Birdscore

Performing BirdScore

Before April 21, 1991, the day I first played flute with birds at an art opening at the Pittsburgh Aviary, music was for me a strictly human activity. After that, it became an interspecies conversation, indoors and out. For the performance that day, I read aloud the names and dates of 165 bird species we humans have eradicated since 1600. I improvised a short riff for each name as a stand-in for sounds we can no longer hear, and listened in amazement when a toucan and other birds in the room mimicked me with uncanny regularity during the forty-minute litany.

The avian echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.

By the end of the performance, an avian avant-garde had taken hold of me. Lark, stork, and sparrow. I was hooked! I returned most every Sunday throughout the 1990s to join in the morning chorus. I took the imaginary position of an extinct bird and let the living ones guide the way toward a dialogue between presence and absence. The birds became my teachers in timbre, phrasing, and multiphonic splendor. They transformed my playing, my listening, and sense of musical place, which is to say, the place in which extinction is both remembered and transformed into living sentiment and sound. Throughout those years, I brought musicians, composers, dancers, artists, poets, Zen monks, butoh dancers, and of course, Jeroen van Westen to perform at the National Aviary. Becoming bird became the story that was telling me out loud and from within.

Every bird is known by his feather.

In an effort to accommodate a wider range of avian timbres and pitches than the flute is capable of, I soon developed the first BirdMachine, a square bass recorder decked out with many bird-related sounds. Later, in homage to Olivier Messiaen, I composed the Catalog of Extinct Birds based on an algorithmic translation of 165 Latin names. I wondered how my internal dialogue between living species and extinct birds might evolve into a composition capable of expanding into a future of countless extinctions up ahead. From the start, birds showed me the way. I simply followed.

A bird told me.

I met Jeroen shortly after discovering birds. As a visual artist, landscape designer, and superb draftsman, his inspiration to draw and paint in abstract synchrony with my new litany of bird riffs was a natural starting point for our collaboration. In BirdScore at Het Glazen Huis, four large plywood-bound books from this period (Ornithologie/Schaduwen) frame the exhibition on separate tables at each corner of the main room. The books chronicle avian extinction and provide trace scores of the musical performances that helped to generate their graphic gestures.

A bird cries too late when it’s taken.

After about a decade of working in this manner, the first BirDrawinGloves appeared. They changed everything. Now, instead of holding just one pencil, Jeroen could join me – to scratch and tap, staccato and flitter, brush and swoop, dance and careen – with, e.g., ten talon-like drawing pencils attached to ten gloved fingers. The performances suddenly went from the solitary elegance of a single patrician scribe to the graphite mania of ten butoh dancers in full flight crawling, buckling, and raging calmly across the picture plane. I’ve seen it many times now – once the BirDrawinGloves are slipped on, there’s no turning back!

He is free as a bird in the air.

In our BirdScore performances throughout Amstelpark this Fall, the BirdMachine and BirDrawinGloves combined for the first time with a new element in our collaboration – the BirdGrid, a two-and-a-half-meter high, cylindrical, birdcage-like gridwork subdivided into eight vertical sections. Once installed at a given site in Amstelpark, a six-meter horizontal paper scroll was stretched around its center on a surface of smooth board. Then, the paper stock, BirDrawinGloves, musical instrumentation, and GoPro set-ups were chosen according to the place, the plants, and the extinctions associated with them. In all, Jeroen and I produced ten scrolls and ten sound events. Six of them currently hang from the gallery’s ceiling as bird scores for performance, along with Jeroen’s video edit of the performances that generated them.

There are no birds of this year in last year’s nests.

Pondering BirdScore

Like birds and all the rest of creation, we are earthlings-among-earthlings. We share a commonwealth of time, place and nature along an endless trajectory through space. We’re in it together, not just haphazardly sharing the same ride, but intrinsically and biologically bound. We share 98.9% of our DNA with chimps and bonobos, 90% with cats and mice, 84% with dogs, 70% with slithering underwater acorn worms, and 60% with bananas and birds. (In my and Jeroen’s case, it may be closer to 99% shared with birds!)

