Being Chicken
Available via Bandcamp, the Aerocade Music website, or on Apple Music or Spotify.
With the recent release of not one, but TWO pieces on the flute album, Aviary (the bird-brained product of flutist Elizabeth Robinson) I wanted to share more about the works featured. Fowl Play (a four movement work about chickens) and Hoppy Feet (a solo piece inspired by Rockhopper penguins) both appear alongside some truly fantastic pieces by composer-flutists Lisa Bost-Sandberg, Nicole Chamberlain, Gay Kahkonen, and Anne McKennon—beautifully produced by Aerocade Music extrodinaire Meerenai Shim! Elizabeth performed the solo work alone, but was joined by the incredible Emlyn Johnson, Erin K. Murphy, and Nicole Riner for Fowl Play. As a non-flutist myself, it is truly an honor to have my work included alongside so many creative minds who have dedicated large portions of their life to flute, and I hope you take the time to go support this album—and all of their other projects as well!
Birds of a Feather
I’m still not totally convinced these birds are real…
Elizabeth has been one of my favorite collaborators to work with in the last few years—she is always finding fun and interesting projects, and she is able to capture so many different moods and tone colors in her playing.
We first met during the Project 12 commissioning series, when she commissioned a work about rockhopper penguins (which you can read all about here). I loved working with her on that piece and deeply admired how adventurous, joyful, and creative she is as a performer and collaborator. I was ecstatic when reached out again to commission a new work—this time about chickens!
She sent me a fantastic photobook, Extraordinary Chickens, by photographer Stephen Green-Armytage—what I would later describe as the Vogue magazine of chickens—and I spent quite a bit of time pouring over the beautifully whimsical images inside. There were a lot of subjects to consider for the multi-movement work we envisioned, but we were eventually able to narrow the selection down to four fantastic fowl.
Discopeckque - Polish
A fabulous birdo showing off their head feathers!
While I wanted this first movement to be the most overtly “chicken sounding,” I also wanted to tease out both the beauty and the quirkiness of chickens. While we’ve heard birds throughout classical music—including some highlights on chickens from the likes of Stravinsky and Haydn, for example—there is so much more to birds, and chickens especially, then their squawking and pecking. The first movement was going to be important to get the listener on board with the idea that there are a lot of different characters/textures one can associate with chickens!
Polish chickens are most notable for their fantastic head feathers—rotund and well-kept on the female Polish chickens and wild, haphazard feathers on the males—and I felt these would be the perfect choice to open the piece.
She’s got her head feathers in tight order!
When I first saw pictures of Polish chickens, the females especially reminded me of hairstyles from the 60s and 70s. In different parts of the movement, you’ll hear neatly unified harmonies with syncopated rhythms (sometimes with all flutes joining in, sometimes in response to a solo line); this is meant as a subtle homage to the girl groups of the era. Short and clean articulations, syncopated melodic ideas, and moments of group harmony all work to capture the softer, neater, and more shapely head feathers of the female chickens.
Here, in measures 51 and 52, the upper flutes imitate a sort of “doo-wap” gesture behind the solo line, coming together in tight harmonies for the last measure of this excerpt.
This guy is a bit more 80’s than his female counterpart!
Something in-between a mad scientist and an 80s rockstar, the males of the species are a bit messier and more aggressive-looking. The neat lines like above are frequently juxtaposed throughout with busy counterpoint and dramatic gestures. Pecking articulations are interrupted by swooping runs. Beautiful melodic lines are sometimes picked up and carried away—or halted entirely by fluttertongue interjections from the other voices. While some tremolos are fast and tight, others are spaced awkwardly apart—creating slower, less regular tremolos. The aggressive eighth-note pecking, thick and busy interplay, fluttertongue moments, and general messiness of other textures throughout the piece are all meant to depict the quirkier, more haphazard headfeathers of the males.
Early on in the piece, you can see how the melody line in the first flute at m. 18 gets passed down to the third flute—but both of these gentler, more playful melodic moments are underscored by the aggressive pecking, fluttertongue, and swooping gestures by the other flutes.
Okay, one more!!
The piece has a different array of flute-family instruments for each movement, so I wanted to be sure that each movement could feel it stood on its own. This first movement is for four C flutes, so I wanted to really capitalize on their similar range by passing ideas around a lot. There are moments throughout the piece for each voice to shine, and to try out some of the different textures/characters (rather than having a single character assigned to each flute). While some of the other movements stay in a particular mood or tone throughout, this movement was all about showcasing the wide array of colors and textures I’d be exploring in later movements.
