The song of the European cuckoo rang out through the rafters of St James’ Church Hall on Elizabeth St last month, filling the air with the curious two-note refrain that has inspired musicians over the centuries.
This time it was the Hobart Guitar Society mimicking the bird, performing Going Cuckoo by modern British composer, Andrew Forrest.
Usually I’m more likely to be found listening to a pub band, but the promise of the song of a bird I remember fondly from my youth in Britain was too much to ignore.
The invitation to the society’s latest concert came from a fellow member of the Waterworks Landcare Group, whom I never knew to be a guitar afficionado. An even greater surprise was to see Chris Harries playing the lute, an instrument looking at home in the elaborate, Gothic confines of the church hall.
The cuckoo composition was one of 16 numbers raging from the Baroque to the Beatles.
The older music, dating from the mid-16th century, was a reminder how birds have influenced Western classical music-making for more than 600 years. Long before that it had its place in folk music from the times that humankind first began to chant and sing.
The classical music oeuvre dates to at least the 14th century, when composers such as Jean Vaillant quoted birdsong in some of their compositions. Among the birds whose songs are most often used in music are the nightingale and, of course, the cuckoo.
Composers and musicians have made use of birdsong in different ways: either intentionally imitating birdsong in compositions; incorporating recordings of birds into their works or singing or playing a duet with birds.
Composers say that birds like the hermit thrush of North America sing on the traditional scales used in human music. Others use variations of rhythm, relationships of musical pitch, and combinations of notes which can resemble music.
American researchers have found evidence that the hermit thrush sings using a harmonic series – a pattern of notes used in human music. In the human harmonic scale, each note is based on all multiples of a base frequency. Put simply, the first note starts at a particular frequency, followed by a note that is double this frequency, and so on. This string of notes is the basis for all music, from Mozart to Taylor Swift.
Like the cuckoo, the nightingale is also important culturally for its music. Musicologists have studied its song to understand its improvisation, just as they have studied human music to understand human musical inventiveness.
Despite playing such a prominent role in European culture, the migratory cuckoo is actually in sharp decline across Europe, experiencing land-clearing and climate-change pressures across its range stretching to central Africa.
There are fears for its survival. Let’s hope that a time does not come when it is remembered only by its song.