Nobody Birds

The following piece was one of many I wrote for the weekly column, Column Eight. The pieces appeared in the Dunedin Star Midweeker in the early 1990s. I've edited it very slightly; there were also a couple of typos in the printed version. A now-deceased friend, Gaynor Smith, had cut it out of the paper and kept it with a host of other material. Her sister found it while going through Gaynor's multitude of papers.

Nobody Birds ˗ Column Eight ˗ November 8 1995

On one of several mornings lately when I haven’t been able to sleep through until a civilised hour, I got up and went for a walk. The day was overcast, the sun barely pinking the clouds. The cool air kept my hands in my pockets.

After wending my way round streets familiar to me through all my born days, I came across a blackbird sitting on a garage roof, singing his heart out.

I’d been aware of the birds all around me waking the day with their singing. I couldn’t help being aware of it, just as at night, if I happen to be in the Octagon or the Queens Gardens as the sun’s going down, I can’t help but notice thousands of sparrows setting themselves for the night by shouting and chattering all at once.

It’s as if they’re trying to hold back sleep ˗ or night ˗ like tired and boisterous children unwilling to go to bed, wearing their parents out with their caterwauling.

It’s easy to think that it’s only out in the open, in the country, that you really hear birds singing.

I remember lying in bed one morning in a place on Banks Peninsula, listening to a bellbird (so I called it, though it may not have been). Time after time he dropped his perfectly-formed notes into the still air, with the regularity of a tap dripping into a bath.

That morning is a glorious moment fixed in my memory.

But this blackbird, this particular morning, was a bird of a different feather ˗ of course. Not for him the hypnotically-repeated, fragrant full-formed notes.

No, he sat there and opened his throat, like a jazz singer in full flight, and the only consistent thing about his song was the regular pause between phrases when he took, I guess, a necessary breath.

He soared up and down the scales, he trilled, he twittered, he laughed, he sang a moment of beauty and topped it off with a scratch across a blackboard. He gave little screams interspersed with fragments from his favourite operas. He choked notes in mid-stream, and coughed. He threw music off the top of his head and caught it again, gave it a shake and a rattle and a roll, and turned it into a thing of beauty forever. He was an avian coloratura.

Across the road, oscillating on an electric wire, was another blackbird. He was doing some trapeze work with his song, swinging it back and forth in a much more regular pattern. Down the road another bird kept hitting his top note and sliding down the scale on a toboggan.

The French composer, Olivier Messiaen, spent a life-time recording bird songs and turning them, unaltered, into compositions for the piano and orchestra. (Personally, I think they lose something in the transition, though the attempt is admirable.)

But I think Messiaen would have found it impossible to cap

ture the wonder of this plain old blackbird’s song. I could only stand in awe as this minuscule scrap of creation gave forth praise to his Creator.

We’ve had a cockatiel in our house for many years. He’s lost whatever little bit of English he could speak, and he’s decided that chattering and squawking is sufficient to make his needs known. (Though he likes to join in when human singers come for a practice.)

Once in a blue moon, however, our cockatiel allows us to hear what he can really do with his voice. He opens his throat and puts Ella Fitzgerald to shame. Then with a casual cough he settles down and becomes just a nobody-cockatiel again.

Thinking entrepreneurially, I could see our cockatiel and that morning blackbird making a great duo. Borrowing a little, maybe, they could call themselves Bee Bee and Cee Cee Tee Winans, or the Daytime Nightingales, or even, Birds Blow the Whistle. 

Over-marked

I do quite a bit of transcribing of music using the computer programme, Sibelius. Transcriptions from printed copies or manuscripts are usually made so they can be transposed into another key. Sibelius, overall, makes the job very easy. I wish I'd had the programme when I was young and was first writing music, but of course at that stage there were no computers, let alone programmes like Sibelius. I often dreamed then of having a typewriter which you could use to print music, but the idea remained a pipe dream.

Anyway, the job of transcribing is generally pretty straightforward, except when you come across a piece of music that is so heavily marked by the composer with instructions as to how to sing or play the piece that you wonder whether he was having a bit of a fit on the day he wrote it.

