Yes, yet another Nightingale. You'll not hear me complaining, there's no way I could do this blog without them.
This is a Nightingale by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) from The Poet's Echo, six settings of poems by Pushkin that Britten wrote when he was on holiday in Russia in 1965, and dedicated to megastar cellist Rostropovich and his wife, the megastar soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. You'll hear the Nightingale singing delicately on the piano, with a strange twilight quality that always makes so much of Britten's music a bit uncomfortable to listen to. But in a good way.
The Poet's Echo
4. The Nightingale and the Rose
V bezmolvii sadov, vesnoj, vo mgle nochej, pajot nad rozoju vostochnyj solovej. No roza milaja ne chuvstvujet, ne vnemlet, I pod vljublennyj gimn kolebletsja i dremlet. Ne tak li ty pajosh’ dlja khladnoj krasoty? Opomnis’, o po’et, k chemu stremish’sja ty? Ona ne slushajet, ne chuvstvujet po’eta; gljadish’ – ana cvetet; zyvajesh’ – net atveta.
The garden’s dark and still; ’tis spring; no night wind blows. He sings! the nightingale, his love song to the rose. She does not hearken, his rose beloved, disdainful, and to his amorous hymn, she dozes, nodding and swaying. With such words would you melt cold beauty into fire? O poet, be aware how far you would aspire! She is not listening, no poems can entrance her; you gaze; she only flowers; you call her; there’s no answer.
Last night, BBC Radio 3 broadcast I programme I made with John Luther Adams (b.1953) on Hear & Now. The more you hear of his music, the more you become totally convinced that he's one of the cultural giants of our time. Listen to Become Ocean and you'll understand what I mean. He told me that birdsong in the 1970s was part of what transformed him
into the composer he is today, and that forty years after he discovered
birds, they're having a big impact on him yet again - this is seriously
exciting news for anyone who likes their music full of birds.
His most recent bird piece was the brilliant Dream of the Canyon Wren, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, but the first piece where he made use of bird song was songbirdsongs, written between 1974-1980 after he spent time in an isolated cabin in Georgia. He told me that when he was there, he kept on hearing the most incredible music, so he followed the music into the forest, and discovered that the music was a Wood Thrush.
songbirdsongs is in 9 parts:
1) Wood Thrush
2) Morningfieldsong
3) Meadowdance
4) August Voice
5) Mourning Dove
6) Apple Blossom Round
7) Not-quitespringdawn
8) Joyful Noise
9) Evensong
Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (And I await the resurrection of the dead)
As you can see, Messiaen wasn't really fussed about short, catchy titles. And it gets better. Two birds are featured in this piece, written in 1964 to commemorate the dead of the two World Wars. The title of the third movement, featuring a Musician Wren, is: L'heure
vient ou les morts entredont la voix du fils de Dieu (The time comes
when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God)
and the fourth movement, featuring a Calandra Lark, is perhaps his very best title: Ils ressusciteront, gloriuex, avec un nom nouveau - dans
le concert joyeux des etoiles et les acclamations de fils du ciel ... (They will rise again in glory, with a new name - and join the blissful
concert of the stars and the acclamations of the Son of Heaven...)
So why choose Musician Wren and Calandra Lark? Neither are geographically related (the Wren is South American, and the Lark occurs from south-west Europe to the Middle East), nor do they share anything to link them to the dead of two World Wars. Messiaen's choice of birds in his music is often perplexing, but ultimately everything comes down to Catholicism, a way of interpreting birds through his unfaltering belief that everything in the Bible is the word of God, and therefore true without any need for questioning. As I wrote earlier this year, when Villa Lobos used the song of a Musician Wren, it was based on a Brazilian folk legend. Messiaen's Musician Wren also taps into another folk legend, that you'll hear the bird's song just before you die - and in Et Expsecto this bird's song symbolises Christ waking the dead.
With the Calandra Lark, Messiaen uses it to symbolise "celestial joy and one of the four qualities of
the glorious souls - the gift of agility."
The whole of this incredibly powerful piece is in the video below. The third movement starts at 12:20 and the fourth at 18:26. At one point time stands still during a huge pause - don't worry, your RM Nimbus home computer hasn't crashed.
