Seven-time Grammy award-winning musician Paul Winter has a new album out — "Horn of Plenty" — and he's on a New England concert tour in December.
Winter is known for his annual solstice concerts and his “earth music,” which features music from around the world, as well as the sounds of animals like wolves, whales and wood thrushes.
Winter talked about his creative approach on Connecticut Public’s “The Colin McEnroe Show.”
Interview highlights
About Winter’s process in creating “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush”
“I had heard wood thrushes for years after I'd come to live in northwest Connecticut, and loved the fact that each one had their own signature song. As you go through the woods, every couple acres, you find a new one. And one June, I heard this new song, a new arrival from probably Costa Rica, and I was so fascinated with it, I listened every morning and evening to hear it was very, very lovely.
“As in most of the wood thrush songs, it's a signature song that he repeats again and again. Hearing the sound through the open windows of our cottage one morning, I went to the piano and found out he was singing in the key of C. So after that, I was thinking of him as my C major wood thrush. And eventually, when I got a good recording of him, and this was over a period of five years, he came back and graced our woods singing that same song in C major.
“I began playing it on my horn, and I realized, wow, the three, four chords that are outlined by these three phrases of the four phrases of three notes each are the same first four chords of the prelude to the 'Well-Tempered Clavier' of Bach. I didn't stop there. It was also the first four chords of the equally famous prelude to the Cello Suites.
“So I decided that all that correlation deserved a piece.”
About giving songwriter credit to birds and Bach alongside himself
“It's a symbolic statement of connectedness, of our relationship with these creatures. And to me, that's one of the hallmarks of this era – I say this era; I'm speaking about the last 80 years – of us reconnecting with creatures, this larger family of life that we were once of, which we were once a much more integral part. And that, to me, has been always very thrilling, a very great source of optimism for me. Even though things go in waves, and we're backpedaling now in many ways, with regard to the creatures. But I think there's something deep there that will stay with us.”
On the name of his new album, “Horn of Plenty,” a play on the traditional Thanksgiving cornucopia
“I thought, well, I could play off the pun of horn because I’ve always thought of my instrument as a horn, and talk about the plenty that is made possible for me musically, in terms of getting to know a little bit of the world.”
About Winter’s solstice concerts
Winter is performing his solstice concerts throughout December.
Upcoming performances are Dec. 13 in Burlington, Vermont; Dec. 17 in Portland, Maine; Dec. 19 in New Haven; Dec. 20 in Great Barrington, Mass.; and Dec. 21 in Florence, Mass. Learn more here.
The conversation
Listen to Winter’s conversation with Colin McEnroe here.
