In 1894 the Australian Musical Album published "The Bell Bird, composed by Reene Lees who is not yet eleven years old". It is a piano exercise, and suggests she was doing well in her piano studies as well as showing promise as a future composer.

The National Library of Australia holds two other compositions by Reene Lees, but I have been unable to find any further reference to her, or to her music.

A few weeks ago we Re:Tweeted the Australian magpie, and it’s back to the island continent for perhaps its greatest songster.  These two species create the sonic backdrop to so many Australian landscapes; it is not surprising that since the early twentieth century composers have been inspired by them.  


This morning Miranda Krestovnikoff presented the bird that has probably inspired more composers than any other non-European species.  In the latest of our Re:Tweets we look at the pied butcherbird of Australia.  Click the button to hear the original Radio 4 Tweet of the Day.

Indeed, birdsong seems to be an especially important influence among composers seeking to add a truly Australian voice to western tradition.  Henry Tate (1873-1926) actively encouraged this and two more generations of composers, from the late Peter Sculthorpe (1928-2014) to Brett Dean (b.1961) and John Rodgers (b. 1962) have appropriated birdsong and other natural sounds as a key ingredient in developing an Australian music that is today among the most vibrant and constantly evolving in the western world.

For Tate, the butcherbird was a particularly valuable resource.  “The slow and dreamy prelude of the butcherbird naturally expands into musical sentences.”  David Lumsdaine (b. Sydney 1931) has created recorded soundscapes, dance pieces and a string quartet based on butcherbird song.  He writes “the pied butcherbird is a virtuoso of composition and improvisation: the long solo develops like a mosaic, through the varied repetition of its phrases. In the course of the song, some elements remain constant, some elements transform through addition and elimination. The bird is a virtuoso of decoration: there is an extraordinary delicacy in the way it articulates the harmonic course of its song with microtonal inflections...”

There has even been a PhD thesis, by Hollis Taylor, on composers’ use of the butcherbird song, exploring whether birdsong can be thought of as music in its own right.  Taylor concludes  that the butcherbird’s “elaborate song culture seems to overreach biological necessity, indicating an aesthetic appreciation of sound.”

Composer, performer, and naturalist Ron Nagorcka (b. 1948) grew up on a sheep farm in Western Victoria.  Artamidae (2004) is his five-movement suite celebrating a family of Australian songbirds: the grey butcherbird, Australian magpie, black currawong, pied butcherbird, and grey currawong.  He uses a fretless electric guitar to achieve the particular microtonal details he identifies as just intonation - the natural effect of diving or multiplying pitch frequencies in simple ratios.  This makes butcherbird song sound slightly out of tune to western ears.

I’m not sure I agree with the analysis, but I do like Nagorcka’s idea that being literally in tune with nature (as opposed to western scales) is something a female listens for in selecting a mate.

The last word should go to Brett Dean (b.1961) who, like Sculthorpe, often finds the music through which to express a deep concern for the environment.  His Pastoral Symphony incorporates a recording of the butcherbird.  Dean comments: “Sure, we all love nature, but what we love more are all the trappings of modern living... certainly more than the desire to stop and bask in the glory of a single butcherbird, perhaps the most magical sound found on the whole Australian continent. This piece, then, is about glorious birdsong, the threat that it faces, the loss, and the soulless noise that we're left with when they're all gone.”

Like millions of people, I first heard the incredible song of the Lyrebird courtesy of David Attenborough’s Life of Birds series back in 1998.  Those few minutes of expert mimicry have been voted one of the most popular wildlife clips ever.  This morning Sir David presented this wonderful songster on Radio 4's Tweet of the Day.

Unsurprisingly, the lyrebird features in aboriginal Australian music, in what may be a continuous tradition lasting tens of thousands of years.  Matthew Doyle, a composer and dancer of aboriginal-Irish descent, continues this tradition in a series of pieces for voice, didjeridu and percussion, issued on a CD entitled, simply, Lyrebird.

A composer who famously appropriated birdsong into many works was Olivier Messiaen, and later composers such as Harrison Birtwistle have claimed that his Messiaen’s style oiseau had a direct and lasting impact on modernists searching for more naturalistic – or at least less formal – musical structures.  It is perhaps fitting that Messiaen’s last completed work should incorporate the bird widely regarded as having the most extraordinary song of them all.

