As backstories to a piece of music go, this is up there with the best, or at least the weirdest. One day, one normal, ordinary day in 1977, Japan's greatest composer Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) saw this:
The back of a man's head. It's a photograph from 1919 called 'Tonsure', taken by the great American-French surrealist photographer Man Ray of the artist Marcel Duchamp. As you can see, Duchamp has, for some reason, shaved a 5-pointed star in his head. And why not? It's his head, he could do whatever he wanted with it.
Later that night, one normal, ordinary night, Takemitsu went to bed and had a dream about a flock of birds landing in a pentagonal-shaped garden, brought about by the 5-pointed star he saw on Marcel Duchamp's head. When Takemitsu woke up, he drew a picture of his dream ...
... and then he wrote a piece of music about it.
Back when I started this blog, I said that you can put bird-inspired music into one of three categories:
Metaphor & mythology - where birds become something more than just a bird, such as how they're represented in folklore (eg Ravens = death / doves = peace / Cuckoos = spring)
Literal use - where a composer actually tries to replicate a singing bird in music
Recorded bird song - I've not posted anything in this category yet, but this is where a composer is too lazy to write music sounding like birds, so they just use recordings instead. And I've got a few fantastic pieces to post later in the year about that
However, I now realise that I should have added another category:
Anyway, it's a beautiful, floating piece of music, obviously full of Japanese and eastern influence, but also totally indebted to the French impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel. Put on some headphones, turn off the lights, pour yourself a chipped mug of Babycham and try not to listen too analytically, just let it wash over you.
It's a short post this week because my laptop charger has melted, yes actually melted, so I'm typing this on my phone. Do you know a new charger costs £65? I know, scandalous, the kind of money you need to go to a Conservative party auction So here's a brilliant short piece for solo piano by Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), it's the 10th and final piece from Book 1 of On the Overgrown Path, a set of autobiographical pieces written between 1901-1911 which refer to Janáček's childhood growing up in Moravia, and also about the death of his 20-year-old daughter. Janáček uses a Barn Owl because, like many owls, they have all sorts of mad superstitious stuff associated with them, and in lots of cultures they're a bird of bad omen. That's crazy, because they are absolutely brilliant birds, a bird which no matter how many times you've seen them, it still fills you with the same level of excitement as it did the very first time you saw one.The problem is that they make a godawful noise, and presumably people were/are terrified of noises coming out of barns and churches in the middle of the night.
And then there's the way they just float silently in the half-light, bounce gently over reedbeds and hedgerows, so I suppose they've got a touch of the supernatural about them. Yes, it's fine being a bit spooked an owl, but nailing one to your front door to keep a thunder storm away is probably going a bit too far. Actually, that last link has a really good quote in it: Another traditional English belief was that if you walked around an Owl in a tree, it
would turn and turn its head to watch you until it wrung its own neck.
It's true, they really do. Anyway, this is a fantastic piece of music, hope you enjoy it.
Perhaps it's really obvious, but I have no idea why the picture on the video is of the Large Hadron Collider. Anyone?
Birds get another mention in On the Overgrown Path, the 5th piece in Book 1 is They Chattered Like Swallows. Well worth a listen.
Last week's post featured a Nightingale, Cuckoo and Quail in Heinrich Biber's Sonata Representativa written in 1669. A century and a half later in 1808, Beethoven used the same three birds in the second movement of his 6th Symphony, the Pastoral Symphony, a five movement work where Beethoven gave thanks to God for nature and birds and fields and the countryside and shepherds and streams and thunderstorms. It's like an episode of the BBC's Countryfile, only it's absolutely nothing like an episode of Countryfile.
I'm not going to write a lot about the Symphony because I have nothing original to say about it, there are so many great things online for you to read. This is really good.
So instead, I'm going to upload two pictures with stupid captions, and that's good enough for me and hopefully good enough for you.
Beethoven with his pet dog Bullseye on one of his walks by the Danube
Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes in 1968
Hilarious.
The reason for the picture of Beethoven is because a lot has been written about artists receiving thunderbolts of inspiration whilst out walking - for some it's an essential tool for creativity. When Beethoven lived in the centre of Vienna he scheduled a daily walk into his routine, and at the start of the 19th century he could very quickly have left the city and found himself in open space, woods and by the then unspoilt river. Looking at the map below from 1800, Vienna was tiny compared to today. Nowadays it would be a long walk, a full day, to get from the city centre out to any real countryside.
There are two things to think about here, and both are quite depressing.
