“Listen to the birds!” urged the composer Paul Dukas. “They are great teachers.” Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, from 1972, is a concerto for birdsong and orchestra; like several of his other compositions, it incorporates field recordings of natural sounds. More recently, the native Californian and dedicated environmentalist Gabriella Smith cuts right to the chase with an SF Symphony-commissioned violin concerto, How to Be a Bird. In her youth the composer volunteered on a songbird research project and dreamed of a career in ornithology; as an adult, she advocates for them through music. Rautavaara’s mentor Sibelius didn’t include any explicit birdsong in his Symphony No. 2, but you’d never know it from the way the woodwinds chatter, warble, and keen.

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