For treble wind instrument and live electronics

During a 2024 trip to Cape Town, South Africa, we found a Red-Winged Starling that had roosted in the fire escape of our hotel room. It woke us up every morning with a beautiful yet haunting melody. I recorded the call on our last day there and used it as the basis and inspiration for this piece. The title is a simple pun on the bird’s name, as the bird seemed to say “look at me, look at me” over and over.

Musically, the instrumental material consists exclusively of fragments from a transcription of the Red-Winged Starling’s call. The call is divided into three sections: the first is the main “contact” call, as the bird is trying to get the attention of a potential mate or searching for food; the second is a response call; and the final is an alarm call. The soloist presents all three sections in different orders and, at times, can play any of the calls in random order. The electronics take the original bird call recordings and use granular signal processing to pull and stretch the sounds into smaller bits that are then recombined to create new sounds. At several points, the soloist is asked to improvise with these new sounds as if they are chirping with their digital counterpart.

The electronics also uses a live recording of the soloist and transforms those sounds in a dialog with the digital bird transformations. Which sound is which? That is for the listener to figure out.

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Support for this project came from the Derryl & Helen Haymon Professorship at the Louisiana State University School of Music.