Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

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

Work Details

Year: 2011

Instrumentation: Piano.

Dedication note: For Jon and Laura Fitzgerald