A Season on the Wind & Rivers are our Bros | 2024

A Season on the Wind

A new multimedia work by a creative dream-team comprised of Australian arts

organisation The Bowerbird Collective, singer Majel Connery, and composer Doug Balliett.

A Season on the Wind tells the story of the epic migration of birds on the American

continent through live performance, visual projections and immersive soundscapes.

This new work comes through invitation from the Biggest Week in American Birding

(BWIAB), one of the most important birding events in the world, to adapt the story from

leading author Kenn Kaufman's book of the same name. Drawing on scientific and

traditional knowledge, stories, a newly created musical score and imagery from across the

American Flyway, this performance is a musical and visual odyssey, and an uplifting call to

action. A Season on the Wind will premier at the BWIAB in May of 2024, followed by

extensive touring across the USA.

The Rivers are our Brothers

A song cycle on ecological responsibility composed and performed by Majel Connery in a

new trio arrangement for Bowerbird Collective. Told from the point of view of the land, the

songs in the cycle take a first-person view of nature, ascribing human qualities and feelings

to elements of the landscape. Connery premiered Rivers in 20 outdoor concerts in the

Sierra Valley (CA) and has since toured the cycle for audiences young and old at

arboretums and museums around the country.

Who?

The Bowerbird Collective are gaining an international reputation as multimedia storytellers, curators and

performers crossing the arts/science divide. Their award-winning productions include Where Song Began, Life

on Land's Edge and Songs of Disappearance, which reached the top of the ARIA charts in 2022.

Majel Connery is a vocalist, composer and roving musicologist making electro-art-dream-pop with repressed

classical influences. Her voice has been called “superb” by the New York Times and her composition “thoroughly

Schubertian" by the Wall Street Journal. As an artist-scholar, she has taught at UC Berkeley, Stanford, Wellesley

and Princeton, and hosts the podcast “A Music of Their Own" on NPR.

Doug Balliett is a composer, instrumentalist and poet based in New York City. The Los Angeles Times recently

wrote "Bassist Doug Balliett, who teaches a course on the Beatles at the Juilliard School and writes cantatas for

Sunday church services, as well as wacky pop operas, is in a class of his own.

" The New York Times has described

his compositions as "brainily bubble gum and lovably shaggy.

"

3 performers: vocals, keyboard, violin, cello.

Multimedia recital: projections, soundscapes.

Key Details

A world-class, 90-minute performance

of contemporary American music.

New audience engagement with

environmental conservation across

partner networks.

USA tour in May 2024.