In Part One of this series, (Generic bird sounds in flute music), we looked at some of the musical devices used by composers to represent the sounds of birds, using examples from Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe (Suite No.2). In this post, I’ll take three of these devices (grace notes, trills and flourishes) and offer examples from real birds that may have inspired these musical sounds, alongside how they would sound as I play them on the piccolo. It’s worth mentioning at this point a few things about using birdsong in music: birds sing incredibly fast and at much higher pitches than we find easy to follow or play, they don’t sing in discrete musical pitches that correlate neatly with our Western musical system of tones and semitones, and they don’t observe regular beats with regular subdivisions. Having said that, let’s plough on looking at musical devices that represent them in music!
1. The first is the grace note. We usually see it written in notation as a very small quaver note with a slash through it, leading into a main note.
It has to be played very quickly, just before the main note, sort of squashed in before it, with the first note tongued but then slurring into the second. Here are a few piccolo examples of the above.
To me, these two notes (grace note followed by main note) is your universal generic ‘tweet’. Compare it to a house sparrow. In this audio, each chirp is not just a single pitch, but begins with a higher-pitched, more strongly attacked sound that moves down. It’s actually more of a chir-rup than a chirp.
[Pere Josa, XC600002. Accessible at https://www.xeno-canto.org/600002]
And here’s my attempt to reproduce what I’m hearing in the above audio, played on the piccolo. I’ve moved it to much higher notes to more accurately imitate the actual frequencies.
And again, this time with the piccolo and sparrow recording combined…
2. Trills involve alternating between two adjacent notes very quickly. On a flute it’s usually a case of lifting and replacing one finger very rapidly (it should look like a motion blur). It’s written with the trill abbreviation ‘tr’ above the note, and a wavy line.
And here are examples of this, played on the piccolo.
Trilling is so common to birdsong it is even part of the birdsong descriptive language. I’ve chosen the wren for my comparison because of the way a wren’s song is almost always described as having the distinctive trill at the end of its song (as well as being incredibly loud).
[Jacek Betleja, XC632487. Accessible at https://www.xeno-canto.org/632487]
To me, I’m actually hearing several trills in succession, at different speeds. When it came to reproducing this song on the piccolo, I actually played trills for the slower alternating sounds, but for the buzzy trill towards the end, (presumably the ‘distinctive trill’ everyone is referring to), I opted for a flutter-tongue technique (see future post). My fingers simply could go fast enough. Hats off to the wren!
And the two recordings combined:
3. For a flourish, the notation is usually a stream of short notes, beamed together, which must take place within the given duration. Here’s the example from Daphnis and Chloe, followed by my flute rendition.
For this comparison, I’m thinking of a blackbird, with its beautiful fluid flutey phrases.
[David Tattersley, XC629598. Accessible at https://www.xeno-canto.org/629598]
As I made the piccolo rendition, there were moments that reminded me strongly of the opening of Messiaen’s flute piece ‘Le Merle Noir’ (‘The Blackbird’). (Watch this space for a future post!)
Here’s the piccolo:
And, again, combined with the original audio I was copying:
So, here’s what I learned as I did this exercise. Birdsong is fabulous! Trying to copy their song with regular beats and pitches feels almost mechanical. And yet, as a composer, there was something liberating about attempting to copy it, as if I was somehow being freed from the limitations of Western music and its notation! Part three to follow soon!