Singers

One of the choirs I sing with gave its annual Christmas concert in its "home" church tonight, and a good number of folk turned up to hear, I'm pleased to say.  Our concert material ranged from the 16th century to the present day, and included a few lighter pieces as well as some quite serious choral music.  And all went very well. Usually I stay for the debrief over mulled wine and mince pies, but tonight I had a lot to do at home so Ann and I came straight back. But from just the few conversations we had with people as we made our way out, it's clear that the audience enjoyed hearing the music as much as we enjoyed singing it.

Bird song delights us as much as human choirs, and of course many composers have been inspired by, and on occasions explicitly copied, the songs of birds. One of the special things about being human is the way in which we delight in things like the sound of bird song or the colour of spring flowers, or the texture of a partly clouded sky; none of these things is provided for our amusement or entertainment, and yet we enjoy them and find them beautiful.

Bird song itself is simply a mode of communication, or so we are told. A robin singing its wistfully sweet falling cadences at this time of year is just establishing its winter territory, and warning other birds off, something which was particularly obvious when I went for a morning walk along a quite country road on a Greek island in the late autumn. Robins were singing at very regular intervals along the lane, each one claiming its little patch.

Of course, some birds - blackbirds and thrushes in the Spring, to give one obvious example - certainly quite deliberately aim to make their song complex and beautifully inventive. And of course, better than that of the next bird. It's still competitive, but it's not so much a shouting match as the final round in an eisteddfod. The hen presumably finds the song as attractive as we do.

But I'm also thinking about the goldfinches I mentioned in my last post. We're getting a lot in the garden just now, and they are quite beautifully noisy. You can hear them through our double glazing, which normally shuts out most things pretty well. And they do seem just to be having fun, though perhaps that's a sentimental and anthropomorphic point of view. Whatever else birdsong is for, sometimes it's just an eager expression of the joy companions can take in each other. Just as our human singing can be.