Birdsong: Evening Concert

Birdsong: Evening Concert - SALT New Music Festival

SALT Experiment

An immersive musical journey where birdsong, instruments, electronics, movement, and space come together.

For centuries, composers have listened to birds—not only imitating their calls, but finding in them new ways to think about melody, rhythm, freedom, nature, and the act of listening itself.

Birdsong: Evening Concert brings this long musical fascination into the present. The SALT Experiment—an ensemble of established and emerging professionals dedicated to expressive experimentation and artistic exchange—creates an immersive evening of music with and about birdsong.

At the heart of the concert are new miniatures by young composers from British Columbia, Canada, and beyond, each inspired by a bird species found in BC. These short works form part of Catalogue d’oiseaux: BC Miniatures, a new collection created especially for SALT 2026. The composers respond not only to birds’ calls and songs, but also to their movement, habitats, behaviours, and ecological stories.

The new works enter into dialogue with music inspired by birds across several centuries, including compositions by Antonio Vivaldi, François Couperin, John Cage, Ottorino Respighi, Olivier Messiaen, and Toshio Hosokawa.

Rather than presenting these pieces as a conventional sequence, the SALT Experiment weaves them together with recorded birdsong, audiovisual elements, spatial performance, and its own musical reflections. The Phillip T. Young Recital Hall becomes a musical bird paradise—a space in which historical and contemporary music, human performers, technology, and the sounds of the natural world continually encounter one another.

After experiencing birds and music together outdoors during the Birdsong events earlier in the weekend, the evening concert brings nature inside. It asks what happens when the sounds of birds enter the concert hall—and how listening to them might change the way we listen to music.

For SALT 2026: PROXIMITY, Birdsong: Evening explores our closeness to the non-human world and the centuries-long dialogue between musicians and birds. It invites us to listen across species, across generations, and across the boundary between nature and art.

ABOUT SALT EXPERIMENT

The SALT Experiment brings together established and emerging musicians in a flexible ensemble created around experimentation, collaboration, and artistic exchange.

Its musicians approach new and historical repertoire as material for exploration: combining instrumental performance with improvisation, electronics, spatial approaches, and other forms of artistic experimentation.

For Birdsong: Evening Concert, the ensemble becomes part performer and part curator of a continuously unfolding sound world, connecting works from different periods with newly commissioned miniatures and the recorded voices of British Columbia’s birds.

ABOUT CATALOGUE D’OISEAUX: BC MINIATURES

For Catalogue d’oiseaux: BC Miniatures, SALT invited composers to create short new works, each inspired by the song and character of a specific bird found in British Columbia.

The collection draws attention to birds ranging from familiar residents of the region to rare, threatened, and endangered species. Each composer responds differently—sometimes to a bird’s vocalizations, sometimes to its movement or personality, and sometimes to the environmental challenges surrounding its survival.

The miniatures are presented throughout SALT’s Birdsong project in different contexts, including outdoor listening experiences and this indoor evening performance.

ABOUT SALT NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL

The SALT New Music Festival is a contemporary music festival based in Victoria, BC, bringing together British Columbian, Canadian, and international composers and performers.

The 2026 edition explores the theme of Proximity—closeness to one another, to nature, to the universe, and across differences of background, nationality, identity, and generation. Through concerts, outdoor events, movement, and shared listening, SALT creates encounters where new music becomes a space for connection, exchange, and discovery.