Heinrich Biber - Sonata Representativa

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.