Until very recently, John Luther Adams (b.1953) spent most of his adult life in Alaska, where he moved to in the 1970s after becoming heavily involved in environmental activism. His activism started out in California, where he participated in the California Condor programme that saved them from extinction, he then travelled up to Alaska to protest against attempts to chew up the vast wilderness, leading to the Alaska Lands Act of 1980. He belongs to the American tradition of counter-culture heroes in the arts, outsiders who drop out of normal life and forge a way forward that can often take a long time for the rest of the world to catch up with. Sadly, some of those heroes have only been appreciated posthumously; thankfully, John Luther Adams isn't one of them. Being out in the middle of nowhere and away from mainstream music making, he's been able to write the music that he wanted to, without having to worry about silly trends in contemporary music. And what he does is, in a way, quite old fashioned - he looks out of the window at what's around him and he writes music about it. He calls his music 'sonic geography'. As a way into the music he wrote in Alaska, have a go at Dark Waves, inspired by the Pacific Ocean of the Bering Sea. It was the first piece I heard by him, and I think it's pretty incredible. It's massive music, slow moving blocks of sound, gradually changing textures that rise and fall with intensity. It's as big and slow as the Alaskan landscape and ocean, the kind of open space and natural rhythms that I suppose we can't really comprehend in Britain, or even most of Europe. He also writes quite a lot of music about birds. One of his most recent pieces is Dream of the Canyon Wren, released earlier this year on a recording by the brilliant JACK Quartet. John Luther Adams has now left Alaska - for the last couple of years he's been living on the Pacific coast in Mexico. He recently said that he's having a great time getting to know the birds around his new home, like Canyon Wrens. First up, here's a real one ...
Here are three bird-inspired concertos by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). The first is a relatively famous piece, the other two not quite as well known.
Written in 1720, the opening movement of Summer, the second of The Four Seasons, has a Cuckoo (1:07), Turtle Dove (1:51) and Goldfinch (2:13) all marked into the score. Nigel Kennedy's recording, made in 1986, is the biggest selling album of all time, outselling by 37% the total sales of all of Michael Jackson's albums combined. Or maybe not. It did pretty well though. The Baroque music connoisseur could pick out plenty of problems with how he played it, and they may well have a point, but it really is an amazing recording. Here's a video of people wearing sunglasses.
In 1728 Vivaldi wrote a flute concerto nicknamed 'Il Gardellino', the Goldfinch.
And around the same time he wrote a violin concerto nicknamed 'Le Coucou'. I presume you don't need that translating?
I could be wrong here, but the piano probably isn't the first instrument a composer would think of using when trying to write music based on transcribed birdsong - flute, clarinet, oboe, violin, they're the usual suspects. But for Messiaen, the piano was the main instrument in a huge chunk of the bird-music that he wrote, and to be honest, if you listen to bird song really carefully, then many birds have a quality to their songs that is more percussive than it is lyrical, so Messiaen was probably right going for the piano.
There's a slightly curious thing that when he wrote for piano with orchestra he would include birds from all over the world - like in Exotic Birds and other pieces from the 60s, 70s and 80s. But when he wrote for just solo piano, the selection of birds are always transcribed from his home country. Even though he had such a profound understanding of what a piano could do and how to write for one with such incredible imagination, he nonetheless restricted his choice of birds to the familiar. I have no idea why that is, but it does strike me as being a bit strange.
To really understand Messiaen, birds and the piano, then you have to place his second wife Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010) at the centre of everything he did from the very second that he met her in May 1941. She's regarded without question as one of the greatest pianists of her generation, especially when it came to playing new music. Messiaen was awestruck by what she could do on a piano, and his piano music is as much about writing for her strengths and pushing her technical and musical abilities even further, as it is about writing about birds. There's a nice bit of quirky birdy coincidence here as well, with Loriot being the French name for a Golden Oriole.