Éclairs sur l'au-delà… [Illuminations of the beyond…] is an orchestral piece composed in 1987–91.  Messiaen visited Australia during that country's bicentennial celebrations in 1988, enabling him to use the sounds of Australian birds notated in the wild.  The third of eleven movements is called L’Oiseau-lyre et la Ville-fiancée [The Lyrebird and the Bridal City].  Whereas traditional Australian music features vocal and didjeridu imitations of birds, Messiaen's works attempt to reproduce the extreme complexity of bird song through notated music.  L'oiseaux-lyre et la Ville-fiancée is among his most complex, with 67 changes of tempo and a dizzying variety of motifs.

Someone who knows these birds and their songs well is the composer Edward Cowie, who was interviewed by NATURAL LIGHT a couple of weeks ago.  He spent twelve years in Australia in the 1980s and 90s and describes an evening sitting at the edge of a cliff overlooking the King Valley in Victoria.  “Just as the light finally dipped towards an inky darkness, several male lyrebirds began to sing in a series of interlocking but combative ensemble performances”.   Cowie often contrasts himself with Messiaen:  he doesn’t attempt to note, and then notate, the exact rhythms, pitches and timbres of the bird.  He is more interested in natural sound as part of an overall experience of a landscape, a place, a moment.

For me, Lyre Bird Motet captures that smoky valley in Victoria wonderfully.  Cowie uses rather dreamy harmonies from one part of the chorus to suggest a balmy dusk scene while the other singers, like a real evening chorus, are all (seemingly) independent soloists, bringing bursts of sound, or maybe shafts of light, into the dim, cool forest.

This morning, on Tweet of the Day, we heard how the Lyrebird – a bit like Edward Cowie - is an avid borrower of sound, listening, choosing, and replaying echos of its own immediate environment. 

Recently, while preparing a talk about birds and music, I ran a search for samples of lyrebird song.  The best was from a captive bird in Adelaide Zoo.  The lyrebird enclosure was in need of repair and a pair of local builders had been brought in.  Some days later Chook, the dominant male lyrebird, gave a recital of his latest composition, based mainly on the sounds he had borrowed from the builders.  In a remarkable recording we hear the hammering of a hammer, the whirr of an electric screwdriver, a power drill, and an old-fashioned hand saw cutting through a plank.  We also hear one builder greeting the other and we can surmise that Chook’s neighbours included a whip-bird and a kookaburra, because we hear a perfect imitation of them both – simultaneously!

Update:  Edward Cowie's Lyre Bird Motet will be part of the BBC Singers' 90th birthday celebrations next Wednesday 24th September, St. Giles Cripplegate, London 6pm.

...to a new occasional series that takes the subject of the morning's Radio 4 Tweet of the Day and explores music inspired by that species.  This morning, Sir David Attenborough introduced us to the Australian Magpie.

It is difficult to imagine a composer taking our magpie’s song as a starting point for a piece of music, but the Australian version’s melodious song with its clearly pitched notes is celebrated by several including John Rodgers and Ross Edwards, two Australian composers who often feature bird songs in their works.  British composer David Matthews describes how friends he was staying with introduced him to the song of their resident magpie.  He wrote down this haunting song, hoping to use it in some way. Later he noted down three more songs, two of them distinctively melodic. The koel, a large Australian cuckoo, had just arrived for spring - and sang day and night.  The pied butcherbird sings three notes on different distinct pitches. Lastly, the eastern whipbird has a crescendoing high note followed by an extraordinary, loud whip-crack.   From this material Matthews wrote Aubade, for chamber orchestra. It develops the initial eight notes of of the Australian magpie’s song into a long violin melody which is later reprised on the cello.

Matthews says "My recent music has become more diatonic, and I have been using folksong in some pieces, and incorporating birdsong into others. Landscape and the natural world have always been important stimuli for my music".

Michael Kennedy, writing in the Sunday Telegraph in 2001 described Aubade as “an appealing essay in the honourable English tradition of short nature pieces – rather like a present-day equivalent of Delius’s First Cuckoo.”

On a cold November morning in the late 1970s a small group of us assembled on the shores of Morecambe Bay, near the village of Hest Bank.  We were there to meet the high tide wader roost, a host of oystercatchers and ringed plovers, in order to net them, ring them and release them as part of a long-term research project into long distance migration.

One of my fellow ornithologists was Edward Cowie, then Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Lancaster, where I had just enrolled as an undergraduate in biology.

From then until Edward’s move to take up an academic post in Australia in 1983, we would encounter each other at bird club meetings, in the field and at concerts.  Our conversations were most often about birds, but sometimes about music.

As for Hest Bank, it was to be the inspiration for an early but already characteristic Cowie piece – an eponymous movement from his Gesangbuch, a cycle of virtuosic choral works written for the BBC Singers.  Cowie’s Hest Bank captures in sound a rippling, surging, swirling, murmuring, flowing and ebbing of vast flocks of knot, dunlin and other waders; of water, surf and flotsam; of light and of landscape.  

