As I listened to the springtime dawn chorus recorded in Queens wood, Highgate, I started pondering the mechanics of sound capture, the repetition and layering of the calls, and the birds’ unselfconscious ease of delivery; but with each interjection I naively wanted to know  more: who was hearing who, what was being said, and  what was being lost. Then, my mind wandered to a workshop event I had attended in the late 80’s about the Czech opera The Cunning Little Vixen. Its composer Leoš Janáček loved nature and was an obsessive notator of birdsong – during this event, two elderly ornithologists introduced me to the birdsong recordings of Ludwig Koch.  

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Born in Germany in 1881, Koch was a pioneering broadcaster and sound recordist, credited as a child with making the first known recording of birdsong (1889) and for inventing the ‘sound book’, by attaching gramophone records of birdsong to an illustrated book. As I researched Koch’s life and work, I became fascinated by two things; his forced migration to England in 1936 and his use of written commentary to describe and explain birdsong. This use of words to capture the intangible and fleeting is very beguiling in its formality; think of sleeve notes on a LP recording of a Beethoven symphony - they feel authoritative but are in fact very partial and slippery in meaning.  The economic and austere use of language leaves space for speculation and the imagination. 

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Reading Koch’s commentary on the blackbird, in Appendix II of Songs of Wild Birds (E.M Nicholson, Ludwig Koch, 1936) I became intrigued by his mention of interrupting birds, background calls - other voices as it were. This combined with information I gleaned about Koch’s wife Nellie, made me think about devising commentaries, ‘alarm calls’, describing Koch’s family’s urgent forced exile from Germany.  

In 1936, whilst on a business trip to Switzerland, Koch was warned in a cryptic message from a colleague not to return home, which meant his wife Nellie had to urgently sell their beloved home and put their belongings into storage and leave Berlin to join him. A film, Four Parts of a Folding Screen (Dir: Ian Within, Anthea Kennedy 2018) made by a descendant of Koch, describes how the family’s belongings were stolen by the Nazis and auctioned off to wealthy Germans. 

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Did each member of the family, Ludwig, Nellie, their child, call out at that moment of catastrophic disruption? Could they hear each other in each other’s mind’s ear? – were other families making the same plaintive calls? Satisfying my own autodidactic nature, could I, using Koch’s methodology, capture and rehear their calls – be a listener in the field, ‘recording’ three Swiss/Berlin takes?