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Night Owls (1999) |
Flute (picc, flute and alto flute) and piano – 22'
Night Owls was commissioned by flautist Susan Milan and premiered on a tour of the USA and Canada with pianist, Ian Brown in 1999.
This is a suite of four short ‘nocturnes’, movements two to four being sonic portraits of three of Britain’s more populous (though seldom viable) owls, namely Barn Owl, Tawny Owl and Little Owl. The first nocturne is described as a ‘habitat piece’, and is in fact intended to evoke the atmosphere of dusk to night in wooded country in the North-West of England.
Almost without exception, I have not taken the obvious (via Messiaen) route and transcribed the actual songs of the three owls. Rather, these movements are more concerned with the flights and ritual courtship displays of each of the three species presented. They are also a form of music inspired as much by visualisation as of listening alone. There is no doubt something ‘sharpening’ and focusing about nightfall and the draining of light and colour; a time when sound takes on its own way of re-articulating and re-framing the placement of forms in the landscape. In a way, nothing is more timbral and full of tone than the sight of a ghostly-cream barn owl quartering fields in a low melismatic beat of wings, and there is nothing more charismatic than the quiet intense stare of a little owl perched on a dead tree-trunk in a quiet lane threading through oak woods in late evening.
Edward Cowie, 1999.