Arlene Sierra is a composer of orchestral and chamber music whose compositional beginnings were in the electroacoustic field.
Urban Birds is a return to Sierra's electroacoustic roots, and brings together three international soloists who specialise in new music for piano plus electronics.
Urban Birds combines harmony, rhythmic drive and sounds from nature in a tapestry of environmental sound and virtuosic performance, engaging musically with our relationship with the natural world.
The piece employs recordings of birds that range in the UK, specifically Wales: the blackcap, the skylark and the cuckoo.
The recordings are part of the musical texture, with samples functioning as integral musical elements in the evolving structure of the work.
The three pianists play material that imitates and answers the birdsong, and they have specific roles as well: one soloist doubles on percussion, one plays the strings inside the piano, while another part interacts with a recorded Yamaha Disklavier piano.
Urban Birds is in three movements, performed attacca:
1. Sylviid Babblers. This movement features the extended songs of the blackcap, with answers from related species known collectively as Sylviid Babblers, as well as from the pianos and a single crotale.
2. Skylark Loops. A looped fragment of the skylark's song is transcribed, manipulated and repeated with percussive contributions from stopped piano strings and woodblock.
3. Cuculus-cornuta. Cuckoo calls dominate this movement, punctuated by the guiro, until rogue elements are introduced in the form of an extended passage for pre-programmed Disklavier and the call of a very different bird: the South American Horned Screamer.
