Birdsong

 The rigs run down to the cliff edge

Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending was recently voted the most popular piece of classical music in the country.    It was chosen as one of the pieces played at the commemoration of the 9/11 tragedy so its appeal extends far beyond our shores.

Vaughan Williams himself did not, apparently, regard it as one of his greatest works.

Its popularity maybe partly due to the image of this tiny bird rising into the blue, wings beating frantically while it pours out its song.  The human equivalent might be to sprint a hundred metres in ten seconds while singing “Che gelida manina" at full register.

The skylarks were in good voice as I skirted the long rigs that run down to the tops of the cliffs along our local coastline but they were in competition with another songster perched inconspicuously atop a stunted hawthorn.   A song that gives rise to that old Scots expression of joy – “singing like lintie” – it was a linnet.  Once so numerous, that our Victorian forefathers, perpetrators of so much wildlife crime, kept them as cage-birds, they are now on the “Red” list of endangered breeds.

 Coastline walk

Birdsong has and probably will always be an inspiration for composers.  The cuckoo features famously in Beethoven, Britten, Mahler and Mozart. The nightingale makes several appearances and there have been parts for robins, wagtails and even siskins.  Vivaldi had his “Goldfinch ” concerto but I can’t find a reference to the linnet.  There must be one somewhere.

Probably the most famous bird in music is the little bird, Peter’s friend in Peter and the Wolf  though I don’t think Prokofiev said what sort of bird it was.  I think it sounds like a wren but I am definitely no musician.

A  recent trip to the Hebrides was enlivened by the daily calling of the gowk whose name, to Anglophones, embodies its call…the cuckoo, and by that sound, now so rare on the mainland, that of the corn crake.

The corn crake’s onomatopoeic Latin name, crex crex, like a thumbnail running down a comb, exactly describes the call that seems to come from about six different birds or from six different locations in the reeds.  No wonder it has a reputation as a ventriloquist.

Watching people going about, walking, jogging, cycling, even waiting at bus stops, with their ears plugged into their i-pods, I fear that a generation will never know the song of a blackbird or the “wise thrush; he sings each song twice over” let alone the linnet or the skylark.