I caught up with Edward as he was preparing for a trip, with his partner, the artist Heather Cowie, to a very different wetland.  They are spending the rest of September in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where Edward will be researching new pieces with the support of a Leverhulme Emeritus fellowship.  Surprisingly, it is Edward’s first visit to tropical Africa.

“One of the things I like about being a composer is it always takes me somewhere strange.  I don’t know how I will react but I know it will be the whole interlocking tapestry that will impress me:  the sky, the flatness, the wetness.”

He knows enough about what to expect to have decided how he intends to work.  One of the main outputs from the trip will be Okavango Nocturne.  It will be the second in a cycle of orchestral works with the overarching title Earth Music.  The first was Great Barrier Reef, commissioned by the BBC Proms and premiered there last year.

“I’ve heard that the Okavango has a very special night-time atmosphere, full of sound coming from millions of animals of all kinds.  I’ll be out there listening very carefully to a habitat that can’t be seen, only heard.”   Okavango Nocturne will be premiered in the 2015/16 season.

I remark that his search for some special magic in the Okavango is characteristic, something he has been doing for years in the wild places of the world.  He agrees and explains that in Australia he often spent long periods alone in wild areas, contemplating and exploring nature and the sonic and visual experiences it affords.  He describes an evening sitting at the edge of a cliff overlooking the King Valley in Victoria. 

“Just as the light finally dipped towards an inky darkness, several male lyrebirds began to sing in a series of interlocking but combative ensemble performances”.   He was captivated by the sounds, but also by the whole experience:  the changing light as dusk falls; tracing wisps of smoke that perforate the forest canopy, the valley landscape enclosing this world of sound and atmosphere.

The result of that experience was one of his best-loved pieces, Lyre Bird Motet (2003), written for the BBC Singers.  A return trip to Australia a few years ago led to a companion piece, Bell Bird Motet, premiered in 2011 by the BBC Singers at the festival Earth Music Bristol which Edward founded.  

For Edward, drawing is an integral part of music composition.  “I’ll be taking a manuscript book to note down the sounds that I hear, but the visual dimension is important – even in the dark.  Composition is for me ‘multi-sensing’ – I draw to capture shape, form, complexity versus simplicity, colour and ‘event.’  I add real musical notes in the drawings if I need to, and then start translating it all into the music."

Our conversation runs like a river in spate, with unexpected turns and splashes.  Suddenly we are discussing the recent discovery of the phenomenal song repertoire of the spiny lobster.  It turns out Edward is working on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio series called Singing Planet.  It’s a natural history of song “from crustaceans to the contemporary chorus.”

We return to the calmer waters of the Okavango and Edward reveals plans for another Botswana project - researching big cats for a piece for clarinet quintet.

“I recently got to know [British clarinettist] Julian Bliss and have been bowled over by his playing – it’s great to hear someone so young display a totally unmediated love of sound”  he enthuses, "and it turns out Julian is seriously keen on wildlife.  I’m writing a clarinet quintet for him, so I asked him what subject he’d like me to focus on and he immediately said ‘big cats’.  So the piece will be called Big Cats.

“I have millions of reasons to compose music, and they are mainly, if not totally, found within the way the natural world works.”

Laurence Rose

Following the death of Peter Sculthorpe on Friday, our Music page now has a fuller appreciation of his life and work, and some reflections from people who knew him.

Peter Sculthorpe was Australia's foremost composer, and the first to create a truly Australian musical voice.  It was on his return from studying in Oxford that Sculthorpe decided that his western musical heritage needed to make room for other influences, and these included aboriginal meoldies, the sounds of nature, and influences from neighbouring Asian countries.

Pieces such as the 1960s series Irkanda - “scrub country’ and Kakadu (1988) established him as the country’s leading painter of landscapes in sound.  The vastness and silence of the outback, or the thronging of Australia’s wetlands, became his primary influences.  He, in turn, became an environmental activist, contrasting the aboriginal peoples’ sense of being part of nature with the negative impact wrought by the arrival of Europeans.

He worked closely with aboriginal musicians, most notably didjeridu virtuoso William Barton, for whom he wrote Earth Cry, a piece that exploits traditional imitative music to invoke the sounds of wildlife such as magpie geese.

Kakadu, named after the famous National Park in the Northern Territory, is a typical example of his response to landscape and his use of native music.  “This enormous wilderness area stretches from coastal tidal plains to rugged mountain plateaux, and in it may be found the living culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants, dating back for fifty thousand years. Sadly, today there are only a few remaining speakers of kakadu or gagadju. The work, then, is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death.”