One of the Whale Fables we learned from the dolphin sounded like …..

Alex South, Nothing Like Melody (2023)

Note from Alex:  For solo clarinet/bass clarinet and interactive electronics, the title of this piece is drawn from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Given Note’, his homage to the beautiful Irish melody Port na bPúcaí. A perhaps apocryphal story relates that this melody was in part inspired by the sounds of humpback whales heard off the now uninhabited Blasket Islands. My piece includes a version of this tune, taught to me by flautist Emma Roche, framed by and overlapping with field recordings of humpback whales made by Edda Magnúsdóttir and colleagues in the North Atlantic. Humpback populations in the Atlantic have recovered well since the cessation of commercial whaling, but are facing new threats from ocean warming, entanglement, and noise pollution. With this piece I pay my own musical homage to the distinctive forms of expression I hear in these songs, aiming to combine human and humpback sounds into a ‘multispecies heterophony’.

Note from Kaori: the frame narrative of the dolphin, laughing at Kipling’s account of how-the-whale-got-his-throat, emerged out of my conversation with Alex South. Thanks so much to Alex for inventing the delphine storyteller in response to Kipling’s story. We had further chats about what kind of tales the dophin might have told, but we think that these stories are unprintable, not only because they are told in cetacean languages, but also because they would be too offensive to human sensibilities.