birds aren’t real

May 2, 2026
Kendra Balmer, Michael Blaakman, Sonja Bontrager, Iris Chan, Daya Deuskar, Noah Farnsworth, Julie Frey, Walker Gosrich, Matt Hall, Amy Hochstetler, Elissa Kranzler, Erina Pearlstein, Rebekah Reddi, Joe Rim, Jordan Rock, Kevin Romano, Melinda Steffy, Ben Willis, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman

featuring Irina Rostomashvili, violin

Abbie Betinis, “Be Like the Bird”

William Byrd, “Vigilate”

Seán Doherty, “Under-Song”

Dominick DiOrio, “Cuckoo, Cuckoo”

William Cornish, “Ah Robin, Gentle Robin”

Maurice Ravel, “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis”

traditional Venezuelan arr. Cristian Grases, “La Paloma (Gaita de tambora)”
Kacey Musgraves arr. Kevin Vondrak, “Cardinal”

R. Vaughan Williams arr. Paul Drayton, “The Lark Ascending”

Manning Sherwin arr. Gene Puerling, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”

Caroline Shaw, “and the swallow (psalm 84)”

The Beatles arr. Emanuel Roll, “Blackbird”

Charles Gabriel arr. Zanaida Stewart Robles, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”

Notes on the Program

In January 2017, hundreds of thousands participated in Women’s Marches around the world, protesting to voice their alarm and build solidarity in the face of the incoming federal regime in the United States. Some events also drew counter-protestors, including in Memphis, Tennessee, where Peter McIndoe, a college student visiting friends, met the counterprotestors’ effort to deny the marchers’ fear with his own attempt in counterfactuals: as reported by the New York Times, “he ripped a poster off a wall, flipped it over and wrote three random words: ‘Birds Aren’t Real.’”

As McIndoe explained to the Times in 2021, “It was a spontaneous joke, but was a reflection of the absurdity everyone was feeling.” McIndoe’s impulsive protest—inventing a rallying cry that felt even more blatantly bewildering than those of the counterprotestors—grew into a viral online movement positing a deliciously bonkers satire of disinformation: that the birds we see today aren’t real animals but actually government-sponsored drones deployed for mass surveillance. Adherents, known as the Bird Brigade, mourn the loss of billions of live birds who were systematically eliminated by the CIA in the late twentieth century in order to make room for “robotic replicas.”

To be clear: Birds Aren’t Real is a satirical movement, mocking the fervor of conspiracy theorists and propaganda through an extended exercise in what scholars call “collaborative world building” and what most of us first experienced as playing pretend. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to feel some kinship with those who fervently believe there’s an underlying explanation for so much of what feels confounding, confusing, and isolating in the world—building and sustaining trust is not for the faint of heart!

The cleverness of McIndoe’s premise is also borne out through centuries of artistic tradition: since birds have so often been figured as messengers or omens, couldn’t they also be carrying information in both directions? What do the birds know of us—and who else might hear them?

Be Like the Bird

Reflecting this discomfort, we open with a deliberate reinterpretation of a canon by contemporary American composer Abbie Betinis (b. 1980). The text, adapted from the final stanza of a poem by Victor Hugo, offers a wonderfully musical metaphor for facing one’s fears. Though we deeply appreciate both Betinis’s inviting setting and the intentions behind Hugo’s poetry, we’re flitting in a different direction today, emphasizing the thicket of sound produced by the canon and allowing ourselves to perch in a moment of uncertainty––even risk––rather than reaching closure.

Vigilate

The English Renaissance composer William Byrd (c. 1540–1623) was no stranger to government surveillance: a devout Catholic during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, his repeated refusal to attend Anglican services and his association with prominent Catholics, including some who celebrated Mass secretly, led not only to regular fines but even to having his home searched and his movements restricted. Perhaps reflecting this atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety, his five-voice “Vigilate” excerpts New Testament verses encouraging the faithful to remain as attentive to salvation as would servants during their master’s time away from the house. Byrd’s masterful text-painting creates an intense, adrenaline-fueled warning, from the ascending proclamation of a crowing rooster to the lulling suspensions as the servants are cautioned against falling asleep.

Under-Song

A distinctly inhuman wariness pervades “Under-Song” by the contemporary Irish composer Seán Doherty (b. 1987), thanks to a range of extended techniques—textless vocalizations, unpitched consonants, tongue clicks, and extended glissandi—evoking a murmuring, vaguely ominous forest. Doherty takes inspiration from the text by Irish poet Lola Ridge, noting that she “uses musical metaphors and word-play in practically every line of this poem. . . . The under-song of this poem is the medieval philosophy of musica universalis, as the poet ascends through each of its three categories: from music made by singers, to the music of the earth and finally, to the music of the spheres, where the dance of the celestial bodies—the sun, moon, and planets—are a form of music.” Perhaps reminding us that music made by the earth and the stars may bear no relationship to our human tones, the piece wavers tantalizingly in and out of consonance, deliberately unsettling us with plaintive bird-like calls and harmonies that slowly warp.

