Songs in the key of life
On a raw evening at the tail end of last year, I found myself huddled among a gaggle of likeminded people in Somerset. As the light faded, so did our chatter. The whisper of starlings performing their sinuous aerial ballet mesmerised us; spirits took flight, soaring and swooping with songs and wingbeats clattering softly like hundreds of paper fans unfolding.
Then, after the last of the birds’ calls ebbed away, we were led along a storm-lashed shore, and ambled upriver along meanders writhing with elvers. A trio of microadventures – all experienced not among the reedbeds of the Somerset Levels or on the Quantock coast, but in a small arts venue in central Bath.
My lyrical guide for the evening was Bristol-based singer-songwriter Kitty Macfarlane. Starling Song, which opened her joyful set, features recordings of a murmuration but, in truth, captures the essence of that luminous experience more in tune, rhythm and rhyme. “Above, a leviathan assembles in the sky… They fly over the stories held in the peat / Telling their own in a million wingbeats.”
Macfarlane is among a swelling wave of nature-inspired
