MiE Fielding - Aves Elektron: Death of the Nightingale

A Closer Listen

How much does it take to care?

The U.K. has lost 73 million birds since 1970: one third of the total population. The U.S. has reported similar numbers. It’s not just a matter of perception; there are fewer birds around than ever, and the numbers will keep shrinking unless human action is taken.

MiE (Mike) Fielding cares. A lifelong naturalist, he has cared for years. He’s been recording the cries of native birds for so long that upon returning to their habitats years later, he has discovered that some of them have fallen silent. Aves Elektron: Death of the Nightingale is his multi-media treatise, a sobering reflection of damage, destruction and the end of diversity.

The book and accompanying CD – or the other way around – are found only in physical format, with an emphasis on headphone listening. The 44-minute piece is designed to be heard in three-dimensional sound, an aural immersion, and is even more effective if played while the book is perused. Will it work? A friend was visiting the other day and saw the book on my coffee table. “What’s this, a book of bird photos?” he asked in anticipation. As he began to flip through it, he muttered with disdain, “Oh, a book of dead birds.” But then he couldn’t put the book down, and started to read. I told him about the swift and massive reduction in avian populations. He was visibly shocked. Thankfully, hearts can still be changed, as can habits, if only the word gets out. And in order to do this, sometimes one has to do something a little shocking.

Fielding emphasizes that this is “Not music,” while we insist that it is, referencing his appreciation for John Cage and the fact that he refers to the piece as a composition. Sound art is music, and this specific brand of music, while falling comfortably into the experimental field, might also be called dark ambient or drone. Nightjars, released a month prior to the book, serves as a fair comparison point. Three sonic sources intertwine: the pure call of the nightingale, whose populations have decreased a terrifying 90%; an enveloping drone, comprised of processed birdsong, inspired by birdsong “drowned out by the quite deafening noise of the motorway traffic on the nearby M40;” and a child’s reading of John Clare’s classic poem The Mores, an elegy for a devastated habitat:

And birds and trees and flowers without a name All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes Have found too truly that they were but dreams.

What did Clare know in 1820 of climate change, carbon footprints, mass transport, industrial food systems, pesticides, fracking and clearcutting? The world’s population back then had just topped one billion, an eighth of what it is today. But as Fielding so poignantly writes, in England one could hear “corn bunting, spotted flycatcher, yellow wagtail and cuckoo … and in winter, water rail, long-eared owl, parties of snipe and finch flocks … now all sadly gone.”

“But,” some may say, “that still leaves a lot of birds.” This common reaction misses the point, that birds, especially migratory birds, are essential for the distribution of seeds and the stability of the food chain. MiE Fielding also mentions the importance of bugs, whose populations are in similar decline and whose existence is necessary for pollination, soil health, and of course avian diets.

What Fielding might call uneasy listening is less so for readers of our site, who are accustomed to dark and foreboding sounds. The general public is different, which is why it’s important that the book begins with more traditionally attractive portraits of birds, along with references to seminal bird-based musical and poetic works, dating back to the Song of Songs. Without any comment, the images eventually change to sculpture, suggesting that one day art may be the primary way one encounters certain species; then the pages fade to black. Meanwhile the music continues to swirl and accumulate, attempting to dominate the sound field, to drown out the “real” sounds with the manipulated. At the page bottoms, a terrifying clock ticks down, displaying the “Time Left,” until the numbers arrive at zero. In one sense, the clock refers to the CD, yet the metaphor is obvious.

The final minutes represent a different recording, made earlier this year at Foyle Riding, where cellist Beatrice Harrison once thrilled audiences by performing duets with the local nightingales, a feat imitated by David Rothenberg’s Nightingales in Berlin. We’re not surprised that Harrison, born in 1892, is gone; the real surprise is that the nightingales have gone as well. This sobering, real-life ending hammers the point home: in many places, it’s already too late to act. In others, little time remains. (Richard Allen)