When the Swifts Disappear

Composer Pilar Miralles reflects in her blog post on putting down roots, leaving and remembering. Miralles’s work they depart us quietly will receive its world première in the walking concert by Malla Vivolin and Ella Mettänen.

These past few years of my life, since I arrived in Finland to continue my studies in composition, have been a question of seeking rootedness. We move around, we meet people, we let them go, because they move around as well; we do things, things come, things pass; sometimes we barely remember them. We need to pull that old, bulging folder with a bunch of papers: the ticket to that concert I had forgotten, a farewell note from a now remote friend, the tenancy agreement from my first home in Finland. Cannot get rid of any of those pieces of junk; they are traces of a long story of disposable memories.

Perhaps I have no roots other than that. My previous life in Spain sometimes feels like a ghost hunting me. Those rural sceneries, abandoned settlements, the herds of goats, the family rituals, the echoes from the past. Are those my roots? Did I lose them when I left? At least I feel like a stranger whenever I come back those one or two times per year. They look at me as the one who departed. What was I even looking for out here? Whatever it was, it made me question where I am supposed to be, with whom, doing what, seeking which kind of truth, if there is indeed any to be sought.

The Birds of My Memories

they depart us quietly is a piece that was born out of a text about swifts. When flutist Malla Vivolin sent me this text by Helen Macdonald as an inspiration for the new commissioned piece, I didn’t even know what kind of bird a swift was. I translated it into Spanish, and I realized it was a bird I actually knew very well.

Macdonald’s text pulled out one of those traces of memory that was piled up among the forgotten junk. We call them aviones, airplanes. Those black birds that cannot take off from the ground… They got trapped everywhere. They got trapped in my window in the mornings. They got trapped in the chimney in the evenings. Good thing that in Spain it is not cold enough to fire up a chimney. They seemed so reckless, flying around at such a fast pace while screaming, that, of course, they bumped into these places. And my dad would pick them up carefully, climb up the roof, and launch them so that they could resume their restless flying. I got their piercing chirping engraved on my body.

A Memorial to Forgotten Traces

But it is true. They are only there in the summer. During those everlasting dusks. Flying around the roofs, causing such a turmoil. And then they leave. And one day we notice that, all of a sudden, we cannot hear them anymore. And then we know summer is over.

they depart us quietly, and so, quietly, we invoke them in this piece with an alto flute and a few ritualistic gestures. We create together a sort of memorial to these forgotten traces that end up in the pile of junk, melding into the sort of compost we are made of. Because this is all we and our roots are: a bunch of stories (sometimes not even ours) that we manage to entangle in order to make sense of who we are now and what we do here.

they depart us quietly consists of five vespers: five invocations of the dusk; five opportunities to try to hear the swifts again. We breathe, in and out, we listen attentively to the echoes of the chirping and rustling, we rely on the recurrence of the sound of a bell. Even when the echoes disappear. We rely on the traces. And we keep hearing them even when they have already departed.

Malla Vivolin & Ella Mettänen: Birds of Passage
18 April at 12.00, Sara Hildén Art Museum