Avant Gardens: Songbirds (Kurraba Point)

Beguiling audiences since 2019, Songbirds has become an Ensemble Offspring crowd-favourite. Ever since, we have toured Songbirds around Australia and the world, and our home crowd have been begging us to bring it into their gardens. Now Songbirds returns as a 30th birthday treat for our first musical garden party of 2025.

In an intimate, salon setting, Nature comes to you, as a trio of flute, clarinet and percussion evokes virtuosic avian displays and the weird and wonderful sounds of the Australian bush. The musical guest list includes the pied butcherbird, magpies, a laughing kookaburra, a frenzied flock of rainbow lorikeets, even a nightingale… Everything you’ll hear was written especially for Ensemble Offspring by composers who’ve woken up with ‘Nature’s first musicians’, hung out with them on their balconies and documented their songs. Brenda Gifford and Nardi Simpson bring Indigenous perspective, turning eyes and ears to the sky. The results are musical conversations – scintillating and playful – as we literally riff with the birds.

Ensemble Offspring “capture the calls and songs of Australia’s birds and create something new: familiar, yes, but unique and engaging and exciting too.”
—Australian Arts Review

Program

FIONA LOADER Lorikeet Corroboree (2015)
ROBERT DAVIDSON Kookaburra Riff (2024)
BRENDA GIFFORD Mungala (Clouds) (2018)
NARDI SIMPSON Of Stars and Birds (2020)
ROBERT DAVIDSON Raven Riff (2024)
KATE MOORE Blackbird Song (2018)
HOLLIS TAYLOR & JON ROSE Bitter Springs Creek 2014 (2019)
CAITLIN YEO A Tawny Tale (2024)*
GERARD BROPHY Beautiful Birds: Flamingos, Hummingbirds (2019)
ROBERT DAVIDSON Magpie Riff (2024)

* World Premiere & Commissioned by the Silo Collective

Artists

Claire Edwardes (Artistic Director, percussion)
Lamorna Nightingale (flutes)
Jason Noble (clarinets)