Introduction

Hello there,

Welcome to Project Birdsong - an exciting new music project taking place in 2012.

Project Birdsong is a music project which will fuse the collective lyrical creativity of Twitter with music, song and performance. The concept is as follows - tweeters will tweet their lyrical contribution to the project in 130 characters (or less) and add the hashtag #BSong (to allow all the tweets to be identified and collected into a central location). Submissions for tweets to be entered into the project will be open until the end of February 2012 at which point all of the submitted tweets (once filtered for offensive or illegal content) will be displayed on a project website (any tweets submitted on or after 1st March 2012 will not be eligible for inclusion in the project).

From 1st March - 31st March the website will be live for public voting on the best lyrical tweets. The best 15-20 tweets as selected by the public vote will be taken forward to the next stage of the project.

The 15-20 best tweets (as voted for by the public) will then be used as the source text for a choral composition by Christof R Davis (composer and project director) who will collaborate with each of the tweeters regarding their lyrics (to fully explore their inspiration and thought process behind the lyrics, and to discuss the integration of the lyrics into the finished work). The musical forces for the finished work will be, to a certain extent, influenced by the lyrics selected but is likely to include vocal soloists, SATB choir and chamber orchestra. It is expected that the creative process will be complete by the end of August 2012.

The final planned stage of the project is to stage a world premiere performance of the work (which may be recorded or broadcast) - it is intended that this performance be crowd funded (to pay for a venue, infrastructure and artist fees) which will also keep the collective/social ethos running through until the culmination of the project. The 15-20 winning tweeters/lyricists will have VIP invites to the premiere and will be introduced before the performance. They will also be considered as a rights holder for their lyrics and as such will be entitled to part writing royalties for any performances/recordings/broadcasts of the work. Further details on copyright will be discussed with the winning tweeters, who will retain full copyright of their lyrics unless otherwise stated/discussed.

A few clarifications on questions we've been asked about the project:
There is no set theme or topic for the project - we hope it will take on a life of its own and grow organically, so we've kept the parameters very loose.
Anyone can submit tweets for inclusion - any age, any nationality, from anywhere in the world. We want this to be a truly global project!

The project is in the early stages of development so watch this space for more information coming soon.

Follow Christof R Davis on twitter at @cdavismusic