The announcer on the BBC World Service told us what was
coming up in the programme; “And we shall hear how birds are producing sweet
music from both ends”. Tantalising
stuff, explained further by the reporter who began by telling us that there was
“A new piece of Classical Music created from bird droppings”.
What this was, he went on to tell us, was an experiment in
which very large sheets of black manuscript paper had been placed under trees
where birds flocked. The birds’
droppings landed on the paper, which was then collected and the shape and
location of the droppings on each sheet transcribed into musical notation. And
thus was born a new musical work. (It
calls to mind that glorious joke of Humphrey Lyttleton’s in which he described
how Mexicans expressed their dislike of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “sheet music” –
you have to say that with a Mexican accent to get the gist!) The artist Kerry Morrison had the idea
because, we are told, “she thought it would be fun”; but the joke landed on the
Arts’ Council, who then decided to finance it, commission composer Jonathan
Herring to formalise it into a readable orchestral score and pay for his
orchestra to perform it at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. (To read more, here’s
the link - www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21082873.)
This is hardly an original idea, even if nobody seems to
have done it with bird droppings before.
There were experiments in which cats walked through a puddle of ink and
then over some manuscript paper, and I even recall an experiment in which elephants
squirted a dye on a wall covered with manuscript paper. All good - not very clean - fun, but certainly
resulting in nothing serious musically (even if Morrison feels it might
encourage people to look at “detritus and waste” in a wholly new way).
It does prompt me, however, to look again at the question of
what we mean by “music”. True, birds
singing make a musical noise, but is it music?
I have always believed that the defining feature of what we call “classical
music” is that it is premeditated. Organised
thoughts have to be written down in order for them to be disseminated by those
with no direct connection with the music’s creator or even the culture from
which the music originates; hence the cliché about music being an “international
language”. Birds and animals have made
music only by their calls being codified and transliterated into musical notation
by a composer, who then uses them as the basis, but not the sole content, of a
musical work. Messiaen spent years
painstakingly notating the calls of birds and incorporating those calls into
his work. His music was birdsong
inspired; the birdsong itself, however, was not music.
Of course, aleatory music – where the composer gives free
rein for unprepared sounds to be brought into a work of music – has existed for
over a century. Grove defines it as “A term applied to music whose composition
and/or performance is, to a greater or lesser extent, undetermined by the
composer”, and goes on to argue that any piece of music is, to an extent,
aleatory since the composer can have no absolute control over the vagaries of
performance. But in truth, it only
became a quantifiable element in music with the American Charles Ives
(1874-1954) and it was his followers, most notably John Cage, who made it
fashionable. It is one result of the
often grotesque experiments of mid-20th century composers which has survived
and is still common currency in works being written today. But in every case aleatory music is created
within a fixed time; even the ultimate aleatory work, Cage’s 4’33” has a defined beginning and
end. In the case of our bird excrement,
the length of the finished work was largely governed by the material collected
rather than a pre-determined time frame from the composer.
The Tate’s publicity describes the works as “A collaborative
musical composition that curiously captures avian activity, creating a piece of
music celebrating our feathered friends”. But while the goodly folk of
Liverpool will certainly be hearing a “musical composition”, in so far that it
is a composition which generates musical sounds, it cannot be described
truthfully as “a piece of music”; unless, that is. Herring (and I would love to
think that the birds involved were seagulls) has added rather more to the score
than second-hand excrement.