Musical & Magical Birds Of Flight

How about an album full of songs in dedication to birds? This is Romantic avian poetry, of beauty and majesty, suitable for our modern tastes. It might even be necessary. Yes, this is true.

This is magically and majestically beautiful. I am all but certain that upon listening to this song and watching the accompanying video, your spirit will take flight and soar upward. Like a bird flying majestically. Here are the lyrics and the video, which matches the voices of the British vocal ensemble, Voces8, and the musical sounds of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

“A Hundred Thousand Birds” is the fourth track on the album, The Lost Birds, which was released on September 30, 2022.

The site writes the following as a way of introduction to this wonderful and inspiring musical performance:

The Lost Birds is a musical memorial to bird species driven to extinction by humankind. Sweeping and elegiac, it's a haunting tribute to those soaring flocks that once filled our skies, but whose songs have since been silenced. It's a celebration of their feathered beauty: their symbolism as messengers of hope, peace, and renewal. But it's also a warning about our own tenuous existence on the planet: that the fate that befell these once soaring flocks foreshadows our own extinction.

A Hundred Thousand Birds
by Christina Georgina Rossetti & Christopher Tin

A hundred thousand birds salute the day
One solitary bird salutes the night
Its mellow grieving wiles our grief away
And tunes our weary watches to delight
It seems to sing the thoughts we cannot say
And to set them right
Until we feel once more that may is may
And hope some buds may bloom without a blight
A hundred thousand birds salute the day
One solitary bird salutes the night
This solitary bird outweighs, outvies
The hundred thousand merry-making birds
Whose innocent warblings might make us wise
Would we but follow when they bid us rise
Would we but set their notes of praise to words
And launch our hearts up with them to the skies

This composition by Christopher Tin is an adaption of a poem (Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets, Stanza 20), by Christina Georgina Rossetti¹, the 19th century English Romantic poet²; Rossetti was born into a highly gifted literary family and I would recommend that you explore her poetry in more detail. Of particular interest is the exploration of expression, feelings and emotion and their immediate connections to Nature, an idea that has regained currency in our age. With good reason, I think. We live in an an age where such connections are becoming harder to make for reasons that have been well known for some time. We feel an alienation from what is important, and sense something has been lost. We fight to regain harmony and sanity in a world that appears to have so little of both. We feel the call of Nature, much in the same way birds call out for their flock members. How do we respond when so many other sounds demand our attention?

We as a species have memories. We need to return to what is important, to what nurtures our soul. This is not the acquisition of things, the accumulation of money or of wealth. This only brings you further away. I must mention beauty; and I, once again, must emphasize the need for it. Beauty. A bird taking a majestic flight is, without a doubt, a thing of beauty. It is also magical. How is it that a bird of 95 grams, Arya the Cockatiel, fly so quickly over the rooftops? How can birds fly thousands of kilometres (or miles) without stopping? How can birds remember their migratory path year after year? What does bird brain really mean? Birds in flight are majestic and magical; birds are true magical beings. Birds bring us so much beauty and joy.

I can’t imagine a world, our Home Earth, without our avian companions. It would be a sad world, indeed. Not one in which I could happily live in; I imagine many of you here would agree. No birds; no beauty; no life. If we desire to live in harmony with ourselves and with other humans—a normal and healthy desire—we need to live in harmony with the natural world and all who lives with us on our Home Earth.

Merci et à bientôt
Born at 315 ppm
Now at 425 ppm

1. Project Canterbury: Christina Georgina Rossetti [1830–1894]: “To look at portraits of Christina is to feel that she was a born mystic; the eyes seem to be filled with inward vision, the entire pose is that of one who holds aloof from earth and its cares and pleasures,' says Miss Mary Bradford Whiting in an article written for the Centenary Commemoration in December, 1930, of the birth of Christina Rossetti. Renunciation, self-effacement, was the keynote of Christina's devotional poetry, but it may be truly said that she was not one of those who have no appreciation of that which they renounce. As Miss Bradford Whiting says: 'Three out of her four grandparents were Italians, and her nature was shot through with that fire of the south which flames up at the sight of beauty and the touch of joy. That her poems are too full of tears is a charge that has been brought against them: but her tears are not a winter rain, cold and cheerless; they are tears of April, with the warm sun shining through them. Wherever her pages are opened, the love of all things beautiful flashes out in some glowing line.”

2. Poetry Foundation: Romanticism: “A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it. English poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and Lord Byron produced work that expressed spontaneous feelings, found parallels to their own emotional lives in the natural world, and celebrated creativity rather than logic.”