LONGER BLURB

This work began with a single blackbird at dawn. Composer Natalia Beylis stood in a field in Leitrim at 6 a.m., looking across a recently clear-felled landscape and reflecting on a conversation with a farmer friend about how birds are the architects of the living landscape. That moment planted the seed for Around Here, The Birds Plant The Trees, a 45-minute composition about listening — to the land, to birds, and to the spaces in between.

Beylis brought together an ensemble — cellist Eimear Reidy, fiddler Tola Custy, violists Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh and Ultan O’Brien, and percussionist Willie Stewart — and together they began to write the piece by spending time in the field listening, taking in the rustle of hedgerows, the whisper of wind through stumps and saplings, and the calls of birds shaping the landscape. From this shared act of listening, the composition took form: collaboratively written, rooted in the textures and rhythms of the field, and ultimately conducted live so that each performance unfolds as a unique variation.

The field itself is surrounded by hedgerows on 4 sides which are carefully managed by Natalia to provide food and shelter for wrens, robins, blackbirds, shrews, bats, and beetles. Two adjoining fields under her stewardship are cultivated to support wildflowers, dragonflies, and butterflies, allowing natural patterns of growth and seasonal change to flourish. In contrast, two neighboring fields are owned by a faceless commercial forestry company; both were clear-felled once, and while one has been replanted into another industrial cycle with Sitka spruce, the other has, for now, been left to rewild. Here, birds, squirrels, and the wind bring new growth, scattering seeds that may one day create a thriving native woodland — a process entirely outside human planning. Yet the future of both fields remains uncertain, highlighting the complex interplay between stewardship, ecological care, and the policies and priorities that govern the land.

In performance, Natalia Beylis transforms the breath of the field into a live sound collage of strings, percussion, and found textures. She is joined by a remarkable ensemble of musicians — each rooted in distinct musical traditions yet united by a shared spirit of experimentation.

Together, they reshape the score in real time, so each night unfolds as a new variation — a living work that changes as the land changes.

Around Here, The Birds Plant The Trees captures this interplay between personal stewardship, natural agency, and industrial impact. Each note and pause evokes the rhythms of growth and regeneration, inviting audiences to hear the land and its inhabitants as active participants in the music. The rustle of beetles in the hedgerow, the squeak of leaning Sitka spruce, a lone curlew’s call — these became the pulse and melody of the composition. Birds, squirrels, wind, and human hands act as co-composers, weaving a shifting soundworld of oaks, saplings, and human heartbeats. This is not a concert to watch from a distance; it is a piece about listening to the land, its past and possible futures, and your own place within it.