Music researcher Ian Nagoski to present birdsong documentary April 8
Music researcher Ian Nagoski will present “Ecstatic and Wingless: Bird Imitation on Four Continents,” an audio documentary project on early 20th century birdsong and its direct relationship on human performance - and human action on birdsong - at 7 p.m., Saturday, April 8, at the Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware.
The documentary tells the story of the first recordings of caged birds and the practice of bird imitation, a field that produced amazing and eccentric celebrities during the 1910s-20s. Rarely heard in recent years, bird imitation was also recorded commercially on every continent by 1925 and likely predates music or language in human history.
Nagoski has published dozens of reissue releases of early 20th century music in languages other than English over the past 10 years. He has presented his work in conferences in over 20 countries, and in the past year he has spoken at the Library of Congress, the University of Chicago and New York University. While he has specialized in the music of immigrants to the U.S. from the Near East, his side project on the earliest recordings of cage birds and bird imitators has resulted in contributions to a current exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London in collaboration with the Center for Post-Natural History and the inclusion of his work on the Moon Ark, the first art work for permanent installation on the moon, as well as recent features on the BBC and The New Yorker.
Nagoski has previously explored the porous boundaries of culture through 78 rpm records of immigrants from collapsing European and Near Eastern empires as they arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and in the process, learned the stories of great, forgotten performers. With “Ecstatic and Wingless,” he has opened his exploration to the world of vaudevillians and bird-fanciers, of canaries, nightingales, finches and the people who studied them, poeticized them and tried to be them.
The address is 30486 Lewes-Georgetown Highway, Lewes. Tickets are $15 cash at the door. For more information, contact Dr. Marcelle Schiff at musicdma@gmail.com.
