The other evening I went to a screening of the 1937 film Lost Horizon at the cozy, expat-y bar near my house. What a grand, emotional adventure! My current homesickness for Colorado winter caused those snowy mountain scenes to really pull at my heartstrings. I was intrigued by one scene in the movie where the main character Robert Conway remarks that every time he sees the beautiful Sondra she is accompanied by music in the air. Sondra takes Robert into her pigeon coop and shows him the wooden flutes she ties to her pigeons’ tales to produce the sweet melodies. I assumed this fanciful practice of tying whistles to birds was merely a cinematic detail. I mused about what it would be like in real life to create music in tandem with pigeons and then few internet searches revealed that this practice does indeed exist! And it originated in China and Indonesia!
The sound of them is so eerie and beautiful. According to Wikipedia pigeon whistles go back to the Qing dynasty in the 1600s and were commonly heard in Beijing until the 1990s when urbanization really took over. A friend who lived in Indonesia told me it’s still popular in Yogyakarta.
Below is a short documentary about a London-based musician named Nathanial Mann who collaborated with a British pigeon fancier named Pigeon Pete to create some pigeon whistle music a few years ago. Pigeon Pete has a deep love of pigeons and it’s so endearing to hear him talk about his relationship with his birds.
My curiosity quest about pigeon whistles led me to many interesting corners of the internet from the early 2000s, including an abandoned pigeon-talk forum located at pigeons.biz and, more importantly, a rich collection of field recordings made by Fausto Caceres when he was living in the Xinjiang province of China in 2003. The second track down on this playlist features the sound of pigeon whistles. This collection of folk music and ambient sounds from Xinjiang feels particularly important right now at a time when 2 million Muslim Uyghurs are currently being incarcerated in government-run re-education camps. Please give a listen to this interview last week on Democracy Now about the situation right now for Uyghurs in China.
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[…] the main reason I wanted to visit Beijing was to go on a hunt for pigeon whistles. This practice used to be quite common in Beijing, but is becoming much less common since the city […]
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