A case in point is the piece I'm doing at the moment, Nocturne, by Michael Head, from a series of four songs under the general title of The Rim of the Moon. I really enjoy Head's music: it's a delight to play and the vocal lines are usually top notch, lying well for the singers.

Nocturne is a bit different. It's more dramatic in style than most of Head's work (though he settles down into his usual mode late in the piece). Consequently he's marked it very heavily, even with some contradictory markings. In one place the pianist is supposed to increase in volume when there's not actually anything to play. In another the tempo is marked both a tempo (go back to the original tempo) as well as Poco piu mosso (go a little faster). It's not actually possible to do that, as I'm sure Mr Head knew. Perhaps an editor got hold of the music and overwhelmed it with markings according to some reasoning we're no longer party to.

Half the notes in the vocal line and in the piano part are given stress marks. If you obeyed every one you'd never get to the end of the piece. And if there aren't stress marks there are accents, the sort that indicate you should give the note more weight than usual. There's a molto rit when the piece has barely started, and a poco rit only two bars after the a tempo. The singer, at one point, is expected to both return to a tempo and sing con moto simultaneously, which is rather like coming back to your normal walking pace while trying to go faster.

The first half or more of the piece is in a kind of recitativo style (that's indicated as well). So there is some excuse for giving the singer an indication of where to move forward and where to pull back. But most singers would do these things instinctively, and the excess of markings merely get in the way. IMHO.

It's like getting a play script from the director in which he's gone through and marked how you should stress each word, speak each phrase, where you should breathe, how loud you should be here and soft there. The lines of the original script would be buried beneath all of these markings.

Transcribing Mr Head's song would be fine except that as the transcriber I'm supposed to make sure I include all these extra details. I'm greatly tempted to leave them out, though of course that would mean not doing the job properly. It's very possible I'll miss one or two, even after a thorough proof-reading. But I'll grit my teeth and do my best.

The audience will never notice

There's a lovely baritone solo in the delightful movie, Calamity Jane, and its stage version: Higher than a Hawk. The music is by Sammy Fain, and the words by Paul Francis Webster, both men much respected in their line. Howard Keel sang the song with all his usual charm and conviction in the movie version. And it was just as well he brought conviction to the song because it has a strange metaphorical error in it, one that, when you notice it, won't let itself be unnoticed.

The song starts: My love is higher than a hawk, my love is deeper than a well. All good so far, in a loose metaphorical sense. But you get the picture without problem. And the chorus goes on quite happily for a few more lines before there's a little verse that, on returning to the end of the chorus again, ends with the same words I've quoted above.

The only problem is that when they return they follow these lines: I said that I would never fall; I laughed at others when they fell, and here I'm fallin' - higher than a hawk, and deeper than a well. 

If you're not listening, it rounds out the song very nicely before it goes off onto another verse. But the problem is, how do you fall higher than something? And why is the hawk fallin' - or falling, as the case may be?

It's a kind of 'it doesn't really matter' situation. Plainly Cain, Webster and Keel, and the rest of the Calamity Jane participants didn't get bothered by it. They probably said, the audience will never notice, because audiences don't. And I agree: there is story after story about movies where the audience doesn't notice things that are wrong, and didn't get put right, or where something's gone wrong on a particular night in the theatre and the audience has gone home just as happy as the audience to whom the same thing didn't happen. If you're still with me. I could tell a few of my own, things I've been involved in. But I won't, because I've probably already told you before.

At the end of the day, the baritone will go on stage and sing about a love that's fallin' higher than a hawk, and the movie will carry on showing Howard Keel singin' the song without blinkin' an eyelid, and 99.9% of people won't notice.

Tim Minchin and Prejudice

I don't know many people who were born in Northampton, in the UK, but apparently Tim Minchin (who's generally regarded as an Aussie) was.  I'd never heard of him till tonight, but it's not unusual for me to be way behind the eight ball when it comes to catching up with singers and musicians and artists in general.  (I've actually been in Northampton more than once, because I have relatives on my wife's side who live there.  I was actually born in Australia,  so does that makes me a kind of reverse Tim Minchin, a kind of Nihcnim Mit?  And did you know that Tim Minchin is an anagram of Ninth Mimic?)

