Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire is a recording and performance project, combining music with anthropology to highlight our connections to our nature and origins. From noisy social gatherings around fires 800,000 years ago to virtual meetings over Zoom today, we humans have created and solved an amazing array of problems. Even as we shape the world in unprecedented ways, we remain an integral part of nature, intertwined with its rhythms and cycles.

Project founder and violinist Maiani da Silva has commissioned six stylistically eclectic composers to write for solo violin based on what intrigues them about our human nature and our place in the ecosystem. In addition, Maiani and the composers have collaborated with world-renowned scientists to gain insights on their chosen theme. What results is an imaginative collection of works that both transcends stylistic labels and embraces intellectual inquiry, while highlighting an important duality: “our ability to work with or against our environment, [which] has been with us from the beginning” (Ian Gottlieb, composer of Shaped by Fire). The drive to express and understand are both deeply human. Brouhaha combines two cultural pillars—art and science—to further ask: What separates and also connects us to the delicate web of nature, our environment, other species, and one another?