A Suite for “Digital” Birds?

The latest video to be uploaded to YouTube by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts is a five-movement suite for guitar and flute by Takashi Yoshimatsu entitled Digital Bird Suite. The titles of the five movements were as follows:

1. Birdophobia
2. A Bird in the Twilight
3. Twitter Machine
4. A Bird in the Noon
5. Bird Circuit

[added 3/25, 10:49 a.m.: YouTube has now created single Web page of the performance of all five movements.] Some readers may recognize the title of the middle movement through its association to Paul Klee’s painting:

Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine), in which the birds are part of a mechanical construction (from a Wikimedia Commons Web page, public domain)

Yoshimatsu has invented any number of imaginative “bird-like tropes” for the flute, leaving the guitar to provide a “continuo” that reflects on the different inventive approaches to birdsong. All of the movements are brief, the last of them being the longest at slightly less than five minutes. The first movement is less than four movements, and the remaining three movements are less than three. This makes the entire suite a rather modest offering, but there is more than enough imaginative technique in Dejan Gavirć’s account the flute part to sustain the attention of the serious listener. For his part, guitarist Goran Krivokapić clearly understands his contribution in providing continuo without scaring off any of the birds.