Flöte (The Twittering Machine)

The music of this piece takes the picture byPaul Klee as part of its inspiration. The image is both cartoonish and menacing; several birds seem to be attached to a cranking mechanism. Have they been captured? Are they part of this strange machine willingly? Are they singing to be made free or are they contentedly serenading? Each movement explores a different aspect of the picture as described in an art catalogue listing and features different instruments from within the group.

As a starting point for musical material I decided to investigate the idea of birdsong in music but instead of trying to capture the real sound of birds, I used an old Gaelic song from St Kilda, the remote and now uninhabited island far off the west coast of Scotland, whose chorus imitates the sound of sea birds. With this as a musical starting point and the mechanical nature of the image in mind, I tried to create a bird, musical box – a twittering machine. The choice of the instrumental group was also important as the variety of the extended family instruments in the wind gave a huge range of sounds for my mechanical device. The grouping is also important from a visual, theatrical point of view as we see the three wind instruments (the birds of the image) tied done by the strings of the cello. The piece was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival in 2008 and first performed in the unusual setting of the Palm House in the Royal Botanic Gardens.