Sheet Music: Score
Birds calling in Fortitude Valley : for piano / Michael Hannan.
by Michael Hannan (2011)
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- Library Availability: 786.2/HAN 27 — Reference (not for loan) copy only
- Instrumentation: Piano.
Product details
In 2010 I wrote a piano piece called Birds Calling in Cloud
Valley. This work was inspired by a Chinese poem of the same
title and employed transcriptions of the calls of four birds
found in China. Later that year I was living in Brisbane in a
suburb called Fortitude Valley while doing research at the
Queensland University of Technology. Every morning at dawn and
for several hours after I heard pied butcherbirds calling. I
began to transcribe these calls and when I returned to my home in
Nimbin, I wrote a piano piece based on the six pages of
transcriptions I had made. In searching for a title I couldn't
resist Birds Calling in Fortitude Valley. For those who
know Fortitude Valley there is an extra layer of humour in the
title.
One section of the piece is based on a melodic sequence of
butcherbird calls which was entirely in the diminished scale (an
eight-tone scale of alternating semitones and tones). As this was
one of the scales used by the birdcall-obsessed composer Olivier
Messiaen, I harmonised my transcriptions of these sequences using
chord progression ideas that Messiaen derived from this
scale.
The work is dedicated to my friends Jon and Laura Fitzgerald
whose flat I was renting in Fortitude Valley while they holidayed
in France and Ireland.
Michael Hannan
Published by: Wirripang [979 0 720146 20 1] — 1 score (5p. -- A4 (portrait))
Includes programme note.
Typeset edition.
ISMN: 979 0 720146 20 1
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