Song Cycle on a Tower...

Among my life ambitions I have added a new one today of recording the song of a bird. I found myself searching for the songster.

The call seemed to start with what sounded like a clever 'turn' or 'shake'. Students of music will know the musical notation of 'a turn' followed by 'a trill' but what caught my ear was the curiously delicate way the turn was executed beginning with an extremely soft volume (pianissimo) and glided (a glissando) to a relaxed moderate volume, yet to a brilliantly rapid inversion of that tune followed by a subtle drop in volume and pause, a silence...after listening, mesmerised, to the whole song and that phrasing a few times I recognised a distinct 'rest'.

A trill followed and a series of bars of the purest music sufficient to make me believe it is with a bird like this one that we found music as we know it in the clumsy by comparison European tradition of notation and execution. The songster opened up its heart without drawing breath it seemed and performed a succession of cadences that sounded as if each was a logical progression, but not so simple. Between each logical phrase it interposed a succession of turns, but might I be mistaken each was performed in a different key!? Yet the musical thread of the cadences remained true to the original musical form described in the opening trill.

Rot. My ear can't be that good.

It might be.

I crossed the road to where I saw birds I couldn't identify flying into an orange tree alongside a mature fushcia bush. Branches of oranges and fuschia florets overhang a corrugated iron fence there. My imagination was so on fire as a consequence of hearing the call I was almost silent moving into place on the pavement where I could listen under the orange tree. A silent honey eater on a fushia branch was amicable about our proximity and two or three other birds of what sort I don't know arrived and flew into the orange tree and hopped in the fuschia ... and left. The song continued.

The air temperature was starting to plummet past icy chill to too cold and my hands were tingling from the cold. It was late afternoon. I had to give up, but puzzled. The song seemed to be coming from the vicinity of the orange tree or in its height, but each time it was repeated it did not change definition or volume. The songster was hidden inside the tree it seemed without the least intention of making itself known...and so still the only movement in the tree was the regular motion of a high wind. Not even when I moved off was there a flutter.

Curiosity drove me to stare upwards at the tree as I walked away disappointed I could not bring the blip home...and there on the communications tower in the side yard behind the orange tree was the feathered musician giving it all there was to give.

I easily identified the bird was the songster by the accompaniment body language.

You know the way someone you know plays a musical instrument.

At the end of the introductory 'turn' before the pause, the songster gyrated its head and at the pause, dropped its head downward almost as if it was looking down to observe where I was standing gawking up...and the upward movement of its head and raising its beak, readying for song was the remaining duration of the pause. Gripping onto its perch in what must have been a fair gale up there, it swelled it lungs and began its distinctive theme tune (gentle intro with its 'turn' and the inversion concluded). I feel goose shivers down my spine recalling the thought I had regarding this bird's ability to project the song, least of all its beauty, not hidden in the orange tree at all but a ventriloquist way, towering above.

Cold drove me home. The songster was still performing Song Cycle on a Tower.