Hudson Valley musicians, scientists, artists and poets celebrate the cicada

Still to come next weekend are the opening reception of a cicada-related art show with spoken-word and acoustic music tributes to the cicadas, at the new location of Donskoj & Company at 101 Abeel Street on the Rondout in Kingston. Curated by Mikhail Horowitz, the event will run from 5 to 9 p.m. on Friday, June 14. Artists featured will include Anita Barbour, Cristina Brusca, Dennis Connors, Bob Crimi, Yourij Donskoj, Jim Fawcett, Jan Harrison, Susan Horowitz, Richmond Johnson, Hal Krieger, Polly Law, Fawn Potash, Jacquie Roland, Cynthia Winika and Carol Zaloom. Performers will include Spider Barbour, Wendy Kagan, Alison Koffler-Wise, Gilles Malkine, Pauline Oliveros, the Princes of Serendip (T. G. Vanini and Julie Parisi), Cheryl Rice, Linda Weintraub and Horowitz himself, who promises, “We’re going to welcome them in properly.” He also notes that video artist Steven Kolpan, who participated in the first Celebration in ’96, has found an early VHS videotape from 1972 titled Cicada Mantra that is “still playable” and will be screened at the opening.

On the following afternoon, Saturday, June 15, “The mayor graciously gave us use of Rotary Park for three hours,” from 3 to 6 p.m. Situated right on the Hudson River across the road from Kingston Point Beach, the park will provide a beautiful setting for the Cicada Celebration’s outdoor concert. Those who wish to attend the Saturday event are encouraged to ride the trolley from the Rondout Historic District Rotary Park, and to bring a picnic and a blanket or lounge chair so you can practice your Deep Listening in comfort.

Performers will include Spider Barbour, Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine, Ione, David Rothenberg with Tony Levin and Pauline Oliveros, the Princes of Serendip, Chuck Stein, If Bwana (Al Margolis and Lisa Kelley) and Ryan Ross Smith and Torben Pastore. ECM recording artist Rothenberg has a special interest in cicada song. He is the author of the book and CD Why Birds Sing, published in seven languages and the subject of a BBC television documentary. He is also the author of numerous other books on music, art and nature, including Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales, and Survival of the Beautiful, about aesthetics in evolution. This spring he releases a book and CD called Bug Music, featuring the sounds of the entomological world.

Finally, on Sunday, June 16 from 1 to 3 p.m., artist/naturalists Spider and Anita Barbour will conduct a guided visit to Eve’s Point, at the end of Lauren Tice Road in Saugerties, where the cicadas will presumably be doing most of the singing. Admission to all of these events is free. More information about the activities and participants, plus recordings of cicada song and poetry and music from the 1996 Celebration, are available online at https://deeplistening.org/site/cicadas.

Thinking back on all the milestones in human activity that have occurred since he last welcomed the masses of red-eyed, six-legged visitors – 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election of America’s first black president – Horowitz observes, “All this has been one night’s sleep for the cicadas.”

Sadly he notes that their habitat has been shrinking, as places that once were meadows get covered with blacktop. “Their environment becomes more circumscribed by each passing cycle…Their numbers are going to be dwindling.”

This fact may please some who view them as pests, but as Horowitz notes, the creatures are basically harmless. “They can’t bite, they can’t sting, they have absolutely no defenses. They mate and lay their eggs. That’s it.” Perhaps if more humans joined him in celebrating the cicadas’ brief visits, we’d be inspired to make this Earth a more welcoming “afterlife” for those who share it, instead of paving their Paradise – however infrequently we may hear their unearthly song.

Heptadecennial Sonnet (14 lines + 3) for the Seventeen-Year Cicadas

Up from under the world as it was then
When summer trees were one continuous hum
As countless predecessors raised a din
Whose echo now impels the ones who come

From root-entangled meshes of deep sleep
Counting seventeen changes, cold to warm
Growing slowly into perfected shape
Until the signal bids them rise and swarm

And storm this world that is their afterlife
The sunny place they joyously reclaim
Each seventeenth June, on every singing leaf
Renewed by wild revelers out of time

And out of time their overwhelming sound
Returns into the darkness unexplained.
As years and wars and nations wheel around,
This world in all its brightness is sustained
By singers deeply dreaming underground.

– Mikhail Horowitz