Meteor of Joy: The Young Peoples Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations

Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent than any of our poems and postulates can touch — the ultimate affirmation of our aliveness, emanating Richard Powers’s beautiful and bittersweet assertion that “the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”

To celebrate twenty years of The Marginalian, composer extraordinaire Paola Prestini set six of her favorite bird divinations to music, which the Young People’s Chorus of New York City brought to life with their commanding innocence and their tender power. Paola’s perfect title for the piece, drawn from one of the cards, captures what every child is when this world is worth of its children: “Meteor of Joy.”