The Piccolo, the Pocketgrouse, and Peapod Pritchard

My dear friend Paige Pritchard sent this lovely email to me and another friend. It's about birds and music—perfectly apt for a blog called Bard Owls, no? -TC

Hello fellow lovers of nature and sound!

I bookmarked this article ("The Piccolo and the Pocketgrouse," by Eric Wagner in Orion) to read a while back, and finally got around to it when I woke up earlier than expected this morning. Given that I'm not fully awake, lazily reading about the intersection of bird songs and music theory was a perfect way to ease my way into consciousness for the day. While reading the article I took the time to research some of the musical pieces and listen to them as Wagner describes it. Tina, I immediately thought of you with all of the ornithology in the piece, I'm sure you've heard of some of the birds the writer featured in the musical pieces! 

 

Petites Esquisses D'oiseaux (translates into, "Small Bird Sketches," I think? "Small Sketches of Birds?") by Olivier Messiaen:  

 

And Brooke, I know we've talked about classical music before. This piece raises the question that comes along with any great aural analysis - What is music? The music of birds, whales, etc. is a collection of sounds that, although beautiful, are arranged haphazardly. It's a stark contrast to the extended melodies of Western music and what we would consider as intelligent composition. Which, then, is the natural form of music? That which occurs organically in animals, or the music we create because it abides by a set of rules and is pleasing to the ear? Wagner addresses this in the second section. 

Either way, the phrase "aural ecology" is now a part of my vocabulary now. What a beautiful term. 

(Emily Doolittle's website, more links are in blue)

Night Blackbird Song

Music for Magpies: Pied Butcherbird [editor's note: Yes! Shrikes are incredible birds!]

 

Check it out when you have a few spare minutes, it's a fun concept to sink your teeth into :) 

 

Also, check Paige out if you have a few spare minutes. She's a most joyful and curious writer, and a great travel partner to boot. Her tweets are music to *my* ears. 

River roads at night

A playlist:

1. Justin Townes Earle - Lone Pine Hill

2. Matt Bauer - Heap of Little Horses



3. William Elliott Whitmore - One Man's Shame



4. Tom Waits - Lucinda

5. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis vs Last Poets & Dead Prez - Panther Train



Just long enough to get lost and unsettled.

Modeling Our Demise

It is not often on Bard Owls that I post short fiction but today it seemed appropriate. Largely because it is also not every day that I find an artist as good as James Vincent McMorrow. The first song of his I heard was his new single Cavalier. I recommend you give it a listen and point your eyeballs at my short fiction ode to The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.

Modeling Our Demise 

The model ran through the night, a peculiarity worth noting. The computing power long ago made short work of explaining the earth’s and indeed many other planets’ biogeochemical cycles. The even greater step of predicting the outcome of these systems for the next several billion years had originally taken most of the computational power on earth to calculate. Now, even that once monumental task could be completed with any number of iterations and down to an infinitesimally small degree of error in no more than a margin of a second.

The model that currently occupied the network of earth’s supercomputers had been built upon these past two accomplishments. All of the data that was ever created on earth was fed into the model. All existing predictions made by the previous models, all the butterflies flapping of wings and all the hurricanes in the pacific that ever were and all that ever would be until the earth’s destruction by the sun had all been neatly factored into the model’s consideration. When the last number of ephemeral rainbows, drops of ocean water on the side of every last fjord and the forces of every last subatomic particle in existence had been rounded to last significant digit, the universe blinked. For with nothing left to be found, understood, or created the process of the universe was complete and with that it promptly started to condense, collapse and close up shop, waiting to once again bang into existence and be learned anew.