Sunday May 31 * 7pm Eastern

RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK: withfriends.co/event/4616372/

Music researcher Ian Nagoski will present an audio documentary project on early 20th century birdsong and its direct relationship on human performance.

It is 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 University of California (LA and Santa Barbar), 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 exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in London and the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin 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.

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.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/humanitys-deepest-longings-found-in-a-birds-song

https://whyy.org/articles/bird-or-human-music-collector-pays-homage-to-bird-songs-and-the-oft-forgotten-imitator/

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/ian-nagoski-interview