Becoming Bird
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song.
Hugh MacDiarmid
On a Raised Beach
Before April 21, 1991, the day I staged a performance for flute and spoken text in the Tropical Room of Pittsburgh’s National Aviary, music was for me a primarily human activity. On that day, I read aloud the vernacular names of 165 bird species we humans have eradicated since 1600, and improvised a short flute riff for each name (along with approximate date of extinction) as a stand-in for sounds we can no longer hear. Five minutes into my fifty-minute solo composition, I listened in amazement when a toucan began to mimic me with uncanny regularity throughout the rest of the litany. Other tropical birds followed suit, and by the end of the performance, an avian avant-garde had taken hold of me lark, stork, and sparrow… and has never let go! I now know that the music of humans represents but a fraction of Earth’s musicality.
After that day, I returned nearly every Sunday throughout the 90’s, just before sunrise, to join in the Aviary’s morning chorus. The birds became my teachers in timbre, phrasing, rhythm, multiphonic dexterity, and a special feeling of musical ineffability. Over time, the birds transformed my playing, my listening, and above all, my sense of musical place, which is to say, the place of remembrance where extinction is not just an archival record, but a poetic memory transformed into living sound and sentiment.
Over the next twenty years, I introduced musicians, artists, poets, Zen monks, and Butoh dancers to the National Aviary, and staged dozens of public performances. Becoming Bird became the persistent story that was telling me out loud in squawks and chirps, whistles and hoots, sweeping glissandos and pitch-perfect melodies… as well as what would become a growing binomial list of extinct bird names throughout the coming century.
During this decade, I added a wide range of bird whistles and avian sounding devices to my collection of woodwind instruments, and developed a variety of hybrid instruments specifically for the aviary. These included several versions of the Birdmachine (subcontrabass and bass recorders or flutes with bird whistles and other accouterments), Violaire (violin with slide whistle), Broominette (shop broom with contrabass clarinet mouthpiece and bird whistles), Birdrawingloves (ten-finger gloves with drawing utensils attached - developed with Jeroen van Westen), Birdrawingtable (with contact-miked slate surface), Flarinet (convertible bass flute and bass clarinet), Windspinner (vibrating, spinning membrane), and Panspinner (circular array of pan pipes for communicating with hummingbirds).
I brought these instruments to the National Aviary, and eventually to distant places and aviaries around the world, as if I were some modern version of Alexander von Humboldt setting up a complex array of the latest scientific instruments used to engage with and study a vast orchestra of avian sounds. There were Inca terns, greater flamingos, sun bitterns, ruddy ducks, crested oropendolas, snowy egrets, scarlet ibises, blue-winged kookaburras, red lorries, golden conures, roseate spoonbills, hooded mergansers, and many others. Unlike my earthbound instrumentation, however, the birds perched, floated, nested and swooped throughout the resonant glass and steel flyway. I did my best to respond to them, not in mimicry nor as their maestro, but with my own array of musical voices aimed at blending in as subtly as possible. I was happy to be a self-appointed bird whisperer, but the Aviary’s keepers insisted I was their Johnny Cash, their winsome, Folsom savior. But that wasn’t true. I was just becoming bird, never quite one of them, but definitely no ones jailbird entertainer or savior!
In the past thirty-two years, avian reverie has not only defined the arc of my artistic thinking and production, but also defined the arc of my travels. I spent one long summer night exchanging Aeolian riffs with a solitary Sprosser thrush on the edge of the Mueggelsee in Berlin. Then the following Spring, I was hidden away in the grotto of a small Buddhist temple in Kita Kamakura performing with a nojiko, a Japanese yellow bunting. A year later, an uguisu, a Japanese nightingale, accompanied me every night for two weeks in a dense forest on the edge of Mt. Asama, a not so dormant, smoldering volcano looming over Karuizawa. On the Canary Island of Lanzarote, I practiced blowing glissandos with a flock of lesser short-toed larks on a high cliff overlooking the ocean toward Africa. Their sound in flight rose and fell along the thermal gusts of sand coming off the Saharan coast. Neither flutes nor faces are particularly fond of windswept sand, but the songs of these larks en masse are too enchanting to ignore.
In this chapter of my life, I am focused on a different kind of aviary, one where wild birds are free to fly throughout, and extinct birds are evoked through music, sound, dance, art, and in written and spoken text. AVIARIUM is a conceptual performance stage with moveable slate walls and a spinning central seat from which to observe the surroundings or to perform musically at the center of a circle of musicians located around the perimeter. It is nestled into a hillside forest overlooking a stream and a frog pond in the back acres of my suburban farm in Middletown, less than twenty miles from where Wallace Stevens wrote one of his most famous poems, Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird, in 1917: When the blackbird flew out of sight,/ It marked the edge/ Of one of many circles. (IX)
Indeed, the circle of AVIARIUM has become a perch from which I play my bird instruments with distant relatives – Redwing blackbirds – of his own birds – grackles – as they nest and flutter through the autumn olive bushes, birch and cedar trees, and the white, wild roses scented all around. Their chattering lyricism blends in with three varieties of syncopated frogs in the small pond – Spring peepers, green frogs, bullfrogs – covering the full range of soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices. By the end of June, the frogs are peaking all together, and their combined decibels, after sunset, can approach 110dB, the equivalent of a raging nightclub or my oversized ride mower. But once the nestlings have left and their parents have moved on, many of the frogs are picked off by great blue herons and hawks for the duration of the summer. By late Fall, all is quiet once again… save for the Aviary of Extinct Birds whose mute inhabitants whisper their litany of extinct names into the coming winds of winter. There’s an echo here of Paul Celan evoking the holocaust: “The world is gone… I must carry you…” as he directs the listener to discover her own voice within the vast and cacophonic silence of lost sounds.