THE patron saint of Scotland’s largest city offers a lesson for modern Scots facing climate change, according to the composer of a major new work.
St Mungo’s first miracle is said to be the revival of a robin that appeared to be dead – “the bird that never flew”.
It is one of four miracles apparently performed by St Mungo and referenced on Glasgow’s crest along with the words “Let Glasgow Flourish”.
However, composer Hanna Tuulikki points out that along with other towns and cities, the “dear green place”, as Glasgow is affectionately known, cannot flourish on a dead planet.
Half Finnish, Tuulikki has been interested in the legend of St Mungo since she arrived to study in Scotland 20 years ago and believes it offers a wake-up call about the crisis facing other species.
“Mungo’s act of empathy provokes us to think about how we can support our feathered kin faced with climate chaos and habitat loss,” she says.
Bird numbers in Britain have declined drastically in recent decades as a result of climate change and habitat loss, echoing the plight of other birds and species around the world.
This has prompted Tuulikki to compose a new work using St Mungo as a starting point and going on to explore the meaning of birds’ alarm calls.
“I’m really interested in them because they are a form of cross-species communication that alert other birds to danger,” she says. “If you are in your garden and a cat comes along, a bird like a robin or blackbird will start alarming and that will ripple through the community of birds in the garden and it will go quiet.
“They are a form of altruistic behaviour and I am interested in how that challenges other things like evolutionary ideas of the survival of the fittest which underpin capitalist ideology and which got us into this mess. I want to look at how we challenge some of those ideas that have given rise to the crisis that we are in.”
The starting point for her composition was to create a sonic world where the alarm calls of birds are understood as an attempt to alert all living beings to the destruction of the earth.
“What if these alarm calls are a collective call to rise and protest – I think they find a parallel in human culture and are almost like protest chants,” says Tuulikki.
She despairs at the “complete disregard” of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and other Westminster politicians to the climate crisis even though there are 70 critically endangered bird species in the UK.
“That is only get worse unless our politicians prioritise green policies,” Tuulikki says.
Commissioned by Historic Environment Scotland, The Bird That Never Flew will be staged in Glasgow Cathedral next month.
Tuulikki said it was a “privilege” to respond to the “historic and sacred setting”.
“I felt so inspired by St Mungo’s robin – the bird that never flew,” she said. “With this new work, I hope to create a space that both mourns biodiversity loss and sounds the alarm.
“I think the arts can really offer a space where we can feel. I do think that music especially bypasses language and can be the space where you can feel and reflect and I don’t think we are going to find a way out of this crisis unless we connect with the emotional and psychological side of things. And language can only take you so far.”
As well as the two performances in September, Tuulikki is also inviting audiences on a Dawn Chorus Walk on September 10 in Glasgow’s Necropolis for “a deep listening exploration” of the urban bird habitat that inspired the work.
