CATHERINE CLOVER  
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Score for the Arrival of the Blackbird in South Eastern Australia 1860 (2019)

for 'Wayback Sound Machine, a sonic constellation compilation Part 3' curated by Maile Costa Colbert for Sonic Field

With Andrea Williams, Diana Combo,Monteith McCollum, Bonnie Jones, Catherine Clover

 
    Compilation link  
       
       
       
   

Common blackbird (Turdus merula)

Blackbirds are song birds. Like people, they learn their songs from their parents and their songs/language remain flexible throughout their lives. This means they can adapt their songs in a new environment, change and develop their calls, just as human language changes and develops. Blackbirds have only been singing in south eastern Australia since 1860, so their voices are relatively recent additions to the biophony (biological sound in any given environment). The birds have had to adapt their voices to locate their sonic niche – the bandwidth where they can sing and be heard by each other – amongst the louder native birds such as parrots, wattlebirds, Australian magpies, butcherbirds and currawongs. As a result, in Melbourne today, the song of blackbirds is louder, shorter and slightly less elaborate than the song of blackbirds in London or Berlin, where the birds are native.

Blackbirds were introduced to Australia by white British settlers. Colonisation has resulted in the eradication of culture and language for many Aboriginal people through dispossession and forced assimilation. The flourishing of blackbirds could be seen as symbolic of this cultural decimation, representing one of the many threads of an ongoing complexity in the postcolonial setting. Yet the birds also represent themselves and are themselves, as birds, and cannot be understood only as symbols for human actions and interactions. Indeed, for Aboriginal Australians there is no separation between nature and culture, and the natural world is the cultural world and vice versa. Theorist Donna Haraway coined the term ‘naturecultures’ in 2003 in order to re-entangle the two concepts and re-introduce what Aboriginal Australians have always understood, that these are not two separate ideas but, rather, equal components of a greater living whole, where humans are a part of things rather than a central pivot.

The score is intended as a prompt for readers to listen and voice with the blackbirds. The transcription struggles to interpret the intricate song using English phonetic words, so a voicing is a necessarily difficult undertaking, particularly as the score becomes less readable as more birds sing. However, the score is not about mimicking or deceiving the blackbirds but about improvising and speculating alongside them, so any attempt can be considered a success.

 
       
       
       
       
       
   

 

 
       
       
       
       
   
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Corvus corvix, Corvus corvix, Corvus corvix, Corvus albicollis,