The first is that looking at how Vienna has sprawled, like everywhere else, it's very easy to understand why there is an increasing dislocation between people and nature - most people on Earth now have to make a big effort to experience proper nature (feeding ducks in the park doesn't quite count), whereas not too long ago it was on your doorstep, people and wildlife lived next to each other
The second is that when Beethoven wrote the Pastoral Symphony, his hearing was shot. His tinnitus had become a problem already by his mid-twenties, and in 1802 he wrote a letter to his brothers in which he confessed his despair over his loss of hearing and that he'd been close to committing suicide. He was totally deaf by about 1815, but in 1808 when he finished the 6th Symphony, it's impossible to believe that Beethoven could have taken one of his walks, or a trip out to the country, and heard for himself a Nightingale, Quail and Cuckoo. So he must have heard these birds earlier in his life - it's very likely that these birds would have been part of his childhood, as they would have been for any child in Europe at that time, because they were very common birds.
Contrast that to a child growing up today. A Cuckoo, that bird which has historically been associated with so much of our folklore, is now a very difficult bird for someone without a specific interest in birds to hear. I'd love to do a survey of how many people under the age of thirty, maybe even under fifty, have ever actually heard one. Even for birders, every year in Britain it gets that little bit more difficult to hear a Cuckoo, and each year it seems like we lose a once guaranteed site for them. For most people, the Cuckoo is now something of mythology, no longer something integral to the changing of seasons as it was to people as recently as half a century ago.
In the amazing Bird Atlas 2007-2011 by the British Trust for Ornithology, the figures for Cuckoo ain't good - a 49% decline in the UK as whole, with a pretty terrifying decline of 63% just in England. And they're declining right across Europe.
Also in the Atlas: Nightingale - 90% (NINETY PERCENT!) decline in England over the last 40 years, and down 52% during 1995-2010.
The British Trust for Ornithology are tracking Cuckoos and Nightingales, and the results about their migration routes and wintering grounds in Africa are being used to draw up strategies to stop them from being featured in books about extinct birds.
So that's good. Here's some music at last. All throughout the second movement (titled Scene by the Brook) of the 6th Symphony, you can hear Beethoven's suggestions of singing birds, usually trilled on the violins. But at 09:53 the orchestra drop out and leave a solo flute, oboe and clarinet to play the songs of Nightingale, Quail ('wet my lips') and Cuckoo. This whole movement, and the whole Symphony, is must-hear music, but if you're short on time then listen from about 7 minutes in. And just in case there's any doubt, from 09:30 you'll hear the best 20 seconds of music ever written.
Beethoven mentions birds in lots of his songs for voice and piano, but there's two of particular interest here - Der Wachtelschlag (Cry of the Quail) and Der Gesang der Nachtigall (Song of the Nightingale). Translations are easy to find using magical internet search engine machines.
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(if you notice any dead links or removed videos, then please email me. Thanks)
When I were a lad at school there was a big poster stuck to the back of our music teacher's piano, it was a timeline from 1500 to 1970 outlining the most important composers. There was no music written before 1500 and there hasn't been any written since 1970. And that's true.
Between 1600-1750 (roughly the Baroque period) there were just four composers on the timeline - Purcell, Vivaldi, Handel and Bach, and because I was so stupid, I believed it. It turns out that my education was just a massive, filthy lie, and that there were more than four composers. One of them was Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704), pronounced the same as Justin Bieber, and coincidentally their music is also very similar.
In the last few decades there's been a tidal wave of interest in Early Music, with loads of exceptional musicians rediscovering incredible composers whose music had been almost totally forgotten for hundreds of years. One of these is Heinrich Biber, which is a very good thing, because some of his music is absolutely extraordinary.
The Sonata Representativa for violin was written in 1669 and imitates Nightingale, Cuckoo and Quail. Also cock and hen, but obviously they're not real birds, so I don't care about them. Biber copied these bird songs straight out of Musurgia Universalis, a treatise on music by Athanasius Kircher published in 1650, which also included musical notation of birdsong. Looking at the picture below, you can only assume that Kircher had never actually seen the birds, or possibly any bird. I mean, just what is that thing in the bottom right corner? Could be the first and only European record of Sirkeer Malkoha?
Translation The glottals of the melodies that are expressed by the whistling observed in the nightingale: "pigolismos" most clear glottals modulated with a limpid and ringing voice "glazismus" those glottals which it continues like a broken voice with the same interval "teretismus" those which for certain it renders like a murmur
Sonata Representativa is in nine sections - Introduction, Nightingale (which starts at 2'05), Cuckoo (3'54), Frog, Cock & Hen, Quail (6'40), Cat, Musketeer's March and a Finale. A crazy energy runs through this whole piece, and the Quail's 'wet-my-lips' rhythm is particularly good scraped on the violin.
Biber never wrote any more specific bird-music, but the Cuckoo motif in the Sonata turns up in other things he wrote. If you like Sonata Representativa then give some more Biber a try - Battalia a 10 is particularly brilliant. In the recording below everything collapses around 01:45, where the music depicts a drunken soldier smashed out of his face and staggering through the streets. Think about when this music was written - about 350 years ago, there was hardly anything else being written quite like it - and you can only be amazed at Biber's imagination.
