A Forest Unfolding

A Forest Unfolding is a collaborative work inspired by recent scientific research into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees. Four writers-the environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof, along with the novelists Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson-selected prose passages and poems on the relations among people and trees. They presented these selections to four composers-Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner, Stephen Jaffe, and David Kirkland Garner-who set these words into a linked sequence of recitatives and arias. The resulting whole traces a narrative arc beginning with human estrangement from nature and ending with a glimpse of the endless cooperation that knits a forest together.