BIRDSONG WHILE WE CAN:
On Edward Cowie’s Bird Portraits
By David Hackbridge Johnson,
with Xiaowei Liu’s photographs
and Iain Sinclair) please scroll down to where it says ‘older posts’
I. The Performance
Edward Cowie joins a list of composers who have populated the musical aviary and have shown a highly sensitive awareness of birdsong, birdflight and feather; a list that includes among others: Vivaldi (his seasons), Beethoven (his birds by the flowing brook), Delius (his cuckoo),Vaughan Williams (his lark), and Messiaen (his vast catalogue). Cowie’s large scale work for violin and piano, Bird Portraits, written in 2020 and performed in public for the first time last night at Deptford Town Hall by Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Roderick Chadwick, might be considered a catalogue of sorts, but unlike Messiaen’s pieces in his Catalogue d'oiseaux of the late 50s, whose individual parts are often played separately, Cowie’s portraits operate as a whole; it is hard to imagine any of the 24 pieces having a separate life beyond the confines of the variegated sky the composer has made for them.
Cowie signposts the work severally: the scales in the piano tumbling downwards – like a sitar sounding a raga, the chains of chords laid out in the piano – sometimes for the violin to mimic, sometimes to ignore, and the insistent rhythms of certain birdsongs that cause the two instruments to lock into conflictual dances – a bizarre ballet of flapping wings and raucous distress calls. Between these signposts the violin often provides an ostinato of birdsong as if suspended between landscape markers: trees, hills, farm buildings, a standing stone perhaps. Virtuosity of a high order is required and both players rose to the challenge magnificently; it should be noted in respect of the violin part that although the writing is often fiendish, it is not ‘against’ the instrument, with most passages having the lie of the fingerboard in view for their execution.
After more than half an hour’s playing, the midpoint of the work was reached: a skylark in wildest delirium of flight and song. With hindsight this is felt as the point of maximum height and light in the three-dimensional sphere of listening required by the piece. The subsequent movements chart a very slow descent into darker clouds and into habitations for more plaintive cries; the curlew’s for example. And there is the gradual dominance structurally of the chord-chains – often in locked 4ths or 5ths – as they set up alternative time-frames for listeners that run counter to the florid eloquence of the birds – like a partially hidden passacaglia trawling the bottom of an increasingly inky lake. This undertow, a magnetic core, diurnal, comes to dominate the last piece as if we are at journey’s end, having travelled from brightly populated skies to heavy clods of earth and the deeper plates that move beneath with inexorable geological tread. Over this ground bass the violin is reduced to long-held keening notes as if drawn out from the body like a thread. The end is a premonition of tragedy that marks the work's ecological standpoint in musical, if not polemical terms; it is all the more urgent for that. The Great Northern Diver cries dolefully in an empty heaven as the darkest piano chords mark a clock that measures aeons, and yet might still grind to a halt. The falling curve of this bird’s call is a lament.
Cowie spoke to me of the feeling of sadness he felt as he composed these last pages, as if all the ebullient air might soon be wiped of its song. That such an ending closes a work ringing with such joy at the love of nature and its creatures, filled me with the sense of both a celebration and an elegy, or even a warning. Cowie is no mere nature lover wishing to paint a sentimental watercolour of something ‘out there’; rather he knows that nature is in him and he in it; I am put in mind of eco-philosophies as propounded by Wendell Berry and Mary Midgley. It is this feeling of being inside nature that struck me as profound; the work of a composer who as he said to me, didn’t want to ‘write music about music’ but wanted music to be part of something outside itself. At the close of the tremendous performance, and after the quite rightly prolonged applause, I had the shuddering thought that we should listen to birdsong while we can – but this implies its imminent demise and is a council of despair. A work as important as Cowie’s Bird Portraits ought to make us at least pause at that possible, horrific outcome and rethink our relationship with something loved but taken for granted.
II. A Poetic Response
Bird-Landscapes
Not so mute the water,
and there the dazzling white among peat beds
a dagger at tunnelled earth
the lake a sky-mirror.
Rough rubbing the grebe
a dive to a scatter of fish
ornate in sun’s glow the orb
at mid-morning frost a shaken crown.
The field is a low firing rim
seed by wide-wing broadcast
and there a distant hammer flinting at bark
the woodland of buff versets.
A curlew spiral -
can it reach the vault or will it fall?
and the slow gong of the earth -
will it still let ring its shimmered coil?
III. Some Photographs by Xiaowei Liu
Edward Cowie and DHJ
Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Roderick Chadwick (with page turner)