::: NightinGala :::

ABOUT

The society of Kallio-Kuninkala Music Festival (www.kallio-kuninkalafestival.fi) organises its 13th annual festival on the 12-15th June 2008. The festival is well established in the mid-Uusimaa area outside Helsinki and has an important role nationwide as a venue of contemporary classical music. The audience is devoted and quite often also professionally-selected, and appreciates the artistic planning and range of program within the festival. The program includes annually from 2 to 5 commissioned works and also introduces an emerging Finnish composer with an entire concert. This year's theme composer is Riikka Talvitie.

The festival also urges for co-operation between other fields of music and arts, reaching new audiences and lowering the threashold of introducing oneself to the music of our times. This year's festival broadens the co-operation with the Music institute of Mid-Uusimaa and its young musicians with the theme of nature in music. In this framework the first NightinGala festival will take place: it will be an eclectic event comprising a concert, a seminar and a workshop, all totally devoted to the nightingales of the species Luscinia. The time of the festival coincides with the very period when nightingales emigrate to Finland, and can often be heard in the night singing their beautiful songs.

The devoted financial partners of the Kallio-Kuninkala Music Festival are the Sibelius Academy and the Foundation of Leonora and Yrjö Paloheimo. The foundation of the festival's musicians lies with the chamber ensemble Zagros (www.zagros.fi), which is well-renowned and prized for broad-minded and independent concerts and recordings.

SEMINAR

The nightingale song between art and research

The massive presence of nightingales in musical composition (all over history, from troubadours to contemporary composers without significant breaks) suggests us a number of reflections that have not only to do with the undeniable charm that the sounds emitted by these birds exercise on the musicians’ sensibility. It also informs us about how this charm, in its aesthetic significance, has survived centuries of (often radically) different ways of conceiving the musical art.

To the consistency of this appeal one must then add the growing scientific and academic interest towards nightingale songs in a sense that is firstly ethological and then specifically musicological. The use of the word song, as applied to these birds and to other non-human animals, has been first metaphorical, then functional, then – finally – meant literarily. That was the birth of zoomusicology, a discipline founded by composer/musicologist François-Bernard Mâche back in 1983, and now enjoying a constantly larger following, starting from Finland, where the very first academic course on the subject was established at Helsinki University.

The NightinGala seminar aims to virtually cover all these areas of investigation, namely:

1) The artistic relation between nightingales and musicians, including its history and its pragmatics;
2) The scientific-ethological investigation on nightingale songs, starting from purely technical aspects (e.g., recording and spectrogram analysis)
3) The zoomusicological input to the issue: is it possible to analyse nightingale songs in a purely musicological sense?

The seminar will last 8 hours altogether, and will be articulated in two sessions of 4 hours each. With the exception of the 1 hour long opening presentation of each session, all other presentations will last 30 minutes, including some time for discussion.

The first session will be entitled “Nightingales in musical practice and history” and will focus on the musical-artistic part, both in terms of direct musical experiences from composers and musicians, and historical illustration of the role of nightingale songs in music development.

The second session will be entitled “Nightingales in natural sciences and zoomusicology”, and will focus on theoretical-musicological approaches on the one hand, and empirical/applied research from such fields like ethology, ornithology and bioacoustics.

In addition to the seminar, a workshop will be designed with the intention of engaging the seminar audience and speakers into a more interactive (and somehow practical) form of participation.

Program (in progress)

1st session

Opening of the session

Dario Martinelli (University of Helsinki) - Zoomusicology and the analysis of nightingale songs
The presentation will provide a short introduction to the history and the main theoretical stands of zoomusicology, and will then proceed to analyse the specific case of the Luscinia luscinia species.

Lina Navickaite (Vilnius Academy of Music and Theatre) - Nightingales in classical music
Here, the author tries to present a historical survey of the usage of nightingale-related melodies, titles or even characters in classical (or so considered nowadays) music. From Middle Ages troubadours to Olivier Messiaen and later composers, this paper will demonstrate the recurrent inspiration that the composers of art music have been drawing from the nightingale song.

Emily Doolittle (University of Princeton) - Nightingales in folk music

Jorma Sorjonen (University of Joensuu) - The daughters of Zeus
According to the Greek mythology the two nightingale species Luscinia luscinia (Progné) and L. megarhynchos (Philoméle) are the daughters of Zeus. Due to their powerful and melodic songs the nightingale has inspired composers and poets. The mystic song during warm and light Finnish summer nights has also inspired a famous Finnish poet Lauri Viita, who wrote an excelent poem “Northern Nightingale”. In spite of his style of poetry the message of behavioural ecology was also perfectly correct. The Philoméle has very large repertoire withouth any local dialects. The Progne has smaller repertoire but great local and habitatical variation. The Nightingales (Progné) on Kursk in Russien and the mixed singing Nightingales (Progné) on the sympatric area of L. luscinia and L. megarhynchos in Poland have famous and exceptional beautiful songs.

Jyrki Alakuijala (University of Oulu) - On algorithmic methods for bird song processing
The presentation will illustrate the methods for processing sound that the author has found interesting for composing with bird song material. These methods include variable tuning, adaptive tuning, sensory dissonance modeling and optimization, enforced virtual pitch, and manually copied (drawn)
and re-synthetized bird song spectrograms.

