 This music was actually, it's part of a ballet. The ballet is called The Bird Seller, and the piece is called The Thorn Bird. The lady who wrote the ballet scenario got permission from calling McCullough. I've come back here quite a few times to make recordings with some very talented Aspen music students. And it's fantastic. The violinists that we gave electric violins to, they were really interested in that. We had digital keyboards on either side of the setup. I don't know if you can see that. One looked like a piano. The other, Bo-Gong Hoang was playing standing up some of the time, a little keyboard. She was on the far left, and she's quite an accomplished pianist. I was a student here for three summers, a pretty long time ago. And so right now in New York there is literally nothing in the classical music performance world happening except online. And there was already too much of that before this. And so I find myself in the midst of a group of musicians who want to make something happen. The classical music world has been hit by the difficulties of economics under these circumstances. In today's period of various levels of shutdown, the best economic model for music is to have a low overhead and something that is repeatable. And that's exactly the need this needs. With just a few musicians, in this case four, we can bring to life the symphonic sound, the symphony of strings. What we have actually done is we heard a new sound that has not been heard before. Just a slight variant of the string orchestra. But this is a sound that really was heard for the first time. Coming back here and working with music students on recording new pieces of music. This was called Music in the Mountains, which turned out to be the slogan of all the music festivals in Colorado. The musicians themselves so loved the place here that they wanted to come back and come every summer and start a music festival. So they were the ones that really started all of this. I want to thank you all for coming to this first reopening concert in Aspen. This is, I think, the first open-air classical music concert in Aspen, Colorado, after all the recent problems, and we're very happy to be here. So many wonderful musicians have come through here. And there have been incredibly gritty summer in my adult life, despite the fact that I became a psychologist and taught at Michigan. I came every summer, except for two. I was in the orchestra for 34 years with the festival orchestra. Fantastic. It is fantastic. I interviewed with Charles Jones and became a composition student at the Aspen Music Festival. Since I was definitely into trying to keep musical life alive, even during the shutdowns, I contrived a project to bring Roberto to the top of Aspen Mountain and record a world premiere in a company cellar piece that I had wanted to bring to prod and couldn't. We shot from the top of Aspen Mountain a greeting to prod and to the Pablo Casel Festival on their 70th anniversary from Aspen while every other festival in the world was shut down. I'm actually proud of this and proud of Roberto for doing a fantastic job. Just recorded in the beautiful outdoors, Webster Young's prads for solo cello, for the Prads Music Festival. Félicitations pour votre anniversaire des Rocky Mountains aux États-Unis aux pieds de Mont Canigou. Et au Grand Festival de Prades, Joyeux Anniversaire. Joyeux Anniversaire. We sent the video to prod congratulating them on their 70th anniversary in the middle of the shutdowns. And that led me to continue on trying to do things in the middle of the shutdowns because the musical employment was here so hard. The performing arts in general have taken arguably the biggest hit in this crisis. Many of my friends, colleagues, myself, we've had opportunities, we've had gigs canceled for up until the next year, 2022. It's a big issue within our community and what we're doing now is we're trying to find ways to stay relevant. I see the possibility that we can have a world premiere with a new kind of ensemble with a slightly new sound that will evoke the string orchestra. I think this could really cause a stir as a live stream. One of the things that I think really was the eye-opener was when all the theaters shut down without remuneration due to the forced major clauses and all of the contracts. Yeah, exactly. They all lost everything. In fact, there are some chorus members I think that have actually pulled out and have left New York and gone elsewhere. One person is actually pursuing a law degree, another person is pursuing a medicine degree and has gone to pre-med and have basically abandoned their positions. As I have often said, it's not enough just to keep something going in a trickle that once was. Something of importance must be done, not just a trickle of what was before. Because we want to show that we can move forward in any circumstances. We can move forward. The creativity latent in New York and latent in the classical music world has that potential. It's always there. There are two schools of thought concerning this. There are those that somehow erroneously think that we can go back to it exactly as it were. There are also those that think that we can continue from where we are and build. Aspen is very much the same. The festival is still just the most fantastic place with the best music students from around the world. I don't even have to audition them. I just ask for students to sign up and I've never yet had a student who signed up that wasn't fantastic. The bird seller gives the thorn bird as a gift to Jonathan who is a deaf mute wave in the city. A homeless young boy. This would be in London in the story when Jonathan has the bird in a cage and he goes to sleep in a park. As he's going to sleep a big light comes forth and the thorn bird is transformed into a kind of a goddess with wings. The first part you hear that is the thorn bird revealing herself becoming very large and full of light. And then the second section is Jonathan waking up and seeing her and the music is very childlike almost like his reaction to seeing this wonderful goddess. And then the middle part is the thorn bird telling Jonathan her story which is a story that has religious significance. And through that she tells Jonathan that he will be healed of his illness.