Elderflora is a deeply moving concert on the life and death of a tree. Narrated in song from the perspective of the tree itself, Elderflora invites audiences on a musical journey inside the mind of a tree, experiencing its thoughts and feelings in hyperreal detail.
Created by Majel Connery, one of America's most unique and powerful voices, and performed by Connery in collaboration with The Bowerbird Collective, an award-winning Australian virtuosic duo of violin and cello, Elderflora is part classical song cycle, part electronic soundscape, with snatches of madrigals and hymns intersecting with mood paintings that evoke wind, rain, and light. Structured as a series of musical portraits, each movement in the oratorio represents a significant moment in the life of the tree: birth by fire, discovery of the sun, or becoming a mother.
“I want us to see humanity in the world around us,” says Connery. “Music gives me the power to join what we know with what we don’t know: to combine the familiar with the strange. Because if trees have a voice — and I think they do — that voice won’t sound like us. It’s going to sound utterly out of this world.”