Harri Viitanen (composer, Helsinki cathedral) - How nightingales become composition
The presentation will illustrate the process through which the author has transformed the bird songs into actual human musical material, and what is the conversion that produces artistically the most interesting musical results.

2nd session

Opening of the session

David Rothenberg (New Jersey Institute of Technology) - The Song of the Nightingale: Why Science and Art Must Be Combined to Decipher It
Biologists have been trying to decipher the structure of nightingale song for the past thirty years, and much has been discovered about how the birds use their singing in courtship and territory defense behavior. However, little has been learned about how the very complex song itself is structured, and this topic might be better investigated by the involvement of more musicians and musicologists into the research process. First I will talk about why this hasn¹t yet happened, and explain what insights musically trained researchers might be better able to elucidate than biologists, who often rely on simplistic statistical models. Scientists tend to count the number of distinctly different syllables as an indication of song complexity, NOT looking at how different phrases are combined to form a musically intricate whole. They often say issues of structure and complexity rely too much on human listener bias, not objective data-gathering. I will explain why this is not the case, why musicology need not be any less objective, or more subjective, than the simple counting favored by science. A better method for objectively analyzing complex bird songs will be proposed.

Marc Naguib (Netherlands Institute of Ecology) - How and why nightingales sing: a behavioral ecological perspective

Timo Maran (University of Tartu) - The zoosemiotics of nightingales

Henrike Hultsch (University of Berlin) - From hearing to singing - song learning and devlopment in the nightingale

Ann Warde (Cornell bioacoustics laboratory) - Nightingale Song: Musical Analysis, Scientific Synthesis

more forthcoming

CONCERT

At the Nightingala Festival the audience will hear music inspired by nightingale songs. The festival has commissioned works from the composers and musicians, who have especially specialized on animal
sounds, and what is even more important, they all will arrive to the festival to perform live their new works first time.

The commissioned works will show a new sides from the bird songs, the performance formats varies from the composed works to improvisations, and mix of these. The nightingale song lives in these works aside of acoustic instruments and human voice. On the other hand the audience will get a closer contact to the subject when the bird song has, for example, slowed-down in the digital compositions. Only then the human ear has chance to hear the microscopic nuances and rich sound colors of fast bird songs.

At the festival American clarinetist David Rothenberg and Estonian guitarist Robert Jürjendal will play along with special kind of nightingale field recordings. This project continues forwards Rothenberg's famous bird project entitled Why Birds Sing. During the years composer Petri Kuljuntausta has created collection of compositions from the animal and nature sounds, and at the Nightingala Festival concert he will transform the bird songs to unexpected spectral dimensions by the means of digital sound technology. Composer Herman Rechberger will perform his new work "Drumming with Birds", where the audience will have a very special chance to hear his drumming along with the birds. Folk musician Kristiina Ilmonen and her group will perform improvisations where the musicians has taken influences from the bird songs and their presence in folk tradition.

Italian zoomusicologist Dario Martinelli will arrange a special musical performance on nightingale song, where his music has motivated the collaborators, Pärttyli Rinne and Nora Lähteenmäki, to broaden the composition with a performance of contemporary theatre. Martinelli's composition will be entirely based on nightingale sounds, in most cases heavily edited and "filtered" through the compositional paradigm of error aesthetics (white noises, clips, random-generated accidents, etc.).

At the festival will be also heard Harri Viitanen's tape-composition "Katharsis", where the composer has created illusion on forest and its birds with the help of surrounding eight-channel multispeaker technology.

In the context of Nightingala Festival concerts will be also released new music CDs, where the music has composed under the influence of bird and animal sounds. The artists behind the new releases are the
festival visitors Rothenberg, Jürjendal, Kuljuntausta and Martinelli.

When the Nightingala Festival will be arranged next time in 2009, the invited composers and musicians will arrange an outdoor performance where the real nightingales will take part to the concert and accompany the music performances. In 2009 will be also released a CD release, which is a compilation on the all music performances recorded at the Nightingala 2008 Festival.

Program

forthcoming

PARTNERS

Kallio-Kuninkala Festival - www.kallio-kuninkalafestival.fi

Leonora ja Yrjö Paloheimon Säätiö - www.yritysopas.com/tiedot/Helsinki/Leonora_Ja_Yrjo_Paloheimon_Saatio.html

Alfred Kordelinin Säätiö - www.kordelin.fi

Sibelius Academy - www.siba.fi - The Sibelius Academy is the only music university in Finland and one of the biggest in Europe. In addition to providing the highest education in the field of music, it engages in performance and creative art and research and is committed to the fostering of Finland's musical culture and cultural heritage. It also seeks active collaboration with Finnish society and participates in the development of culture.

The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation - www.sll.fi - the SLL is the largest non-governmental organization for environmental protection and nature conservation in Finland. Its objectives include the promotion of sustainable production and consumption patterns and the protection of biodiversity.

Umweb - www.umweb.org - UMWEB is an international no-profit network of semioticians from diverse fields with the purpose of developing and communicating the semiotic approach. It produces publications, organises events, and employs other means to enhance communication and cooperation between individuals and groups

University of Helsinki - www.helsinki.fi/yliopisto/index.html - The University of Helsinki has the widest range of disciplines in Finland. It was established in Turku in 1640, but was transferred to Helsinki in 1828. The number of faculties is eleven. There are 38,806 degree students and 7,707 staff. The number of degrees taken each year is almost 4,300, of which 377 are doctorates.

more forthcoming