|
Birdsong Bagatelles (2004) |
string quartet - 35'
The sounds made by birds have inspired musicians for thousands of years. Humans seem to have a very special and particular relationship with birdsong, perhaps more than any other voice from sounding creatures on earth. The variety of birdsong is staggering in terms of rhythms and ‘scales’ (modes, dynamics and colour (timbre)).
Birdsong Bagatelles is for the medium of string quartet; not one that would seem to suggest an immediate relationship to birds, but one offering tremendous possibilities for an aural ‘focus’ on natural sound(s)! The Birdsong Bagatelles are a set of 24 pieces that deal with the songs and visible behaviour of 24 birds, all common in Britain and throughout Europe. Each is an acoustic and ‘visual(ised)’ portrait of a single bird, none however, divorced from notions of habitat and context.
Each piece is located within one of the 24 major or minor keys, following the progression (in 5ths) from C major to F minor at the close.
Rather than take the musical precedent for the form (such as those employed by Beethoven and Webern, for example), I have looked at the game of Bagatelle in which ‘several small balls are struck into numbered holes on a board, with pins as obstructions’.
Each bird(song) is a ‘ball’ in a game of 24 moves. Given the impossibility of direct transcription of birdsong to musical instruments, the string quartet forms the roles played by pins in the game of bagatelle. The technical properties of each of the four instruments are metaphors for the ‘pins’ that arrest and shape the movement of the balls into numbered holes (wholes). What follows is a procession of relocated natural sound, played by a string quartet in a series of often highly virtuosic episodes of short duration.