BirdFoot Festival
A rule-bending chamber music festival with a New Orleans flavor—Birdfoot Festival is back with a season of music-making that explores our entwined relationship with the natural world. Birdfoot 2023 is a musical pilgrimage that reaches beyond the concert hall to celebrate the mythic dimensions of nature, bear witness to environmental degradation, and meditate on our place in the world. Learn more at https://birdfootfestival.org/
Listening Pilgrimage I: Awakening - Friday, March 10, 2023
6:30pm, CAC Rooftop
Free (Suggested Donation $10 – $25)
Birdfoot launches its 2023 residency at the Contemporary Arts Center with an open air concert for nature lovers, forest bathers, and oxygen breathers. Join the musicians of the 2023 Birdfoot Festival on the first leg of a listening pilgrimage that asks how we can understand our entwined relationship with the natural world through our ears. Winding through the entire Birdfoot festival, this series of outdoor pop-up concerts reaches beyond the concert hall to celebrate the simple beauty and the mythic dimensions of nature, bear witness to environmental degradation, and meditate on our place in the world. Come with us on an adventure that invites you to bask in music, listen deeply and stretch your senses—and might even change how you listen to the word we inhabit. Listening Pilgrimage concerts will be approximately 30 minutes in length, and musical selections will not be announced in advance.
Birdfoot Backstage: Lost Songs- Thursday, March 16, 2023,
6:30pm, CAC Black Box Theater
Free (Suggested Donation $15 – $30)
Join Birdfoot Festival musicians for an interactive exploration of Juri Seo’s Lost Songs for string quartet and clarinet, based on a recording of the call of the last living Kauai ʻōʻō bird (Moho braccatus). Join the conversation and get inside the music alongside the musicians, and then come hear the piece in its entirety during Birdfoot’s final concert on March 18.
“We live in cycles, with birth and death being the primary conditions of our existence. The simple act of breathing encapsulates the cyclic nature of life. Song does too, though perhaps in a more abstract way. In song, a call awaits a response; in song, silence is broken and inevitably restored.” —composer Juri Seo