Zugvögel (2012)
(for oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto-saxophone and bassoon)

My ears need fresh sounds that I usually find outside the music. When I hear something that fascinates me, I dedicate myself in my pieces to this listening experience. This frees me from reproducing clichés of whatever music. The more photographic I stay with the acoustic experience, the better. I transcribe sounds and translate them to ordinary instruments. With this transfer, the playing technique and the palette of tone colors must expand - with the participation of the musicians. The reeds of the Calefax Reed Quintet provoke to try out a certain sound world. My task is to work out the essence of the sounds. I also have to think about the environment of the sound and describe it; Create spaces.

Whooper swans scream with every flapping of their wings. They draw large circles before they fly away. They cross an immense airspace. Strict rules of conduct. They create shapes.

Pelican, Mourning Duck, Canada Goose, Cormorant, Hawk, Great Diver, Collar Duck ...

The piece is dedicated to the brilliant musicians of the Calefax Reed Quintet. When I look at the concert calendar of the ensemble, the title of „Migratory Birds“ seems to me appropriate.

Text: Simon Cummings

Olivier Messiaen’s music has pretty much monopolised the world of birds for the majority of the last century, his efforts being directed towards the attempt to capture their songs and calls through a process of close, repeated listening and notating. The results were a mixture of a modicum of accuracy and a fair amount of stylisation: birdsong filtered through Messiaen, as it were. The possibilities of a more directly accurate approach are explored by German composer Carola Bauckholt in her 2012 wind quintet Zugvögel. The title translates as ‘migratory birds’, the sounds of 13 of which – swan, whooper swan, pelican, common scoter, chicken, black grouse, chukar, Canada goose, duck, cormorant, falcon, common loon and harlequin duck – Bauckholt has notated. Both the recordings and the notations are presented to the five wind players – oboe (and cor anglais), clarinet, alto sax, bass clarinet, bassoon (and contraforte)) – who are instructed to use them as the basis for a reproduction. However, the recordings are what takes precedence; Bauckholt’s note in the score states that “Pitches, rhythms, timbre, dynamics and the expressive quality of the sounds should be imitated as closely as possible. The notation should only be taken as a guide.” The onus is therefore on each of the players to establish their own unique compromise between Bauckholt’s formalised score – which is very intricate and precise (especially rhythmically) – and the more free, naturalistic rhythms, pitches and timbres of the original sounds.

As such, while performances of music by different players will obviously differ in certain respects, in the case of Zugvögel there will be an especially high level of difference, due to the utmost subjective way in which each performer hears the sounds and then seeks to find a way of mimetically reproducing them as accurately as possible, a process that is likely to vary considerably from player to player. Furthermore, while to all intents and purposes the score of Zugvögel looks entirely straightforward, it arguably functions more as a graphic score, indicating to the players where the different bird calls should begin and end, as well as providing an indication (and, perhaps, a reminder) of their general qualities and contours.

While this approach hands over control of certain aspects of the piece to the players, Bauckholt’s role as composer remains paramount, since the points at which these different calls should occur are all predetermined by her, along with suggested descriptive terms about their articulation (“guttural”, “espressivo”, “whimper extremely softly”, etc.). That being said, Bauckholt’s aim has evidently not been to organise her pseudo-aviary into a highly dramatic narrative. The work’s structure is relatively simple, displaying an overall tendency towards reduction and simplification. Within this overarching direction, the intricacies of the piece manifest in variations of density, which often separate into interplays between the group and the individual.

Thus, the start of the work is somewhat minimalistic, overlapping repeating notes with differing speeds and registers, sporadically punctuated by loud calls. Within a couple of minutes this has been smoothed to a texture of sustained drifting tones, and the remainder of the work moves around the continuum that exists between these two poles. For certain periods of the piece, it’s tempting to hear the players as disparate individuals only ‘connected’ inasmuch as they’re behaving in a superficially similar manner in the same general environment. Indeed, there are occasions when it seems as if order, such as it is, has almost broken down entirely, and Zugvögel comes close to resembling avant-garde improvisation, full of individuated lines articulating melodies that spiral and cavort semi-chaotically. And then, sometimes abruptly, their tones unite and coalesce, falling and rising together in a cooperative, coordinated way that indicates a deep underlying unity among the diverse species of instruments. Drones emerge, acting like imaginary lines upon which the birds might almost be perched, calling and singing as a group.

Considering the meaning of the title, one could read Zugvögel as an example of migration taking place, the birds gradually disappearing from view to be replaced by silence and ambient noise. i suspect it’s not intended as literally as that, instead acting as a more abstract process of encroaching quiet and calm, where pitch itself finally evaporates, replaced with air noise and soft tappings, the vibrant colour of earlier now replaced with monochromatic stillness.

In Zugvögel, Carola Bauckholt seeks to probe into the ways we can imitate and reproduce extant sounds, and both the process its results are fascinating. But i also love the way that, for all its artificiality, it genuinely transports me back to nature, to the countless times when i’ve stood surrounded by birds and just listened, at length, to their wild, spontaneous, structured, disordered solos and choruses and heard it as nothing other than music.

This performance of Zugvögel was given by the Calefax Reed Quintet at the 2019 Sound Festival in Aberdeen.