The major piece of bird-music that Messiaen wrote for Loriod is the Catalogue of Birds, about three hours of solo piano music depicting 77 different species of birds transcribed throughout France. At some point I'm going to have to have a go at tackling that before this blog dies at the end of the year, but for now I'm avoiding it. It's a combination of laziness and not knowing quite where to start with it.
So here instead is 34 minutes of music about a Garden Warbler (La Fauvette des Jardins), written in 1970 for Loriod, and depicting a Garden Warbler and other birds singing throughout a day from 4am-11pm in late June/early July at Lake Laffrey near Grenoble. Not only the birds, but Messiaen also puts in the landscape, sunlight and the changing colour of the surface of the lake.
These are all the birds in the piece: Garden Warbler, Nightingale, Wren, Quail, Blackbird, Green Woodpecker, Chaffinch, Skylark, Great Reed Warbler, Golden Oriole, Carrion Crow, Red-backed Shrike, Swallow, Black Kite, Yellowhammer, Goldfinch, Blackcap & Tawny Owl. Some are quite obvious to pick out - like the yaffling Green Woodpecker, bullying aggressive rhythmic repetition of Great Reed Warbler and little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeeeeeese Yellowhammer - but some others... well, you'll have to use your imagination!
This is the halfway point in my blog, post number 26. Hooray. Let's celebrate. I'll put out a buffet, you bring along some WKDs and a few bottles of Mad Dog 20/20.
Seeing as this is such a "special" occasion, I thought I'd better post a particularly special piece of music. Well at least I think it is.
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) wasn't a composer that I thought would ever feature in a blog about music inspired by birds. He was one of the dominant figures in modernist music for about four decades until his death, and I reckon that in two-hundred years' time, it will be Xenakis who is listed amongst the handful of composers who were the greatest of those born in the first few decades of the last century, the composers that history filters into being the best representatives of what classical music was about in the second half of the twentieth century.
Xenakis studied composition with Mr Bird-music Olivier Messiaen, so when I was putting together a list of music to feature in this blog, I thought I'd better
check out some of the people Messiaen taught. But Xenakis writing music
about birds? No chance.
Have a read of an encyclopedia entry and Xenakis will be listed as a composer that used "stochastic" processes in his music. Nobody involved in music actually knows what that means. A lot pretend they understand what it means ("it's about maths and numbers and physics theories and stuff"), but they don't. It doesn't actually matter that nobody understands what stochastic music is, what matters is that it worked for Xenakis. It's like the Higgs boson - just allow yourself to be amazed by it, even though you have absolutely no idea what it is or what the Large Hadron Collider does.
You'll also read that Xenakis wrote two groundbreaking pieces of stochastic music: Metastaseis and Pithoprakta, both early works that Xenakis wrote in the mid-50s. It's unlikely that any other pieces will be mentioned. That's a massive shame, because they're pretty poor pieces to select out of the whole of Xenakis's output (over 140 pieces), and in no way indicative of just how effing good Xenakis became.
During WW2, Xenakis was part of the Greek resistance, first fighting against the Germans and then, after the Germans were defeated, Xenakis fought against the British, who also tried to suppress the resistance. In January 1945 Xenakis was hit by a shell from a Sherman tank, losing his left eye, smashing his jaw to pieces and tearing off a big chunk of his face. In a book of conversations made with the journalist Balint Andras Varga, Xenakis explained that despite being battered by a shell, he'd also blown up a few tanks himself. He was pretty nails was Xenakis.
He eventually sneaked out of Greece for Italy, obtaining false papers and changing his name to Konstantin Kastrounis, before moving on to Paris. It was here that he got a job working for the architect 'Le Corbusier' (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and ended up helping to design new-world-order buildings, even monasteries like the Couvent de la Tourette.
A building that would make Prince Charles vomit?
The most famous project that Xenakis was involved in was the Philips Pavilion, designed and built for Expo 58 in Brussels.
After studying with Messiaen (who said that Xenakis was one of the most extraordinary men he'd ever known, "a hero like no other") and leaving Le Corbusier's studio, he eventually established himself as a full-time composer, and in the last couple of decades of his life he was up there as one of the most sought after composers on the planet. Whilst so many of the more extreme composers of his generation were tamed as they got older, Xenakis never backed off from writing music which is, at times, the aural equivalent of having a nail gun repeatedly fired into your forehead. But in a good way. A really good way.
