Between 2006 and 2022, Birmingham Trees for Life was responsible for the planting of 100,000 trees across the city and surrounding areas, increasing its canopy by 10%. Birmingham Contemporary Music Group played its part, too, with workshops and education initiatives, and to mark the end of this phase of the project it commissioned a large-scale choral work celebrating trees from Christian Mason.
With a text by Paul Griffiths, The Singing Tree is an “environmental cantata” for five solo voices (members of Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart), children’s choir (Finchley Children’s Music Group) and a large ensemble. Mason writes that he finds “analogies between trees and the musical meanings and processes that coalesce in [his] work”. He also notes that Griffiths has supplied him with a “wonderfully arborescent text”, which is printed in the shape of a tree, and grows exponentially across the seven sections from the single word “tree” that is set in the first movement, to four words in the second, 16 in the third, and so on.