Chasing Tail - Golden Duckwing Phoenix
So long, but oh-so-pretty too!
For the next movement, I was excited to capture some chickens-with-lore! Chickens have been domesticated for centuries, but they were not always kept for the practical production of eggs and meat.
Golden Duckwing Phoenix chickens were bred (primarily in Japan) to have flowing, long tails—the most extensive of which was recorded at a staggering 30 feet long! Peasant-class farmers would breed these long-tailed beauties as prestigious gifts for their royals. Royals would sometimes gift feathers from their prized birds to samurai to adorn their spears. Today, while no tail has quite reached the legendary length of 30 ft, they are still largely bred for their tails and kept as exotic pets.
In writing about these amazing chickens, I wanted to capture both a sense of timelessness, as well as pay tribute to their military plumage. By using four distinct flute-family instruments, I would get the widest array of colors and a large range to work with—so the movement is scored for piccolo, C flute, alto flute, and bass flute.
The lowest staves are for alto and bass flutes, which get a chance to shine in a more agile, melodic role while the piccolo and flute churn away in the background.
For the opening, I wanted the piece to feel like the start of a story. The main melody passes down from the piccolo all the way to the bass and alto flutes, which have an almost grandmother-like quality to their tone. After the intro, the piccolo sits in its lowest register to trade with the flute in a series of small, rolling gestures, repeating in the background of the melody. The bass and alto flutes trade the melody—filled not with slow, lyrical sustains, but with facile turns and rhythmic gestures. I really wanted to showcase these lower flutes’ ability to move and act as lyrical instruments (so often relegated to drones or bass notes), and it was so fun giving them this moment to shine!
Frills and pomp were the focus here, even as the bass and alto flute provide a bit of a slow march beneath.
For the more military feeling of the next section, I relied a lot on the upper range of the flute and the piccolo. Piccolos are often used to evoke military themes in western classical music, but I didn’t necessarily want to go all-out on the Stars and Stripes style. Using grace notes, dotted sixteenth rhythms, and keeping the musical material more motivic than melodic (in this case, keeping the gestures centered around a single note rather than outlining a progressing harmony) all help to keep it from going too far into the military-band feel. This is further subverted by having the texture flipped on its head soon after—with the bass and alto flute now getting the fancy runs for a few measures as the flute and piccolo pick up on the bass line instead.
The march feel in the piccolo and flute are further dampened by breaking away into tremolos in the flute as the lower flutes pick up the more frilly melody ideas.
Form is something I’ve really been striving to work on in the last year—both within a single piece, but also thinking more deeply about multi-movement works and how movements can speak to one another.
To help with this, I stopped trying to write movements in order. For this work, I wrote the first and last movements first, then this movement, and finally the third. Doing so allowed me to pull textures from the outer movements to incorporate into the inner movements—giving the whole piece a bit more consistency, even as the instrumentation changed.
Lots of textures packed into these last few bars!
The ending to this movement ends in a flourish; far removed from the mysterious tone of the opening, but has moments that allude to textures to come—the flutter tongue melody in the piccolo and in the ensemble at the end notes tease what will become a main feature in the next movement; the repeated sixteenth note pattern that pops up briefly throughout the piece (pictured below in m. 62-63) hint at the main texture for the last movement. The opening and a few middle sections of this piece feature a large amount of tremolo gestures, calling back to the opening of the first movement.
While I still believe this movement stands on its own, it also acts as a structural pillar for the piece as a whole, and it was a really exciting challenge to work out how to do this in a more subtle way than using exact motives!
Featherbrained - Silkies
Fluffy goddesses.
The first time I ever saw a silkie chicken was in Paris. I was studying there for a summer at IRCAM and staying with a host family, who had a white silkie on their porch. I had never seen one before and didn’t fully believe it was real! Elizabeth and I both agreed that—while it would make sense to have a slower, softer movement for these silky ladies— these chickens were still unbelievably weird and we really didn’t want the movement to lose its quirky character.
It begins innocently enough…
To evoke softness, I started by forcing myself to really simplify some key elements. I chose a very simple form of theme-and-variation (in a broad sense) and largely stuck to chorale-like textures—the voices largely having the same rhythm throughout. I decided to score the movement for three flutes and alto flute, helping to keep the range and color more uniform (especially when contrasted with the last movement). I also kept the harmonic language very simple and largely stagnant. This left me with a rather simple canvas upon which I could add some texture and color to ruffle-up the edges.
