Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble continues its 51st season with a concert in Waltham, MA, with music focused on mind, body, and environment, as the ensemble continues to explore a new era of passionately bringing cutting-edge music of living composers to a diverse public.

The concert is centered around Luke Blackburn’s Menagerie of Spectacular Creatures: Insecta, a nearly 30-minute multi-movement collection. Blackburn engages in a practice of “docu-composition”, loosely following the model Camille Saint-Saens provides in Le carnaval des animaux, for insects! The music brings awareness of endangered species and its effect on our ecosystems in decline. Each movement—referencing monarch butterflies, Hercules beetles, and fireflies—is designed as a small snippet of the insect’s life, sometimes from the human perspective, sometimes from the insect’s perspective, and occasionally both.

String and saxophone duos by Dorothy Chang and Keyna Wilkins round out the program. Chang’s Walk on Water considers this sacred natural resource as a metaphor for time – “the flow of time, the stream or tide of time.” Australian composer Keyna Wilkins’s direct and impactful sounds address current issues of climate change, and, following artist Reiko Azuma’s visual artwork, invite us to examine the “endless expansiveness of cosmology of human heart.”

Featuring:

Compositions

Luke Blackburn: Menagerie of Spectacular Creatures: Insecta

Dorothy Chang: Walk on Water

Keyna Wilkins: A Glimpse into Eternity

Keyna Wilkins: Scorched Earth

Musicians

Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin, flutes

Diane Heffner, clarinets

Seychelle Dunn-Corbin, baritone saxophone

Christopher Oldfather, piano

Lilit Hartunian, violin

Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello