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.