A Bird in Quarantine

Length: ca. 5’30”
Instrumentation: flute

The following piece is based on the song of the Uirapuru (musician wren). The musician wren is a small brown wren native to the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil. It is famous for its beautiful song and the stories and legends around it. Many composers have been inspired by it, among others Bayle, Messiaen, and Villa-Lobos.

While every single wren has a unique call sung with ‘eventual variety’ (repeating a song-type several times before switching to another), they all demonstrate a common preference for perfect consonances (P8, P5, P4) over dissonances and imperfect consonances. That is one of the reasons why a vast majority of us will perceive it as *tonal*.

This composition focuses on a song by a single Uirapuru. Throughout the entire piece, the song is varied melodically and rhythmically and intensified through personal motivic gestures. To stay true to the original song, the performer needs to reproduce the lyrical aspect of the song as accurately as possible and enhance the dynamic contrasts.