A different key, flutter tongue and tremolos, faster - but still the same material as the opening!
In total we hear the opening three times. Each time the theme returns, it gets a little more roughed up. It has a little more flutter tongue and tremolo, includes just a little bit more counterpoint than the opening, and—in the case of the last time—is a bit faster. I spent days trying to strike the right balance between these three sections, with one sketch even including jet whistles and vocalized yelps. In the end, I opted to go for a more subtle transformation overall, and I think it ended up suiting the birds much better.
Even the feet have feathers!
In between these main sections, I played around with a few different ideas. After the first theme, we get an interlude that highlights the alto flute as a melodic instrument once more (like in the previous movement). After we hear the theme a second time, I expand the flutter tongue texture to the entire ensemble, while still keeping the musical material smooth and chorale-like.
The transition from the flutter tongue to the tongue pizz was tricky to figure out at first
While the next section is meant to evoke pecking, this version is quite different from the “pecking” idea in the first movement. The slow, regular pattern of the tongue pizzes necessitates a lighter, less aggressive touch—fostering a soft, almost kiss-like texture, further helped by the use of the lower, more resonant register of the instruments. While I loved the pizz alone, I knew I had to work in a few ruffled movements. The contrapuntal texture—quite different from the more uniform feeling of the rest of the movement—was in part so each player had enough time to perform the flutter tongue gestures and tremolos and still return to the pizz texture. It also ended up helping the movement feel a bit more dynamic. While this movement is one of the shortest, using less material overall helped it to feel complete.
“I suddenly want a winter coat that makes me look like this chicken half the year. Fluffy and FABULOUS.”
Cock Flight - Sumatra
so pretty!!
The last movement, Cock Flight, was inspired by the powerful and aggressive Sumatra chickens. While modern day Sumatras are more docile, they use to be bred as fighting birds and—what really sparked my imagination—could fly for short distances.
When it comes to a flute fight, there’s nothing more fun than pitting piccolos against each other. While I was tempted to score the movement for four piccolos, a few things kept me from doing so. One important factor being that I was trying to keep each part such that they only had to double one other instrument (so the first and second players double piccolo, the third player doubles alto, and the fourth doubles bass), the other being that—due to the limited range of the piccolo—I wanted to make sure I could really capture the raw power of the chicken, and felt I needed a lower octave to do so. While I didn’t initially anticipate it, having two piccolos and two flutes also opened a lot more possibilities for trading lines back and forth; this helped to really make the punches land harder and keep them coming faster.
Here you can see the additional grace notes in m. 19, 21, and 22 all working to create momentum.
While the higher range played a big factor in making the piece feel aggressive, I also employed a number of other tricks.
One was the use of grace notes—adding more grace notes as the line ascends helped to really add drama to the ascending lines and thicken up the textures, especially for the piccolos. It also created momentum similar to flapping wings, and made for some really fun moments to harmonize the grace note ascents.
While sixteenths and tuplets help to create speed and density, the mixed meter section really helps to catapult the momentum forward, also—the beat suddenly feeling twice as fast as the section before and the lopsided groups of two’s and three’s keeping the listener on their toes.
The percussive stops to each gesture also helped to really make this punchy
Flutter tongue also makes a big appearance in this movement, employed in a similar theme-and-variations method as the previous movement. It was so fun having the piccolos, especially, use flutter tongue so much—the higher range combined with sudden stops really create an aggressive, percussive punch as the lower flutes added much needed body to the actual pitches.
This movement, out of the four, actually came together the fastest for me. I loved the idea of the fighting flutes, the flight-like motives trading with punchy moments, and the overall aggressive feeling to wrap up the movement.
The Bigger Peck-ture
Imagine this but like, 30 feet tall.
Chickens can be many things—beautiful, quirky, loud, fuzzy, fabulous, wild…if you’ve ever been near a group of chickens when they’re riled up, you also fully believe that the dinosaurs were probably their ancestors. It was such a treat, not only to write this piece and work with Elizbeth and the other fabulous flutists, but to learn more about these fantastic creatures. These are the kinds of projects I really get excited about, and it was so fulfilling to work on this piece.
With Fowl Play now having enjoyed its live premiere and CD release (and a big upcoming performance planned for later this summer…), I’m so excited to get the sheet music out into the world soon! The sheet music will be available in The Library later this month. I hope it proves to be a fun piece to experience, both as a listener and as a performer.
Stay plucky, friends!