But Xenakis writing music about birds? Never.
So back to the start of the year when I was knocking up my list of blogposts, and I was amazed to find that not only was Aïs (1979) based on birdsong, but also about a species from probably my favourite family of birds. No Nightingales or Cuckoos or generic birdy trilling from Xenakis, nope - Xenakis decided to write a piece based on the nocturnal screaming calls of Scopoli's Shearwaters.
SCOPOLI'S SHEARWATERS!
In the same book of conversations that I mentioned above, Xenakis talks about the background to Aïs, and describes being on holiday in Corsica with his wife, where he spent the time canoeing along the coast and wild camping on small islands. He talks about one night when he heard screaming sounds and how he started panicking that a load of Corsicans were slaughtering each other. Then he remembered that he'd heard the same sounds when he was younger on a deserted island in the Aegean Sea, and finally he worked out that they were birds.
"It's a kind of seagull or petrel found in the Mediterranean. It has a brownish colour and never rests on the rocks but floats on the sea and fishes during the day. Some times at night they gather above their nests on the seashore or the rocks, fly around and give out cries which sound as if children were being assassinated... In ancient times these birds were used for divination: when they flew to the left the augury was bad, when they flew to the right it was good."
Xenakis's description suggests they're not actually gulls or petrels (as in storm-petrels), but shearwaters. Out of the three shearwaters that occur in the Mediterranean, Balearic Shearwater doesn't breed in Corsica or the Aegean, but Scopoli's and Yelkouan Shearwaters do. After listening to the music and comparing it to recordings from Xeno-Canto, and also in the incredible Petrels Night and Day by Magnus Robb (possibly the best bird book I've ever read), I think it has to be Scopoli's.
The shearwaters are imitated by an amplified baritone singer, who also growls and yells his way through texts by Homer and Sappho - Aïs was the name used in Greek poetry for Hades, the domain of the dead.Before clicking on play below, you need to knock back a shot (bottle?) of absinthe and then strap yourself in. Here we go - Scopoli's Shearwaters in Aïs by Iannis Xenakis ...
Béla Bartók's most well known use of birdsong features in the second movement of his 3rd Piano Concerto, but he also wrote at least two more pieces where birdsong is used - the third movement from the String Quartet no.4 and a movement from the piano suite Out of Doors. There are other pieces where he hints at birdsong and calls, but not as obviously as in these pieces.
These are both good examples of Bartók's
night music, a particular musical character that he used over and over again in
slow movements in pieces composed in the last twenty
years of his life. It's music that unfolds very slowly, with slow shifting harmony, there's a weird sense of unease underpinning everything, with constant interjections, said to be the sounds of birds, insects and other
animals.
String Quartet no.4
Bartókwrote this in the summer of 1928. It's in five movements, four of them manic, with a violent energy that comes to a complete standstill in the central third movement - where a Nightingale (or at least I presume it is) starts to sing on the first violin - before firing off into the fourth movement and back to the relentless energy.
This is one of my very favourite pieces of music - it is totally mindblowing, so you'd better like it, or I'll be livid. Do yourselves a massive favour and listen to it all. But I understand that you're busy (Hollyoaks, Holby City, Judge Rinder, Homes Under the Hammer, etc...) so if you can't spare 22 minutes, then first of all, shame on you, but secondly, you can skip to the 3rd movement which starts at 08:42. The Nightingale starts to sing at 11:13.
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Out of Doors
This is a suite of five short pieces for solo piano written in 1926, the fourth movement is titled Musiques Nocturnes (starts at 6:06 in the clip below). The pulse is maintained all the way through by a constant chromatic blur of four notes played with the left hand, and above that, the right hand throws in fragments of birdsong, and also cicadas and supposedly the calls of Fire-bellied Toad (known in Hungary as the Unka Frog). It's hard to say what the bird is, but repetitive song structure could point to a Song Thrush, although you also get a hint of the machine gun repetition, which suggests it's just another bloody Nightingale.
The middle of June in the northern hemisphere - the start of an ornithological graveyard for a few weeks, as birds vanish, either hidden behind leaves or looking after young. Although in Britain, June can also be the time when something viciously rare turns up, usually something small, very attractive and from the east. Like a Cretzschmar's Bunting on Bardsey Island in Wales. But on the whole, June ain't too great for birds. Unless you're interested in annoying birds at their nest, which you shouldn't be, because it's illegal. Frederick Delius (1862-1934) wrote a great piece about nesting Mockingbirds, Sea Drift, which he finished in 1904. It's a setting of Walt Whitman's poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, from Whitman's collection Leaves of Grass. It's about a boy walking along the beach at Paumanok, in Long Island, New York. He finds a Mockingbird nest and starts to study it, until one day the female vanishes. There's a great analysis of the poem HERE.
The performance below is from the opening night of the BBC Proms in 2012. Enjoy.
I've already written about the first ever recording of a bird, made by Ludwig Koch in 1889, HERE. It's generally agreed that the first time a recording of a bird was used in a piece of music was in 1924, in The Pines of Rome by the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936). In the third piece from the set of four, Respighi depicts a nocturnal visit to the pines on Janiculum Hill, and puts in a real recording of a Nightingale at the very end - a live orchestra is joined by the recorded bird.
I'm not sure about who / when / where the Nightingale was recorded, but Respighi did suggest that in a performance, the recording of the bird should be played on a Brunswick Panatrope, which I think would have been a brand new invention at the time. Nowadays, performances use modern technology like the cassette player and mini-discs.
Brunswick Panatrope
Every time time I listen to this, I always think that the sudden arrival of a genuine Nightingale from out of the orchestra is really powerful and actually quite moving. Not everyone agrees - this piece has been a long time source of controversy amongst people who like to find things to wind themselves up over. Respighi has been criticised for sickbag over-sentimentality. Did he lack the musical imagination to depict a Nightingale using the orchestra? And best of all, there are suggestions that by using a machine to replace a living creature, Respighi's Nightingale is symptomatic of the totalitarian Fascism of Mussolini's Italy. Obviously. So there you go.
There's no rush - don't worry, your Findus Crispy Pancakes have got ages until they start to burn - so take the time to watch all of this. Trust me, it's really good (other than a few people in the audience dying from some lung disorder). But if you can smell burning, then the Nightingale starts to sing at 5:50.
Here are two Nightingales, a startled Linnet and some singing warblers, in the third book of keyboard pieces (Pièces de clavecin) written in 1722 by François Couperin (1668-1733). The books are divided into suites, or ordres, and these bird pieces make up the first four of the seven pieces from the 14th ordre. I nearly put in another piece by Couperin called the Dodo, then I found out that 'dodo' is a word that kids and parents use in France for going to sleep. I suppose I could have just lied. Anyway ...
Leading on from last week, Olivier Messiaen said, "I think that Couperin, given
what he wrote, never heard a Nightingale, but this takes away nothing
from the charm of the piece." That's not actually true, because Couperin does attempt to create the effect of the most well known part of a Nightingale's song - the machine gun repeated notes - which Couperin imitates on the keyboard with accelerating trills at ends of sections. But the Linnet and warblers are written in a generic bird-style. - Le Rossignol en amour (the Nightingale in love) - La Linotte éffarouchée (the startled Linnet) 3:14 - Les Fauvéttes plaintives (the plaintive song of the warblers) 4:59 - Le Rossignol vainqueur (the vanquished Nightingale) 10:00
So far I've featured two pieces by Olivier Messiaen:
