Natalia Beylis Turns a Clear-Felled Leitrim Field into a Sonic Memorial

Natalia Beylis’s debut ensemble piece is rooted in a specific scar on the landscape: a clear-felled wasteland in Leitrim. Around Here, The Birds Plant The Trees does not abstract that loss. It documents it, moment by moment, across a single field on December 12, 2025, from 6 a.m. onward. The 51-minute work moves through a string quartet, percussion, and textured field recordings with the attention of a diarist, not a eulogist.

The cello introduces a low drone—reverent, watchful—before the quartet builds a harmonic suite with a distinctly Irish lilt. Beylis doesn’t illustrate the landscape so much as inhabit it. Percussion suggests small creatures rustling in the undergrowth; a curlew’s call surfaces and recedes. At the 15-minute mark, the atmosphere tightens. A threat enters, and the instruments retreat like hidden animals, leaving a charged quiet that mirrors the forest’s absence.

Willie Stewart’s drum work becomes a central presence after a jarring cymbal strike at 32:07, sounding less like rhythm and more like architecture being assembled. The question hovers: is this reconstruction or further clearing? The piece refuses to resolve neatly. Instead, it stays close to the field’s own ambiguity, where a blackbird’s cross-pollination and a fox’s hunt coexist with the memory of bulldozers. Beylis trusts that sound itself—the actual music, and what it points to—might stir something that words often fail to reach.