Hanna Tuulikki has released a visual score to accompany her place-responsive performance the bird that never flew — which premiered at Glasgow Cathedral in 2023, featuring a song cycle for three voices, manipulated field recordings, electronics, and bowed psaltery, punctuated with gestural choreography.

Responding to the city’s roots in ornithological entanglements, the song-cycle brings together sacred lament and political protest to raise the alarm for critically endangered birds.

With its distinctive red breast and warbling song, the European robin plays a prominent role in the life of Glasgow’s patron saint, St Mungo, who is said to have brought a dead bird back to life by holding it in his hands, smoothing its feathers, and praying until the lifeless creature revived. In times of severe biodiversity loss, where numbers of wild birds in Britain have declined drastically, Mungo’s story of empathy prompts us to consider how we might support other-than-human beings faced with severe decline brought about by human activity. In acknowledging such loss, it may also provoke us to stand up, take action, and raise the alarm.

The alarm calls of birds are a way of signalling danger and, as a form of communication crossing species boundaries, a single alarm signal can save many recipients of different species simultaneously. As such, this seemingly altruistic behaviour poses a major challenge to the Darwinian evolutionary theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’, an idea that also underpins capitalist ideology.

As a starting point for her composition, Tuulikki asks: “What if we were able to translate the alarm calls of birds into human language and discovered these signals were alerting all beings to the destruction of the earth? What if these alarm calls were a collective call to rise up and protest? How might we retune our senses and begin to listen with care and act with compassion?”

Narrated by the robin, Tuulikki’s animal fable for tomorrow translates the alarm calls of UK red-listed woodland birds into protest chants, weaving together what the robin knows of past, present and future. One by one, in a collective call to rise up and attend to the future of our biosphere, the Mistle thrush, Capercaillie, Nightingale, Wood warbler, Tree pipit and Greenfinch each sound their alarm.