Archives Day - A Lament to All the Birds (Minnesota)

A musical composition dedicated to birds that died in aircraft accidents in Minnesota is performed on the museum's Cahman organ from the late 17th century.

Since the 1990s, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has collected data on birds that have collided with aircraft - species, weather conditions, and accident circumstances - to make air travel safer. The artistic organization Hillside Projects has transformed this database into an artwork that honors the deceased birds. For Archives Day, they have created a system that converts data from the state of Minnesota into music, and composer Rickard Scheffer performs the piece on the Cahman organ in the museum's organ hall.

Hillside Projects, based in Stockholm, was a fellow at HULT in autumn 2025, Kronoberg region's artistic research residency. The program is both a continuation of the residency stay and part of the artistic work being conducted around birds, archives, and cataloging in Kronoberg and elsewhere in the world.

Rickard Scheffer is a composer and organist who has worked as a church musician since 1994 in the dioceses of Lund, Göteborg, and Växjö, and since 2006 as artistic director of the Tingsryd Orchestra Association/Sinfonietta.

The performance begins with a brief presentation of Hillside Projects at 1:00 p.m., after which the music fills the room until 3:00 p.m. Come and go as you wish.