birds, the binding of

Paul Novak

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Vocal Quartet

2022

9 min.

Mezzo-soprano

Soprano

Program Notes: birds, the binding of (2022) which was written in collaboration with poet Ira Goga for Quince Ensemble, is a work about transformation and the queer body. Goga uses the words of an 18th-century taxidermy manual as the source material for their text, rearranging and repurposing this strange, bodily language into something new and beautiful. This act of queer reinvention - a deconstructing and reassembling of oneself, a rethinking of the physical body – is an idea that has become one of the cores of my work, and it is a process which I enact musically in this piece, breaking down Goga’s text into it’s smallest phonemes and weaving it back together into something different and resonant.
Ensemble Name: Quince Ensemble