Cuckoo, Cuckoo

If “Vigilate” and “Under-Song” suggest that one might have cause to remain alert in the natural world, contemporary American composer Dominick DiOrio’s (b. 1984) mischievous “Cuckoo, Cuckoo” makes explicit the threat of human fallibility. Thanks to text from an early Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, the jaunty, lilting depiction of springtime delights is brought to a crashing, chromatic halt by the appearance of a cuckoo bird, which once symbolized cuckoldry, or a husband deceived by an unfaithful wife. The ornithological truth is less patriarchal but still sobering: cuckoos are brood parasites that do not build their own nests but rather lay a single egg in another species’ nest, stealing one of the host’s eggs in order to make the swap unnoticeable; newly hatched cuckoos then push the remaining host eggs out of the nest. (One of our birdwatching singers would like it noted that brown-headed cowbirds are also brood parasites, though at least newly hatched brown-headed cowbirds don’t murder their nestmates.) In ancient times, naturalists conflated the cuckoo hen’s “adulteration” of another bird’s nest with philandering, leading to Shakespeare’s warning. DiOrio captures the sneaky juxtaposition of the text in pin-point reversals of mood, with cheerful, almost-jazzy stanzas interrupted by the ominous, menacing cuckoo.

Ah Robin, Gentle Robin

Lacking today’s hyperconnected culture, were all Renaissance writers concerned that they were being deceived by their lovers? Perhaps. In the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who authored “Ah Robin, Gentle Robin” that William Cornish (c. 1468–1523) composed as a canon for three voices, this seems like blatant projection: Wyatt had at least one affair that resulted in multiple children, was imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of committing adultery with Anne Boleyn, and spent more than a decade separated from his wife on grounds of—you guessed it!—adultery. This perhaps explains why C. S. Lewis described Wyatt’s poetry as “full of resentment . . . how badly his mistress has treated him, how well he deserves to be treated, and how much more fortunate he has been with other women, how sorry she will be some day—such are his recurrent themes.” (Notably, Anne Boleyn herself and five other men who were accused of adultery with her were executed, so one might be forgiven for wishing that Sir Thomas had perhaps read the room and reined in his complaints.) Nonetheless, we are enchanted by Cornish’s lilting three-part setting, with the gossipy first line, asking a robin about their leman, or lover, offered as a canon while the melody floats above. 

Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis

Birds might once have been messengers for more poignant news of the heart, as in “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis,” the second of Maurice Ravel’s Trois Chansons, which together comprise the only a cappella choral music he ever published. Ravel (1875–1937) wrote the texts and music for all three pieces in the winter of 1914–1915 while waiting to be enlisted in the army. The other two songs in the set employ light, whimsical themes, but “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis” is unmistakably the product of contemplating war. A woman greets three birds-of-paradise, each representing a color from France’s tricolored flag and each bearing something from her lover, who has gone to the war. The woman’s anxious vigil at home is embodied by a soprano soloist, with the blue, white, and red birds sung by tenor, mezzo-soprano, and baritone soloists respectively. The three birds bring echoes of the beloved’s voice and tender gestures, while the wordless, plaintive choral part hints at the woman’s worst fear: that her lover is dead at the front. In the final phrase, as the treble voices close to a mournful hum, the woman asks the red bird to take her own heart back—perhaps herself dying of grief, with the red bird bearing a final, undeliverable message for its return journey.

La Paloma

In a change of mood, “La Paloma” offers a contemporary adaptation of a traditional gaita de tambora, or “drum gaita,” from the folk music of the Zulia state in western Venezuela. Publisher Gunilla Luboff notes that Cristian Grases’ (b. 1973) setting reflects drum gaitas’ typical combination of “elements of Iberian, African, and Indigenous music” with a “fixed refrain” and “call and response style.” The declamatory, evocative text teeters between philosophy, despair, and raucousness, with a range of moods so wide as to suggest that the only way to navigate such chaos is to surrender to it. Accordingly, the piece is fueled by a propulsive, hectic texture and driving rhythms––we don’t need to understand everything in order to join the dance.

