Lark Animations

An Ecology of Connectedness, From Memory to Song

By Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Skylarks hold a particular place in the British postwar imagination: the author Richard King finds connections between the birds and the horrors of war in the novels of both Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf. For the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), the skylark symbolized hope and recovery. In attempting to process his experience of the atrocities of the First World War, he composed The Lark Ascending for violin and string orchestra (1914). Such works join in using the bird’s unmistakable chirrup, tirra-lira song, its rising, soaring flight, and its literal bird’s-eye view of the changing landscape to meditate on questions of destruction and restoration.

Aske Zidore’s Lark Animations (2023) comes from a different time and a different relationship to nature; his construction of the lark – while it shares some superficial similarities with Vaughan Williams (both feature rising pentatonic arpeggios, for example) – is therefore different too. Where Vaughan Williams’ bird is a heaven-bound quasi-religious spirit, Zidore’s is pinpricks of location and diving swoops into the grass: an articulation of space and entanglement. Zidore’s work seeks to explore relations between wild nature and modern society, connoting contemporary ideas of relationality, memory, and translation.

These ideas are embedded in the music’s conception and notation. Lark Animations is written in twelve sections, each on a single sheet of paper. In performance these are arranged in a circle around the player, who stands in the middle, able to turn from one page to another, in any order, following ‘portals’ indicated on the score. The exploration of space and openness continues on the sheets themselves, which outline, like flowcharts, various paths between and among different kinds of material: notated fragments of birdsong-like music, from single notes to long passages of elaborate figuration; slower, pastoral evocations; and graphics representing the flights of larks and sonograms of their song. This variety of material allows the performer to imitate and interpret the birds on multiple levels.

This fragmentary, distributed form of representation is closer to our experience of larks in the wild – or our recollection of them at home or in the concert hall. Walk on an English or Danish hillside in spring and there will be larks in the air above and around you (they are common birds in both countries), as well as zipping through the undergrowth. Zidore has drawn on memories of larks from his ‘childhood’s spiritual landscape’, evoking the bird’s movement patterns as well as its song.

Larks tend to be already up when you encounter them, hovering in place (‘filling the sky with [their] aural graffiti’, in the words of the poet and ornithologist John Bevis). Several of them at once is like a multichannel array of tiny speakers, suspended from the sky. Their song cuts unmistakably through the air and snares the ear, but the birds themselves are only seen after some effort, as flickering dots high above one’s head. To stand among larks is to have one’s perceptions, one’s sense of self and body, stretched across a three-dimensional matrix; to join with this scattered network of sounds.

Lark Animations in a 3D rendering with the violinist placed in a circle of 12 music sheets.

Zidore incorporates this embodied side of our encounter with larks in the movements of the violinist. For one thing, she must navigate the score spatially, moving from fragment to fragment, from sheet to sheet, across and around the circle of pages. The leap from one page to another, the composer suggests, is like the flight of the bird, diving into the grass only to emerge somewhere else. A similar sense of non-linearity arises from the switches between fragments – which can differ abruptly in style from Baroque figuration to minimalist repetition to abstract noise. And then there are the movements of her arm and bow which, in all those fast cross-string passages, mimic the flapping of a bird’s wing, leading the performer to almost transform into the bird itself.

In an age of climate breakdown and extractive relations across the globe increasingly being laid bare, Zidore’s translations of the bird’s song and behaviour into sound, space, and movement, offers a way to think about ecologies of connectedness. Here the natural world is not something to be separated from humans, to be viewed from afar or used as resource, but something we are intimately and inextricably part of. Just as the lark is entangled with the sky and the grass, so are we entangled with it.