New Year

These aren't the first of my 52 pieces of bird music, but just something for the new year. First up, a polka by Johann Strauss II, In Krapfen's Woods - oh for God's sake, you're so childish. There are people who think that the New Year Concerts in Vienna represent everything that's anachronistic and just generally terrible about classical music - being a miserable lefty who steals all of his opinions on the world straight from George Monbiot and Stewart Lee, I should probably agree with them, and yet I don't. But forget all that and just listen to the quality of the playing by the Vienna Philharmonic, here conducted by Carlos Kleiber in 1989. I think it's safe to say that no other orchestra plays this music with such class. See if you can pick out and identify the bird. (Ahem)

 
And now a tribute to the two rarest birds currently spending the winter in Britain - an Eastern Black Redstart on the Isles of Scilly, and a Blyth's Pipit near Wakefield in Yorkshire at Pugneys Country Park. Both of them are completely lost, thousands of miles out of range, and both of them have a breeding range in Central Asia. So, with no imagination on my part whatsoever, here's In the Steppes of Central Asia by Alexander Borodin.

The first proper piece is coming next week. Happy New Year!

The selection process

For quite a long time I've been compiling a list of music that contains references to birds, and that list has now bulged into hundreds of pieces, referring to hundreds of different birds from every continent.

In some cases the links to birds are extremely tenuous, like With the Wild Geese by Hamilton Harty - the Wild Geese in the title were a French army brigade made up of Irish exiles who fought in the 1745 Battle of Fontenoy. Obviously you already knew that. There's also Franz Schubert's final set of songs Schwanengesang (Swansong), which has absolutely nothing to do with swans, although a Nightingale and a seagull get a mention.

I've not yet decided on what the 52 pieces of music will be, although I'm pretty certain of 27 I want to use. A lot of the music on my disturbingly OCD masterlist I haven't even listened to, just things I've written down when I've either read about them or heard them mentioned, so I'm actually quite excited about working my way through and hopefully digging up a few beauties to share with you.

Expect quite a few Cuckoos and Nightingales over the year. With Cuckoos, composers have always liked to use them because imitating a Cuckoo in music is a doddle. But not only that, a Cuckoo can also be used to represent seasonal change, which then takes us into musical allegory, dealing with bigger concepts.

The song of a Nightingale carries with it a certain magic and romance, so just putting 'Nightingale' in the title of your piece of music instantly means it's, well, going to be full of magic and romance. Here's what I mean. If your piece was called

I stopped to look at a dead badger on the A62 Huddersfield ring-road

then you can instantly art it up and make it all profound by calling it

A Nightingale sang as I stopped to look at a dead badger on the A62 Huddersfield ring-road

I'll be giving you examples of amazing music where a composer has really tried to replicate a Nightingale's song, and other equally amazing music where a composer has just put any old generic trilly stuff in, possibly never having even heard a Nightingale.

 

For the more refined bird enthusiasts, there will be plenty of sexy and exotic birds to hear in music. And feel free to help me out with any suggestions, but no I won't be putting in Blackbird by Paul McCartney. Probably a Blackbird by someone else though.

52 pieces of music

A blog about music? Wow, that's original. That's never been done before.

A blog about birds? Wow, that's original. That's never been done before.

What about a blog about music AND birds? Wow, because yes, you're the only person who likes both music and birds.

No, I mean a blog about music that's actually got birds in it. How about a blog about that? A blog about music inspired by birds? That's exactly what the internet needs. Mindblowing.

So, starting in the new year, I'm going to post 52 pieces of music (that's one a week - I know, clever!) that somehow contain references to birds. Music written over many centuries, from all over the world and in a bazillion different musical styles, and all of them in some way about birds - imitation of birdsong, real recordings of birds, birds in folklore, mythology and used as metaphor, and probably some other slightly mad things that I can't quite categorise. Like this, Papageno the bird-catcher in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute.

The ultimate idea is that this blog becomes a massive hit - a www. global phenomenon like Friends Reunited or Ask Jeeves - and then I start to add advertising and I eventually find myself so obnoxiously rich that it genuinely makes me physically sick when I contemplate the grotesque enormity of my fortune. Or in reality, I'll probably give up and quietly delete the blog after two weeks, upon a cold and stinging realisation that nobody's interested, another failed dream that evaporates into the world wide ether.

And why is this blog called From the Canyons to the Stars? You'll just have to wait and see. Or Google it.

I'll post again next week with some more details, and then I'll be kicking off properly at the start of January.