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How to set eyes on a living sound

6 June 2019 by Simon Barnes 6 Comments

Eddie and I were sitting out on the marsh an hour or so before dusk when we heard the cuckoo again. Good. He – only a male cuckoo says cuckoo – has been hard at it for six weeks now. Cuckoos love this spot, one that we in Norfolk, without a trace of irony, call a valley: wet, reed-fringed with a generous flood-plain. 

Cuckoo! A simple, far carrying call, and for a good reason. He’s trying to summon a female from a colossal distance. In my new book, On the Marsh, I compare the cuckoo’s song to a scene in Fellini’s Amarcord, in which the main character’s mad uncle, let out for the day, climbs a high tree and shouts again and again: voglio una donna! I want a woman!

The cuckoo is all sound. So much so that on the rare occasions you actually see one, it comes as a mild shock: like seeing a piece of music rather than hearing it. The shape, with wings so sharp they seem to cut the air around it, never seems an easy thing for the landscape to cope with.

How can it be possible to see a cuckoo? Its very name is a sound, the bird exists as a noise, not a visual experience. It’s a bit like the phenomenon known as synaesthesia, when people hear colours or see sounds: the senses confused and conflated, sometimes thrillingly. Some people experience that on acid trips, but some do in real life, seeing a distinct colour for each day of the week, each number and each letter.

There are many examples of synaesthetes in all the arts: Nabakov, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Scriabin and Hockney. For my money the best of them all is Messiaen, who created landscapes with music and then filled them with birds. He referred to himself not as musician but as an ornithologist and rhythmician. 

The cuckoo kept on cuckooing above the marsh: not one to give up easily. He had been lucky as least twice, for we have heard the clear, wild bubbling sounds of a female, responding to the cuckoo’s treetop entreaty.

In the growing dark a sedge warbler sang an accompaniment. What colour was his song, do you think? 

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Posted in Wildblog

Comments

  1. Bob Reeves says

    6 June 2019 at 7:37 pm

    Andy Sheppard, a fine jazz saxophonist from Bristol, has recorded bird song and woven it into some beautiful music. Check his album ‘The Birds’. Google it or check on ‘You tube’ and you can hear some.
    It is delightful.

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      17 June 2019 at 6:51 pm

      I’ll do that Bob, thanks for the tip.

      Reply
  2. Anthony Bird says

    6 June 2019 at 10:18 pm

    Wow, two pieces of iformation for the price of one! Thank you again, Simon, for allowing me and Bob Reeves into your world. I occasionally hear a cuckoo here in Thetford but I do not think I have ever heard the female reply, we did see a male at Wicken Fen a few years back and I look forward to our next visit.

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      17 June 2019 at 6:53 pm

      Wicken Fen is a real treat, I hope you have a good visit.

      Reply
  3. Ian Whybrow says

    11 June 2019 at 9:51 am

    Heard cuckoos the other day above the roar of warplanes at Lakenheath Fen. Now that was a spooky soundscape… Didn’t see the blighter – but saw TWO bitterns – first time and a double treat – and a number of marsh harriers. Still have the boom of the bittern to look forward to.

    Reply
    • Simon Barnes says

      17 June 2019 at 7:01 pm

      You must try Orford Ness for a really spooky birding experience. One of the first things you see there is an atom bomb, seriously!

      Reply

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