Birds of a feather flock together.

According to many creation stories, however, we are not just earthlingsamong-earthlings, but have hatched, along with the rest of the universe, from a single cosmic egg. If that’s true – and who can doubt it – then our abiding aspiration to become bird is all the more understandable… and, in these days of disastrous reckoning, all the more urgent.

Destroy the nest and the bird will fly away.

Of course, Jeroen and I know well that we are human. We see the carbon footprints in the sand and know that they are ours. We also know that we are no less avian antagonists, however unintentionally, than the cats and rats at every port of call. Our affiliation with the world’s most destructive species just happens to make this unavoidable. And yet, seeking refuge in being unavoidably human misses the point, while also squandering opportunities to gain real insight into our predicament. The point we are making is about the critical value and importance of interspecies communication, in our case with birds – living birds, threatened but still singing, squawking, flying and swooping along the spectrum of increasing extinction.

Forbear not sowing because of birds.

If Jeroen and I are trying to do anything in our BirdScore performances, it’s to pry open an imaginary perception of avian reality, even just a crack to catch a glimpse of what that might mean. We call it our ‘research’, though science at this point in the BirdScore ritual has taken a back seat to the shamanic negotiation between image and sound. If we’re lucky, a performance will sweep us up in avian reverie and sheer divine madness, but only when we’re fully spent will it let us float slowly back to Earth in 4’33”. That is a moment worth waiting for….

Becoming BirdScore

“The inward gates of a bird are always open

It does not know how to shut them

That is the secret of its song.”

The secret of our human song is very different from the one the poet, Hugh McDiarmid, writes about in On a Raised Beach. Unlike birds, we have learned to close the doors of our being-in-nature just enough to pretend that we are separate from it. Once that’s done, we can plunder our cosmic egg with impunity, inadvertently or not, for as long as we like… or for as long as we are able.

The crow is never the whiter for washing herself often.

Jeroen and I are no different in this regard. The big BirdGrid and all our dozens of technical accoutrements in Het Glazen Huis gallery are unmistakably the product of such plunder: Baltic birch plywood bonded with urea-formaldehyde glue; fibrous, toxic, steam-cooked, pressure-molded lengths of masonite, XXX-size orange workers’ gloves made of denseweave polyester fiber coated in polyvinyl chloride, Piano Cluster Boards (PCBs) made of supposedly sustainable tropical wood, video cameras and players, audio speakers, copper wires, silver flutes…… the list goes on and on. Not much cradle-to-cradle enrichment of ecosystems here.

The thrush when he pollutes the bough sows for himself the seeds of woe.

Short of becoming Zen monks, we will surely persist in the life of making art for carefully conceptualized reasons. We will continue to seek to connect with the sixty-percent of our DNA that has a right to claim such a flight of fancy – to become birds … and perhaps, even for a split second, shake off our mortal, human coil. Perhaps it’s the poignant impossibility of such a premise that makes it so appealing to an artist. It can only exist in the imagination. And yet, becoming bird may, after all, turn out to be our best hope and refuge in the years to come.

CODA

The great Canadian storyteller, Dan Yashinsky, responded a couple of weeks ago to Jeroen’s video of our performances in Amstelpark: “An almost-ephemeral record of ancestral tracks and tunes echoing through our contemporary habitats. The tapped and scratched graphics are a beautiful way to bring us alongside an order and necessity we can never fully live, but can only imagine. The images are a great analogue for the hopping, flitting, sketchily brief touchdowns of birds, both extinct ones and the ones who have survived. The music is the soundtrack of commemoration, elegy, celebration, and irrepressible hope. It’s really like you both landed just long enough to launch songs and trace images that are already turning into their own echoes and fading colors just as we begin to see and hear them.”

Thanks Dan, and thanks Jeroen for sharing this commonwealth of time and place… and 99.9% of our human DNA! Becoming Bird has never seemed more likely!

Michael Pestel