Cardinal

Might birds truly be messengers, or might we be getting a little too far into our own heads? Country singer Kacey Musgraves (b. 1988) contemplates exactly this in “Cardinal,” which she released in 2024 after losing a dear friend to COVID in 2020. Our own dear friend and Chestnut Street Singers alum Kevin Vondrak created this choral arrangement for us, resetting Musgraves’ pop stylings for today’s world premiere. We love the precision of the lyrics as Musgraves questions whether she’s experiencing a repeated coincidence or a “message from the other side.”

The Lark Ascending

The titular bird in “The Lark Ascending” bears a message that is at once simple and indecipherable: its song. The great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) crafted this long-beloved work in phases, originally writing for solo violin and piano in 1914 before revising the work after World War I to showcase solo violin and orchestra. It is a joy for us that contemporary composer Paul Drayton created this arrangement of Vaughan Williams’ orchestra piece for solo violin and choir in 2019. As Drayton notes, “Vaughan Williams’s pragmatic approach to music-making is well-known, with phrases often cued in to other parts to cover instruments that might not be available. . . . One may imagine Vaughan Williams, himself a regular arranger and a proponent of musical inclusiveness, sanctioning a choral backdrop to his lark.” 

Vaughan Williams’s title comes from an 1881 poem of the same name by Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith. The original 122-line poem is a rapturous depiction of beauty for its own sake, following a singing lark “up and up . . . to lift us with him as he goes.” Drayton sets as the choir’s text twelve non-consecutive lines from Meredith’s poem that Vaughan Williams had inscribed at the top of an early draft of the score, but the ensemble is equally likely to be wordless, channeling clarinets, flutes, horns, and strings in conversation with the virtuosic lark. In addition to bird-like patterns of crystalline thirty-second notes, Vaughan Williams’s lifelong devotion to folk music comes through vividly, with snatches of folksong in lilting melodies and dance-like rhythm passed between the violinist and choir and back again. 

Deftly reflecting Meredith’s full text, the simultaneous complexity and seeming naturalism of Vaughan Williams’ music challenges us to accept that beauty need not be analyzed or owned in order to be cherished. The lesson of the lark is truer even today than it was for Vaughan Williams and Meredith: our ability to notice, wonder, and exult is its own miracle, still somehow withstanding the quotidian assault on our attention. The lark’s song—voiced purely for its own pleasure, not for any audience or gain––offers us a glimpse of this power, greater even than the harrowing forces of fear, exploitation, and division.

We trust you will share our delight in welcoming violinist Irina Rostomashvili as today’s lark. Her rendition of this beautiful work calls us to another stanza from Meredith’s original poem that once inspired Vaughan Williams: 

Was never voice of ours could say

Our inmost in the sweetest way,

Like yonder voice aloft, and link

All hearers in the song they drink.

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square

After the transcendence of “The Lark Ascending,” we’re ready to believe that birds might indeed still be able to carry us beyond the mundane. This classic Manhattan Transfer arrangement of the World War II standard “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” offers a fond recollection of an evening that was almost too good to be true: streets paved with stars, angels dining at the next table, and a nightingale singing in a busy neighborhood of downtown London. Surely we know the truths of our hearts, so why shouldn’t that bird also be real?

and the swallow (psalm 84)

Sometimes we might want to emulate the birds, not just be lured by them. The initial simplicity of “and the swallow (psalm 84)” by contemporary American composer Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) is deceptive, as the overlapping voices cascade seamlessly between triplet and duple rhythms to create a shimmering texture. Shaw excerpts just a few phrases from the original psalm, resulting in an intimate expression of yearning for peace and safety.

Blackbird

The Beatles’ classic “Blackbird” strikes a similar note, here rearranged in barbershop-inspired style by Emanuel Roll. Paul McCartney (b. 1942) has cited various inspirations for the song, including hearing the call of a blackbird while studying transcendental meditation in India and responding to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Whatever its origin, this bird now bears more than a message––it’s a harbinger, even a movement, called by the refrain: “You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”

His Eye Is on the Sparrow

Zanaida Stewart Robles’ gospel-style arrangement of this classic Charles Gabriel hymn offers another vision on the possibilities we might find, given courage enough to both seek and be seen. Robles writes, “I conceived this arrangement in 2005 while I was a first-year graduate conducting student under Paul A. Smith at CSU Northridge. Professor Smith was the first Black choral educator with whom I had ever studied . . . The words: ‘I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free’ represent the joy and freedom I experienced from feeling fully seen and heard by my teacher on a daily basis.” Like Robles in grad school, like the lark, like all today’s visionaries and believers: may we all find power in being seen and heard . . . at least, when we want to be.

Notes by Caroline Winschel