed. It stood stock-still, the only spot of color in a sea of grey and white. It waited patiently, as though it were listening intently to the song, too, and as soon as the song ended, it took off almost straight up and was gone.