Episode 031: Woman with a Birdcage

In which we discuss car alarms, hot mics, and collective nouns

So there is a mockingbird that has been singing outside my bedroom window. You know the bird: it sounds like nature’s car alarm. Cycles through a dozen or more different sounds. Toads, frogs. Other birds. Doors creaking. Kitty-cats. 

Cute, right?

Well…this particular mockingbird has somehow gotten turned upside down. It has been doing its surprisingly accurate impersonations in the dead of night. I haven’t slept very well, as you could imagine.

One night, I simply could not handle it anymore, and there I was, hanging out of my bedroom window at 3 a.m. yelling at the bird to be quiet.

You’ll be surprised to learn that didn’t work.

I soon began throwing things in the general direction of the tree I thought the bird was in. These projectiles included—but were not limited to—a slipper, a small flashlight, a handful of pennies, a rolled-up pair of socks, and a Disney water-bottle. Nothing to injure the little birdie, just to encourage a swift relo to some unsuspecting neighbor’s tree.

No luck.

I haven’t slept for a week.

Anyway, I had to write a beat about birds. Or, I couldn’t sleep and I wrote something about birds: one or the other. I remembered being enamored with József Rippl-Rónai’s Woman with a Birdcage at one time in my life, so here we go…

No promises here, as I wrote and recorded this in a frightfully sleep-deprived state. Maybe that’s why it is the shortest of these beats, clocking in at just under a minute and a quarter.

I envision the woman dancing around her living room holding the birdcage. The chopped-up sample I used for the main rhythm part has a relaxed, lilting vibe and its own catchy melody—with a little flowing, dancing kind of rhythm to it. Made me think of her pirouetting around her apartment.

For the bird singing, I didn't want to use a whistle, or a piccolo, or something very high-pitched, or try to imitate a bird.

Cheep tricks, all [sorry, tired].

Instead, I opted for a delicate horn. Horns are notoriously difficult to artificially reproduce in a small studio. Fortunately, this haunting set of samples made it pretty easy to perform a convincing melody. 

A trumpet player friend of mine heard this piece and asked me who I got to play the part. Hah!

Fun fact: I always have an open mic running while I'm recording, just in case I say or sing something useful while I'm working on a beat. Just before the second drop, if you listen carefully you can hear me counting myself back in. I don't believe I purposefully left it in, but after I mixed it I heard it and decided to leave it. 

Woman with Birdcage, József Rippl-Rónai, 1892

This painting came out of Rippl-Rónai’s black period. All the colors here are said to come from the black, especially the woman’s outline. Of that period, he said:

"I wanted to paint things emerging from blackness. I was very attracted by black and gray and I was interested in the question regarding what one could solve artistically with these two colors."

While everything in the painting is dark and subdued, I think these colors are luscious, and I actually find the painting happy—joyful even. It’s said that the painting has an inherent, muted sadness, but I don’t feel that at all. Except for the bird in the cage, perhaps.

It was difficult to pick only five colors for my reduction, I really wanted her hair and her hat represented in there too, but at the end of the day, I needed to pick the five colors that best represented the original. I even left out the bird, only the cage made it!

Woman with a Birdcage - Reduction

Birds have, by far, the best collective nouns:

• A peep of chickens

• A piteousness of doves

• A trembling of finches

• An exaltation of larks

• A parliament of owls

• A pandemonium of parrots

• An ostentation of peacocks

I will stop now.

• An unkindness of ravens [so much better than a murder of crows, although that’s pretty great too]

Ok, I’ll really stop now.

• A pitying of turtle doves

Have I mentioned I haven’t slept in a week?

• An echo of mockingbirds

• An echo of mockingbirds

• An echo of mockingbirds

Goodnight.

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Until next week, thanks for reading Polyester City. If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment by clicking the link above. If you know anyone who likes Music and Art and Stories [and insomnia], which is pretty much everyone, please consider sharing by clicking the link below.