Enough of that.  Tim Minchin is a talented musician who can play piano and sing. His songs (if the one in the video is anything to go by) are very clever and amusing.   The song has a longish opening that leads you down a completely different track (especially if, as a New Zealander, you've heard about the word Hone Harawira used in Facebook recently) and then it gives you a lovely surprise by turning out to be about something else altogether.  

Great stuff...

Southern Concert of Voices concert

Yesterday my wife and I went to the Southern Consort of Voices' Concert in the former Dominican Nuns' chapel behind St Joseph's Cathedral.  This is a lovely venue, and one that's unfamiliar to most people in Dunedin, I suspect.  Certainly I've never been there before, though admittedly when I was younger the building would have been off-limits to most people, particularly males.  It was part of the large Dominican convent complex, and the only other time I remember being in the complex was when we performed a play in the Hall. How that came about I can't remember, but I think it was quite a daunting place for the audience to find!  (The play was An Inspector Calls, the first play produced by the Marlowe Players, a group long since disbanded.)

The Dominicans have long since moved on from this complex, and it's now cared for by the Diocese as a whole, I assume.  I imagine the building gets a certain amount of use by the local parish these days.

The choir was somewhat bigger than the last time I saw them, at least as far as the women were concerned, and was in very good voice.  Their programme was focused around Otago composers (with a couple of ring-ins who only just made it because of some connection with the area) and was an interesting mix.  Four of the eight composers were in the audience: Corwin Newall, Alan Edwards, Alex Campbell-Hunt and Anthony Ritchie.  Newall is a current music student at Otago, and Campbell-Hunt has just completed a Mus B there.)

Newall's piece was a setting of the Ave Maria and was quite an ambitious piece for the choir to open with, but they did it well and it communicated itself to the audience.  This was followed by two pieces  composed by Richard Madden, both of them familiar: Bullulalow and I Sing of a Maiden.  Madden has a lovely expressive gift and the second of these two pieces has one of the sweetest tunes around.

Leanne Veitch's Sing Christmas is a boisterous piece that leaves the choir gasping for breath at the end - effective, but not something you'd want to sing twice in a row.  Alan Edwards' I will sing to the Lord was short and didn't make a particular impact on me on first hearing.  I suspect it's a piece you need to become familiar with to enjoy thoroughly.

The final piece in the first half (all the pieces here had some religious link) was The Lord Bless You and Keep You.  It was composed by Michael Winikoff in memory of his father - Winikoff is a regular member of the choir but was overseas yesterday.  The words of the blessing are ones that Winikoff's father would use to his family and they are sung in both English and Hebrew during the course of the piece.  There's also a violin obbligato.   The piece has a lovely, slightly unusual setting of the English words, and then gradually introduces the Hebrew.  Finally the two are sung together forming a rich and evocative sound.   This piece went down well with the audience. 


In the second half we had three settings of poems by Emily Dickinson, composed by Christopher Marshall.  To Hear the Oriole Sing was lovely, I'm Nobody a delight and the piece that the audience responded most quickly to; Hope is the Thing with Feathers was less engaging on first hearing.  One difficulty with choral works is that the words can easily be lost in the mix of harmonies and counterpoints.  A couple of pieces suffered a little from this, particularly the third of the Marshall songs.  Without the words, the music can lose its point to a degree.  As a listener you resign yourself to not being able to tell what's being sung, but this isn't ideal.  Naturally it requires a great deal of effort on the choir's part to communicate the words distinctly, and often with the complexity of the music taking up much of their attention, this gets put in second place.  Anthony Ritchie's piece, Piano Practice, which came later in the concert, began with clear words.  These became more obscured, however, as time went on, and the point of the poem got lost - for me. 


Alex Campbell-Hunt's piece, Late Wisdom, is another that probably requires two or three hearings to get the feel at home with.  Not that it was particularly complex; it just didn't pick up the ears quite so readily on first hearing. 


Anthony Ritchie's three pieces were last on the programme.  In the Summer Fields has a Hungarian 

Bodhrán 

flavour to it, and came across well.  As I said Piano Practice missed out in terms of words, but is a lovely piece otherwise.   Song of Hope was another of those pieces that require some familiarity.   There's nothing that can be done about this in the process of a single concert!  


