Night Songs

Created by legendary Australian experimental musician and composer Jon Rose, Night Songs is a remarkable sonic experience: an interspecies engagement between the 13 million year old music of a uniquely Australian songbird - The Pied Butcherbird and contemporary human musicians.

Night Songs is a compression of geography and time; the recordings and transcriptions of the birds by Dr. Hollis Taylor come from Centralia, Western Australia and Far North Queensland. Pied Butcherbirds (Cracticus Nigrogularis) sing their long form songs at night in Spring, and this performance shrinks a twenty-four hour period into a one hour concentrated audio-visual encounter. Jon Rose has arranged this music for eight human musicians featuring Sydney’s premiere new music group Ensemble Offspring under the direction of Claire Edwardes.

A glimpse of what is involved in Night Songs can be heard at:

https://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_whistling_in_the_dark.php

Audience warnings: use of strobe