“Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Please”
Before the doors of New York City’s subways close, two bells chime in warning: ding-dong. Their pitches—C and A-flat—coincidentally match the call of the cuckoo bird as imitated in Benjamin Britten’s song “Cuckoo!” from Friday Afternoons, for children’s voices and piano. So, whenever I ride the MTA, I can’t help but think of melancholic Anglican children singing about birds:
Benjamin Britten: “Cuckoo!” from Friday Afternoons, op. 7
Britten’s music—including “Cuckoo!”—featured prominently in Wes Anderson’s 2012 film, Moonrise Kingdom. Beauty here lies as much in what’s not there as in what is: absence intensifies. The modally-ambiguous call of the cuckoo can be heard either in A-flat major or F minor—lending the music a bittersweet air. Britten heightens the ambiguity by harmonizing the pentatonic tune with a simple, descending bass-line in the piano that starts not on the tonic, A-flat, but on F, the relative minor, and steps progressively down to D-flat, nine notes below, before finally cadencing on A-flat.
How we get there, however, is unexpected. The vocal part arcs up and down, building momentum, through “April,” “May,” “June,” and “July,” before launching itself into the air for “August.” Each month lasts two measures and corresponds with a step down in the bass—from F to E-flat to D-flat to C. When the voice part reaches “August,” the bass starts moving twice as fast, passing through B-flat and A-flat in half the time before landing unexpectedly on G-flat. This is a significant disturbance within what had been a diatonic idyll—the G-flat (as opposed to a diatonic G-natural) saps the preceding A-flat of its gravitational pull, but does not clearly point toward any new gravitational center, like F minor, either. Instead, we’re suddenly unmoored, like the cuckoo that’s just taken flight. Skating over A-flat, which ought to have been the harmonic goal, only amplifies this groundlessness. At the same time, the vocal line ascends to an F at the top of the treble staff—the highest pitch in the piece—to begin a winding melisma on “away” that perfectly illustrates the cuckoo leaving its nest. This F arrives on an upbeat, then suspends against the bass’s change to G-flat on the next downbeat—a suddenly piquant and heavy harmony, despite the preceding momentum and lift.
It’s like you have it—like maybe summer really can last forever—and then it’s gone.
The final words, “I must,” are intoned on a low F in simple rhythm, almost like a chant or prayer—mature certitude after youthful caprice.
The meaning of “In August away I must” changed for me after the end of a long relationship. My partner, a singer, had flown away in July for an out-of-town gig, and when she returned in August, the tune had changed. “Cuckoo, what do you do?” I asked. “Away I must” was the reply.
Clarence Ashley: “The Coo-Coo Bird”
There’s another cuckoo that rings in my ears, if not when I ride the MTA, then whenever I practice banjo: Clarence Ashley’s “The Coo-Coo Bird.” Recorded on November 23, 1929 in Johnson City, Tennessee for Columbia Records, and later reissued on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways in 1952, “Coo-Coo Bird” is Ashley’s signature song—confounding and eternal. Ashley’s cuckoo is related to Britten’s—a herald of summer—but its cry is not wistful or melancholic, but liable to drive you crazy. In contrast to the (seeming) innocence of Britten’s cuckoo, Ashley’s is the parasite who lays eggs in the nests of other birds. Bigger and more aggressive, cuckoo chicks then often knock the host-species’ chicks out of the nest. These avian “brothers from another mother” reveal a second meaning, reflected in the etymology of the bird’s name: in French, the word for cuckoo is the same as the word for cuckold. So, the bird’s warning is not only of summer, but also of infidelity.
Ashley, like Britten, employs a repeated, upbeat riff illustrative of a bird call: in this case, a nimble, open roll across all five strings. Ashley tunes his banjo in the distinctive mountain (or “sawmill”) tuning—g-D-G-C-D. This tuning gives “Coo-Coo Bird” a modal, anachronistic quality, and also creates lots of sympathetic resonance between the two Gs and two Ds. Ascending rather than descending, Ashley’s cuckoo call is like an insistent fire alarm to Britten’s polite door bell.
And oh, can Ashley play! His clawhammer technique predates the later three-finger, “Scruggs style” of bluegrass. Yet, somehow, with only his “claw” and thumb to get the job done, he conjures up a dense, rippling texture that serves as a perfect foil to the simple, sustained vocal melody. The contrast between relentless picking and smooth, almost monotonous vocals is only amplified by Ashley’s Cheshire-cat delivery of the lyrics. Who’s “Willy”? Why is Ashley humming after the first verse? Why’s he talking about cards and gambling overseas now? What secrets does the cuckoo’s warble foretell?
Greil Marcus, in his excellent book The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes from 1872, writing: “We Americans are all cuckoos. We make our homes in the nests of other birds.”
Here’s Ashley’s original 1929 recording:
And here’s another performance, with guitar, likely from the late 1950s: