Bird Metamorphoses (2022)

When I was a child in the Faroe Islands there were many more birds on the Islands and in the cliffs on the west side of the Islands than there are now. And when there were so many birds it was easy to catch them, simply because there were many of them.

Nowadays the number of birds has decreased immensely. In my youth it was a real cacophony of bird songs in the mountains and in the cliffs, but this has totally disappeared now. The birds we still are catching, the "northern gannet" and the “northern fulmar” are filled with plastic nowadays. So the pollution of the sea plays a major role in the reduction of the birds on and around the Faroe Islands.

I will write a piece for flute, guitar and electronics. The electronics will consist of real sounds of birds in the beginning of the piece, but as the piece goes on the bird singing will be, by the electronic, transformed to something that sounds very different from the birds in the beginning of the piece. At the same time, the two instruments will be transformed from amplified instruments, through an “effect processor” to another soundworld. At the end of the piece the music will die out as a symbol of the situation we have been facing on the Faroe Islands the last 40 years, namely that the bird songs have almost disappeared.

- Sunleif Rasmussen