Michael Johns

Dr. Michael Johns has spent a lifetime in music, both as vocation and avocation. A graduate of New England Conservatory and Temple University, he earned degrees in French horn performance and music history and has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Seiji Ozawa, the Philadelphia Orchestra with Riccardo Muti, and for Arthur Fiedler, long-time conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and also attended Marlboro Music Festival. He has a life-long fascination about the power of music to inspire and communicate beyond the reach of words, leading to decades of collaborative student-teacher learning at Temple University and Swarthmore College. The Birdsong and Human Musical Inspiration presentation begins by looking at what birdsong is, how and why it is produced, similarities between human and bird music, and the historical record of human fascination with birds and their song. The remainder samples musical excerpts across 800 years of notated human music; music which seeks to literally reproduce the acoustic sound of birdsong or recreate the emotional aura generated by it.