Composing can sometimes be a lonely thing. Sometimes the music flows easily, sometimes there's only you and the empty music paper. Venturing outside the 'pure, ideal' realm of music has therefore been very rewarding for me in many periods. It has provided me with ideas and actual musical material that I would never have arrived at on my own. Something I could have a deep artistic interaction with, so that the result is not entirely nature, not entirely me, but an amalgamation of the two.

One category of sparring partners is birds. I have borrowed their song for several pieces. I tried slowing down the speed up to 1/8 of the original and transposing down up to 3 octaves – similar to playing the sound back on a tape recorder with very slow tape speed. What happens is that our poor, slow human ears can appreciate the fascinating melodies hiding in what we call 'twitter'. One example is my percussion concerto Das war schön!, a collection of portraits of Mozart, commissioned by Wiener Mozartjahr 2006. The title of the first movement, M. Noir, is a tribute to two big M's: Mozart, who 'composed as effortlessly as a bird sings', and Messiaen, the master of birdsong, and one of his most wellknown pieces, Le merle noir.

Here is a little glimpse into how M. Noir was composed: Above the staff of the solo vibraphone one can see the frequencies of the slowed-down and downwards transposed song of a rock thrush, projected on a grid of sixteenth notes and the chromatic scale. The darker the rectangle, the stronger the frequency. The black rectangles below show the overall loudness of that sixteenth note. Like divining from coffee grounds (it can get a lot grittier than what you see here!), I then extracted the skeleton of the music, and added my own colours and musical responses.

Here is a video of the whole concerto, with Martin Grubinger and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Litton.

Das war schön! also appears on the CD Act, with Martin Grubinger and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by John Axelrod, and available on Ondine. 

Birds Within Us

Many years later I went back to the birds, but from a totally different angle: an audiovisual concert performance about the ongoing extinction of birds: Large Bird Mask. In the programme note I wrote: 'We are increasingly made aware of animal species on the brink of extinction. The populations of many common birds have been more than halved in the matter of a few decades. One could ask: when we exterminate the birds, do we also exterminate what they symbolise deep within us? The dream of flying, the dream of singing freely and exuberantly, and indeed the very dream of freedom?'

Central to the performance are three pieces, titled Birds Within Us. The scores are extracted from the song of some of the endangered bird species: starling, nightingale and skylark. I got in touch with composer Laurence Rose, who also works in the The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He gave me a set of alarming graphs showing the decline in population of a number of very common bird species in the UK from 1980 to 2014.

Then came a question I often ask myself: Can this piece of science be squarely mapped onto music? Or – just as important – maybe not? Sometimes an idea is just a good idea, but it doesn't yield anything of artistic interest, and I simply leave it. But this idea worked disturbingly well: during the duration of each piece, I slowed down the 'tape speed' according to the alarming decline of their respective species. What happened was an uncanny journey: the jolly chirping we all know and love went through a stretch of time when it sounded almost like human moaning, before sinking into a dark, sinister abyss. The effect is so stunning that I included the sound in the music, so that each bird is like a soloist, with the humans in the ensemble trying to emulate it and respond to it.

The concert performance Large Bird Mask came out of a close collaboration with the musicians of Cikada Ensemble and stage director Kjetil Skøien. In these video excerpts from the world premiere, we start with seeing and hearing the downwards journey of the starling. At 1:20 we jump to the gloomy end of the piece.

However, we might also have a hope of reversing the dismal trend of extinction! Thus, in the last of the three pieces, I have simply and naïvely reversed the graph, and at 2:19 in this video, a lark starts ascending from the dismal present population number to a population as it was in 'the good old days'.

I am about to embark on an exciting double project: A video of Large Bird Mask taking the music and the musicians out from the theatre and out in real nature, and CD with the music. So watch this space!

Maths, me and music

Fractal mathematics are not nature, but they are one of many ways humans have tried to emulate nature through mathematics. And they are pretty good at it: Fractal algorithms generate fascinating and surprisingly 'organic' patterns, and they have been used by scientists to mimic stuff that can't be easily described by the geometry we learn in school – which is most of what we humans like seeing: the patterns of trees, clouds, tigers, mountain ranges etc etc. So the mysterious figure on the front cover of the CD TWINE is the exact graphical equivalent of the music three minutes into this last track of Stonewave. On the CD disk you can see what the music looks like at 2 minutes. One would think that such a mathematical approach would lead to sterile and 'theoretical' music, but the sound world of Stonewave is not one you would associate with math books.

So here is the last movement from Stonewave, the last track of the CD on the Nonclassical label, performed by SISU Percussion Ensemble.