The Carnival of Endangered Wonders: A Zoological Fantasy for chamber ensemble unfolds over one fantastical 24-hour day around the world, from the stirrings of an orangutan in Borneo at dawn to the call of the Puerto Rican parrot the next morning. The idea began after I performed Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and started imagining what a modern companion work might look like, one filled not with familiar zoo favorites but with endangered creatures that are still around at the edges of our awareness. Some I have encountered in the wild, others I have come to know through more hours of video-watching than I care to admit. A chance meeting with a buff-cheeked gibbon in Hong Kong, swinging its arms in endless acrobatic circles as if performing for no one in particular, riveted me and helped nudge the whole project to life.

I kept Saint-Saëns’ instrumentation and developed the piece during residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, where I had the time and quiet to experiment with colors, gestures, and a rather ambitious assortment of percussion instruments. The sawfish movement even uses a real saw. Conversations with the commissioning consortium and many generous colleagues helped guide the work forward, and the piece is the result of all those voices mingling with my own.

Across fourteen movements, the music portrays creatures including the blue whale, saola, axolotl, manatee, buff-cheeked gibbon, cassowary (dinosaur-like birds from Western Australia), and of course pianists, whose tender spirits seemed worth depicting.

Because the piece follows a single day, we meet each creature at the hour it is most itself, a sea turtle under moonlight, a blue whale rising at first light, and the pianists at 2 a.m., when most sensible people are asleep but pianists are still hunched over their keyboards, wondering why they chose this profession in the first place.

My genius friend, playwright, singer-songwriter, and theater artist Daniel Zaitchik, has written playful, evocative poems to introduce each of the 14 movements. My hope is that this work opens a small doorway into the natural world and playfully reminds us of the fragile and astonishing life surrounding us.