Uccelli et altre cose

Commissioned by the hr-Sinfonieorchester for cresc..biennale 2026 Schwärmen dedicated to Brad Lubman

Duration: 20' ca.

Instrumentation: 2/2/2/2  2/2/0/0  2vib  6/5/4/4/2 (doubled)

1st performance: 7 February 2026, hr-Sinfonieorchester, cond. Brad Lubman. hr-Sendesaal, Frankfurt (DE)

Soon after this I saw starlings in vast flights, borne along like smoke, mist, like a body unendued with voluntary power. Now it shaped itself into a circular area, inclined; now it formed a square, now a globe, now from a complete orb into an ellipse; then oblongated into a balloon with the car suspended, now a concave semicircle; still expanding, or contracting, thinning or condensing, now glimmering  and shivering, now thickening, deepening, blackening!                                                                                                      Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1799 

I’ve been fascinated by the murmuration of birds for a long time - this magic, purely musical nature phenomenon, a swarming flock which moves perfectly coordinated in space changing its shape in an unexpected, mesmerising way, where each bird seems to blend into a cloud and fly only while copying the motions of (six, seven?) surrounding neighbours. Without a leader, without a plan. 

It reminds me of a dense micro-polyphonic texture in a continuous transformation where the orchestra musicians mirror, echo, imitate each other’s wave patterns with subtle variations of intensity, tempo, range, articulation, slowing or accelerating their breath, splitting or melting their gestures into a single, pulsing, living organism of sound. The polyphonic lines rise and fall in a very organic way, as if there was no human influence, no control, no willpower, just simply following the laws of nature - the wind, air resistance, currents, the gravity..

And still, what makes this cloud expand and shrink, lift and drop? Is it the unbearable human desire of flying? The same feeling that obsessed Leonardo da Vinci around 1505 while he was painting Gioconda and at the same time sketching, drawing, writing down observations on aerodynamics in “The Codex on the Flight of Birds” which grounded the invention of the airplane, successful only in the early 20th century. Another name of this treatise, probably added by a cataloger to describe a manuscript that covered a wider range of topics than initially suggested, is "Uccelli et altre cose" (“Birds and other things”), which became the title of my piece. Justė Janulytė