The mockingjays aren’t very tonally reliable. Not like my singing telegram guy. These birds change the key on you. Maybe it’s just the dopplers shifting around while they fly and sing at the same time, or maybe they purposefully mock the melodies of the humans below them. And why not? Just at look at what these girls melodisize as their distress call and answer!

The first girl begins singing a D Major scale, rising up in thirds from D to E. However, the second girl sings in G Minor, and instead falls down on the final note, resolving to a D, the initial tone. It has a kind of fearful symmetry you see. Each four-note melody has two notes in common (G and D), that mirror each other at the beginnings and ends of the melodies. Both melodies fit nicely into the key of G Melodic Minor (G A Bb C D E F# G).

The second melody acts like a reverse picardy5. Instead of resolving to the G Major as was expected, the bird call picardies to a G Minor, subtly setting the viewer up for tragedy, sweet glorious tragedy, that lifts one up and drops one down like the dirty little fuckbirds that ferry our births and peck us unto death.

Oh, and Happy Harry Hundos! This here blog is an hundred blogs old.

Notes:



[1] Joyce, James. Dirty Love Letters to Nora Barnacle. http://loveletters.tribe.net/thread/fce72385-b146-4bf2-9d2e-0dfa6ac7142d



[2] Black-Capped Bloggy http://www.losdoggies.com/archives/14

(with quaint myspace hyperlinks)

[3] Major Laugh Made Ya Laugh http://www.losdoggies.com/archives/2354 (not about woodpecker’s song)



[4] The Musical Cryptogram “CAGED B” resembles the locrian scale, the 7th mode of C major, but really it’s a scale all its own. Also of note, the cryptogram spans greater than an octave, starting on a C and descending down a C Major Pentatonic scale, only to resolve to a B, defiantly passing over the root, as is to be expected from caged birds, a game of melodic leapfrog (similar to musical chairs), that tinges the modal mood with just the right amount of longing, sweet longing to be free from the tonic king.

[5] Picardy Party http://www.losdoggies.com/?s=picardy



