Course Description

Instructor: Judith Costello

From barnyard chickens to village swallows, from waddling penguins to thieving magpies, from hummingbirds and ostriches to cuckoos and cranes and nightingales — composers have quoted and described all kinds of birds since at least the mid-1300s. And as recording technologies have become more available, many composers in the 20th and 21st centuries have incorporated actual birdsongs into their works. 

Over this four-week class, we’ll celebrate the coming of spring by listening to music of the season’s first musical harbingers — the birds.
 

Bio: Judith Costello teaches courses on music about non-musical subjects -- the weather, works of literature, landscapes, animals, human enterprises -- and has been an OLLI@Emory instructor for the past two years. She is a native of Oak Park, Illinois, and has lived in New York, Florida, and Michigan. She was producer and on-air host of classical music programs for NPR stations WUSF (Tampa, Florida) and WFBE (Flint, Michigan), and later worked for 25 years as Political and Academic Officer at the Canadian Consulate General in Atlanta before retiring in 2013.