Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

A Perth Festival Commission

Australian music legend Paul Kelly and leading Western Australian composer James Ledger bring together musicians from broad-ranging backgrounds to perform bird-inspired poems written by John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Judith Wright, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gwen Harwood, A D Hope and others.

Birds have fascinated poets for centuries, not just for their song and flight but as symbols – of hope, freedom, love, communication, peace, luck good and bad, and migration. What better way to honour them than by sending songs out into the air?

Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds features Seraphim Trio with Anna Goldsworthy on piano, Helen Ayres on violin and Tim Nankervis on cello, along with composer James Ledger and singer-songwriters Paul Kelly and Alice Keath. Together these artists create an evocative soundscape, each poem its own world – delicate and intimate at times, colossal and soaring at others, with everything in between. Banjo with pizzicato strings, synthesizer drones with piano, processed guitar with glockenspiel are just a few of the combinations to be heard.

Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds is a unique marriage of electronics, acoustic instruments and the human voice, celebrating winged creatures from the barn owl to the nightingale, from the thornbill to the falcon, from the magpie to the swan.

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (08) 6488 2000 or by email to festival@perthfestival.com.au

Featured Australian Works

Featured artists

• Performer Paul Kelly
• Performer James Ledger
• Performer Alice Keath
• Performer Seraphim Trio