I. NIGHT BLACKBIRD SONG, for two piccolos (one doubling on flute) and three percussion (1999)
The piece starts with a bang, as the long, drawn-out cry of piccolos brings the listener to attention. After a pause, a wind rustles leaves; a wood block beats out drops of rain. Then a piccolo—the blackbird—starts to sing, warbling over quiet musical gusts of wind. Another bird chimes in, and the two duet (or duel) over a building percussive din. The overall effect is spare and lovely, that of two birds singing to each other, swaying on branches in the dark, trying to be heard over an incidental urban cacophony.
In an interview with journalist George Tombs, Emily Doolittle, the composer of the piece, described its origins. It was 1997, and she had recently moved to Amsterdam from the Midwest. Living in an unfamiliar place, she was more attentive to its aural ecology, and one night she lay awake listening to a European blackbird as it sang outside her window. The blackbird is a member of that family of noted songsters, the thrushes. Its song is rich and melodic. In it, Doolittle heard elements that reminded her of human music. She listened more closely, listened also to other blackbirds down the street. She gathered themes from them, made up some of her own, and wrote a piece as she thought a blackbird might, stitching phrases together in an improvisatory and at times arbitrary fashion.
Still, “Night Blackbird Song” is representative rather than replicative. By its end, the bird-flutes and bird-piccolos have become just flutes and piccolos, incorporated within a more conventional musical statement, as Doolittle makes allowances for the human ear and its expectations. “It is more patterned,” she told Tombs, “there is more transition between motives, things are more connected . . . ”
As one who follows the comings and goings of birds, I was intrigued by Doolittle’s efforts to write music more or less on their terms. When I found out that she lives in Seattle, I wrote to her and asked if she would mind chatting about intersections between music and ecology. We meet at a small coffee shop near the Cornish College for the Arts, where she teaches music theory and composition. “I’m interested in ways that animal sounds are and are not like music,” she says. “There are a few names for this—biomusicology, ecomusicology—but zoomusicology is probably the most specific.”
The term zoomusicology was coined in 1983 by French composer François-Bernard Mâche. Mâche argued that bird song and human music share many attributes. Both rely on repeated patterns, scales, arpeggios, themes, and variations. Both are frequently used to attract mates, or claim territory. (How much conceptual daylight is there between a national anthem and a blackbird singing to tell other males to clear off?) It was possible, then, to analyze animal sounds using musicological principles.
Mâche went further, though, wondering whether birds might consider their own calls aesthetically as well as functionally. Scientists had observed that bird songs are often more complex and ornamented than seems absolutely necessary; and some species create their songs rather than know them innately, cobbling their own compositions together with snippets from their parents, their neighbors. Do these birds improvise and mimic and mock for the sheer raucous thrill of it? Do they hear their own songs as music? If they do—if, as Mâche put it, music could be considered a “widespread phenomenon in several living species apart from man”—the very nature of music would be called into question.
The piece starts with a bang, as the long, drawn-out cry of piccolos brings the listener to attention. After a pause, a wind rustles leaves; a wood block beats out drops of rain. Then a piccolo—the blackbird—starts to sing, warbling over quiet musical gusts of wind. Another bird chimes in, and the two duet (or duel) over a building percussive din. The overall effect is spare and lovely, that of two birds singing to each other, swaying on branches in the dark, trying to be heard over an incidental urban cacophony.In an interview with journalist George Tombs, Emily Doolittle, the composer of the piece, described its origins. It was 1997, and she had recently moved to Amsterdam from the Midwest. Living in an unfamiliar place, she was more attentive to its aural ecology, and one night she lay awake listening to a European blackbird as it sang outside her window. The blackbird is a member of that family of noted songsters, the thrushes. Its song is rich and melodic. In it, Doolittle heard elements that reminded her of human music. She listened more closely, listened also to other blackbirds down the street. She gathered themes from them, made up some of her own, and wrote a piece as she thought a blackbird might, stitching phrases together in an improvisatory and at times arbitrary fashion.
Still, “Night Blackbird Song” is representative rather than replicative. By its end, the bird-flutes and bird-piccolos have become just flutes and piccolos, incorporated within a more conventional musical statement, as Doolittle makes allowances for the human ear and its expectations. “It is more patterned,” she told Tombs, “there is more transition between motives, things are more connected . . . ”As one who follows the comings and goings of birds, I was intrigued by Doolittle’s efforts to write music more or less on their terms. When I found out that she lives in Seattle, I wrote to her and asked if she would mind chatting about intersections between music and ecology. We meet at a small coffee shop near the Cornish College for the Arts, where she teaches music theory and composition. “I’m interested in ways that animal sounds are and are not like music,” she says. “There are a few names for this—biomusicology, ecomusicology—but zoomusicology is probably the most specific.”
The term zoomusicology was coined in 1983 by French composer François-Bernard Mâche. Mâche argued that bird song and human music share many attributes. Both rely on repeated patterns, scales, arpeggios, themes, and variations. Both are frequently used to attract mates, or claim territory. (How much conceptual daylight is there between a national anthem and a blackbird singing to tell other males to clear off?) It was possible, then, to analyze animal sounds using musicological principles.
Mâche went further, though, wondering whether birds might consider their own calls aesthetically as well as functionally. Scientists had observed that bird songs are often more complex and ornamented than seems absolutely necessary; and some species create their songs rather than know them innately, cobbling their own compositions together with snippets from their parents, their neighbors. Do these birds improvise and mimic and mock for the sheer raucous thrill of it? Do they hear their own songs as music? If they do—if, as Mâche put it, music could be considered a “widespread phenomenon in several living species apart from man”—the very nature of music would be called into question.
