LIVESTREAM Ten Thousand Birds // Live Streamed Music Video Launch

20 birds, 3 frogs and 14 musicians at home with their phones.

Join us at sunset on ​an ordinary Tuesday in this extraordinary time as UNSW’s New Music Collective brings the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams' Ten Thousand Birds into vivid, warbling, chirping, mesmerising, bustling and iridescent life. 

Working from their seperate homes, the collective transforms this luminescent piece, based on musical transcription of bird-song, into an hour-long music artwork. They'll take you on an audio-visual adventure that spans the full cycle of the sun. Listen out for the chirping of the white-throated sparrow in the Morning, the woodpeckers' cacophonous chorus in the Afternoon, the mysterious and eerie owls calling in the Night, and the resplendent red-winged blackbirds announcing the new day when the Morning light returns again.

Featuring some of UNSW's most talented, imaginative and adventurous musicians, this music video will bring together the sights and sounds of this experience at a time when many of us yearn for communion with the natural world.  

Ten Thousand Birds has only been performed in Australia once before, and is typically performed in large open spaces with the audience able to wander among the performers, who are improvising their sequence of bird-calls in response to each other. No two performances are ever the same.

To connect with this experiment we invite you to tune in to the live launch of the video, scheduled so you can watch ​and listen while surrounded by the changing light of the setting sun. UNSW New Music Collective director and internationally-acclaimed pianist Dr. Sonya Lifschitz will host the evening live, sharing insights and anecdotes about the work, the composer and the creative process, along with excerpts of the score and student artwork made in response to this piece.

Register to receive a reminder with the link before the live event begins.