This was a pretty ambitious concert overall, with the singers being required to sing complex parts and pitch some difficult leaps - some also had to whistle, play bells and a bodhrán.   There were many beautiful moments when chords hung wonderfully in the air and on the ear, and when harmonies shifted magically.  

Masterpiece

The King's Singers performing Masterpiece in which a range of famous composers get their share of the limelight, with their names being used as the words of the song.   The ensemble work here is terrific, and the humour delightful. 

A song for atheists

Steve Martin provides atheists with a 'song' - well, sort of. Whether they'll appreciate it or not is another question.



It may not become top of the pops (although the close harmony is great) but at least it provides something humorous about what is often a deadly serious subject.

(Incidentally, Martin's movie, Leap of Faith, from 1992, still stands as a surprisingly good 'discussion' about faith, real and fake.)

More Mum than Dad?

A bit too late for Mother's Day here in NZ, but never mind - this song has a somewhat timeless quality.



Cleverly put together and full of words: so keep your wits about you and your ears wide open. I think the singer's name is Adam Cole.

You can download the song as an mp3 from the site in the link above....if you want. The words are written out on the You Tube site.

Driving economically

Getting a decent car insurance quote can be a bit of a nightmare. You think you've got it all sussed, and suddenly some better deal comes up....or does it? Trying to go into all the details and figure out whether A will give you this or B will take it away, or C will do it in a different way or D will just decide the whole thing's a waste of time and charge you even more can be a minefield.

It's a bit like life in general: you decide to go for something and all these other possibilities arise. It's a 'Life of Possibilities' as some group whose name I think is Dismemberment Plan sings. Now there's a name to conjure with.

A little promotion...

The other day I rang Elizabeth Bouman, one of the music teachers in town, about the dates for the next lot of singing competitions. I needed to know so that my up and coming concert didn't clash with them.

As a result of this conversation, I was invited to contribute a piece to the NEWZATS newsletter (NEWZATS, as you'll already know, being a widely-read audience, stands for the New Zealand Association of Teachers of Singing. Not Singing Teachers, you'll notice, since that would have wound up with the acronym: NEWZAST, which apparently doesn't have such a good ring to it.)

This piece of self-promotion was seemingly quite acceptable to the editor of the newsletter, although I tried not to make it sound too much like one long advertisement. Hopefully, it will let singing teachers apart from those I already know in Dunedin hear about my songs, and hopefully I'll get a chance to sell some copies!

You can see a revised version of the article here, along with the ad for Evony which borders on the erotic, and certainly distracts the reader more than a little. (I tried to find a photo on Flickr.com which showed a singer, but all the ones available have people using microphones. NEWZATS pupils sing without mikes, in the good old-fashioned way.)

Not so Minimalist

I have to apologise to pigeons. They don’t only sing ooh ooooooh ooh. Around where we are at present, they tend to sing: ooh ooooooh ooooooh ooh ooh, usually repeated at least twice, with the second and third lines going up the scale a touch. Perhaps Suffolk pigeons have slightly different vocal training as fledglings. Different it may be, but not more pleasant on the ear. Not mine, anyway, particularly as these dear creatures of God tend to sing non-stop all day long, wherever we go.

Minimalist

I know for a fact that God doesn’t have a tin ear when it comes to music, including bird song. But on the day he made pigeons he seems to have been thinking of something else. The pigeons (I’m told they’re pigeons, not doves) that hang around the garden of the house I’m staying in, or the homing pigeons that lived next door (when they were home) to the last house we stayed in, have a monotony of melody that would make the minimalist composer Steve Reich sound good.

The constant ooh ooooooh ooh that’s been going on in the garden for the last couple of hours is not just plaintive, it’s painful. Occasionally one of the two that’s making the noise gets a little more excited and adds a more scrawny note to the middle of the three, rather as though he was choking on something. Or else they tack a shorter note on the beginning or the end of the phrase. But beyond that, it’s back to the ooh oooooh ooh as the norm.

Sorry, God, but give me blackbirds any day.