Stray Birds

Stray Birds was written in the Fall and Summer of 2025 for Ekmeles vocal ensemble and Mivos Quartet. This work sets adapted writings of Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Stapledon and Tagore were polymaths, pacifists, and universalists. I bring them together in celebration of their shared optimism and overlapping philosophies as well as for their contrasting writing styles. Tagore will often represent his ideas through intimate, personal relationships, while Stapledon describes societies and large groups, often never mentioning a single individual.

The Stapledon text originates from his 1930 novel, Last and First Men, which explores the possibilities of humanity in the near and distant future, written like an ethnographic report. I set excerpts of a chapter describing a humanity obsessed with sound and music, which shapes religion, social structures, and leads to eventual societal collapse. The Tagore texts are derived from four poems from his 1916 collection, Stray Birds, which Tagore himself translated from Bengali into English. These poems I have translated once again from English into pseudo-proto-Indo-European, which is a hypothesized language derived from Indo-European languages, a kind of missing linguistic link. By doing so, I am attempting to create a sense of cultural distance, while maintaining some strange familiarity.

I conceived of these Tagore sections as the music being created in Stapledon’s hypothetical society obsessed with sound. The music alternates between Tagore and Stapledon three times during the piece, and is written in an extended just intonation system that centers on the note D and has 27 notes per octave. One string on each of the string instruments is retuned to fit with this harmonic system and bring out the extreme consonance and dissonance that the harmonic system was designed to maximize the resonance of the retuned instruments.

Commissioned by Ekmeles with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Premiere: Ekmeles and Mivos Quartet, Cary Hall, New York, November 1, 2025.