On May 16, Natalie Spears will grace the stage of TACAW with the Aspen Music Festival String Quintet — comprised of Delaney Meyers, Camille Backman, Ross Kribbs, Sarah Graf and Carl Meinecke — featuring compositions by Spears’ longtime collaborator and friend, Ilan Blanck, for an evening that will take the audience on a musical journey paralleled with the sounds of birds.
“We’ll begin with the dawn chorus, which is that chorus of sound you hear the birds making right as the sun rises,” Spears explained to The Sopris Sun. “We’ll move through different phases of the day. It won’t all be birds, but there’ll be different energetic snippets woven in.”
The performance is the result of a collaboration between the Roaring Fork Audubon Society and Aspen Music Festival. It will open with a presentation of works from “The Birdsong Project,” launched during the pandemic in partnership with the National Audubon Society. That project aimed to unite artists through bird songs, celebrate the intersections of art, music and nature and educate people on conservation efforts for avian populations.
Spears had the opportunity to work with The Birdsong Project last summer for the title track of her album, “Hymn of Wild Things,” inspired by the sandhill crane. Many of the songs on Spears’ album were inspired by avian wildlife, woven with themes of grief and transformation.
“The Birdsong Project did some programming with the Aspen Music Festival last summer which is how I became involved,” said Spears. “Aspen Music Festival gave us funding to go into some of the schools and to demonstrate what happens when you take folk music traditions and mix them with more traditionally classical string arrangements to demonstrate their versatility.”
Coming up on the first anniversary of the release of her latest record, Spears looks forward to sharing the stage with collaborators again after embarking on some solo ventures.
“I think the success has been learning how my voice is outside of collaborations,” said Spears. “It was meaningful to put out the album, and it’s also been a year to rest and decide what’s next and continue to integrate the parts of the record process that I loved into my next projects.”
Spears discussed how many people live in the Roaring Fork Valley because of the access to nature and the outdoors, and how the intersection between music and nature can be good for folks to be open to and explore.
“A lot of us come here just to live close to the wilderness. For me, I feel like the birds are my umbilical cord to that,” said Spears. “The world feels like such a shit show right now and I think we get really far away from our hearts when life is hard, because we get into fear based mode. I think music, wild spaces, beauty and art is where we can find reprieve for our souls.”
“We can’t always think our way through things,” she concluded. “Sometimes we just need to feel a heart connection to the world, and I think that music and art is a wonderful way to do that.”
In a Nutshell:
Who: Natalie Spears & AMF String Quintet
Where: TACAW
When: May 16 at 8pm
Tickets: www.tacaw.org