‘Carnival of the Nearly Extinct Animals’ celebrates species with song

Once upon a time, flocks of passenger pigeons were so dense they blocked the sun like great gray thunderclouds flying overhead. Composer Stephanie Ann Boyd imagines this with music. “You will feel this movement before you hear it: a deep rumble in the low voices of the orchestra suddenly crescendo and explode into a grand, flying murmuration of sound and flurry,” Boyd writes. The passenger pigeon movement is part of Carnival of the Nearly Extinct Animals, a work honoring species facing extinction and a few that have already crossed the threshold. This staged production pairing music with puppetry, dance, and spoken word opens at the historic Hawaii Theatre in Honolulu on Sept. 18 and 19, produced by Ocean Music Action in partnership with the Hawaii Theatre Center. Carnival of the Nearly Extinct Animals has 14 movements covering 13 species: tigers, bees and butterflies, polar bears, hawksbill turtles, elephants, black rhinos, coral, blue whales, ivory-billed woodpeckers, passenger pigeons, gray wolves, American buffalo and kāhuli, snails native to Hawai‘i, with a finale. Boyd designed the orchestral piece as a sister work to an older, famous piece of music called Carnival of the Animals, written by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns in the 1880s. The two pieces share the same number of movements and are roughly the same length. Musicians from the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra play the score in Honolulu, with dancers from Ballet Hawaii and guest artists from New York. Obie Award-winning puppeteer Greg Corbino built dozens of the animals by hand. Hawaiian…This article was originally published on

Mongabay