Quatuor pour la fin du temps (the Quartet for the end of time), 1941 and Le merle noir (Blackbird), 1952 The former was the first piece Messiaen wrote in which he indicated what birds were singing (Blackbird and Nightingale), and the latter is the first piece which is all about a bird. But in 1953 Messiaen upped his game with Reveil des Oiseaux, the Awakening of the Birds, or a Dawn Chorus if you like. It's the only piece Messiaen wrote which is based entirely on transcribed birdsong (38 different birds) with no other musical material. As big a fan I am of Messiaen, I reckon Reveil des Oiseaux is pretty hard to listen to, and Messiaen himself must have had his doubts, because he then scrapped the idea of writing total bird-music, and followed it up with a much better piece in 1956, Oiseaux Exotiques, Exotic Birds. Messiaen's definition of 'exotiques' is clearly that of a birder new to the game who is starting to fall madly in love with birds - all of the featured birds are actually mega common in the countries where they are native, and in no way exotiques. In fact, going through Messiaen's bird-music in chronological order is the classic outline of a birder's career - initial curiosity about the natural world, a desire to learn more about the birds in your back garden, being stunned as you learn about big stupid colourful birds in far off lands, travelling all over the place to see/hear those big stupid colourful foreign birds, developing a selective interest in certain types of birds, and finally returning to your local birds that first got you hooked but with a refined sense of appreciation. Oiseaux Exotiques is an absolutely fantastic piece. It's based on transcribed birdsongs that Messiaen heard in an aviary in Paris containing Asian birds, and also from a recording of North American birds. But he colours the music with his own totally unique harmonies and also scraps the idea of being 100% faithful to his transcriptions, transforming the birdsong into music which is more intelligible to a human audience, which was sort of important, you know, with an audience in a concert hall usually being made up of humans.
There are too many birds for me to embed files from Xeno-Canto, but it's definitely worth having a listen to a Greater Prairie Chicken and comparing it to Messiaen's.
And just one final thing. I think Messiaen got something wrong. The repeated mega-loud hammered notes of White-crested Laughing-thrush near the beginning and at the very end don't make any sense at all, they sound nothing at all like the bird. I think Messiaen heard a Coppersmith Barbet in that Paris aviary and didn't realise which bird was singing (Messiaen's bird expertise has been massively exaggerated). The problem is that to create a great dramatic ending, conductors usually conduct those final chords really slowly, much slower than Messiaen indicates they should be played in the score. When it's played at the speed Messiaen wants it to be played, then those chords are spot on for Coppersmith Barbet.
I've listed all the birds below, so follow along as you listen.
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- Common Mynah - 0'41 White-crested Laughing-thrush (Coppersmith Barbet?) - 1'03 piano solo. Common Mynah, Red-billed Mesia, Wood Thrush and Veery - 2'32 Lesser Green Leafbird, Baltimore Oriole, Red-billed Mesia, California Thrasher - 2'51 piano solo. Northern Cardinal - 3'20 Lesser Green Leafbird, Baltimore Oriole, Red-billed Mesia, California Thrasher - 3'46 piano solo. Northern Cardinal - 4'17 Greater Prairie Chicken - 4'55 central orchestral section. White-crested Laughing-thrush, Orchard Oriole, Cowbird (Messiaen doesn't specify which one), Red-whiskered Bulbul, Barred Owl, Olive-backed Thrush, Indigo Bunting, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Hermit Thrush, White-crowned Sparrow, White-rumped Shama, Song Sparrow, Summer Tanager, Northern Mockingbird, Wild Turkey, Fox Sparrow, California Quail, Gambel's Quail, Whip-poor-will, Brown Thrasher, Black-headed Grosbeak, American Robin, Vesper Sparrow - 8'38 Greater Prairie Chicken - 9'30 piano solo. Grey Catbird and Bobolink - 11'38 White-rumped shama - 11'48 many of the species already heard the in central orchestral section, but now also including Carolina Wren, Horned Lark, Red-eyed Vireo, Warbling Vireo, Purple Finch, Yellow-throated Vireo, Lazuli Bunting, Blue-headed Vireo - 13'09 piano solo. Northern Cardinal and Wood Thrush - 13'40 Common Mynah - 13'48 White-crested Laughing-thrush (Coppersmith Barbet?)
A couple of years ago I decided to watch films of the four operas which make up The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner (1813-1883). I'd only heard chunks of it before on CD and I had absolutely no idea what they were singing about or what was happening in the plot. After watching a couple of the operas (I didn't get time to watch all four, because all four total up at 767,000 hours in length, actually, probably a bit more) I still hadn't really got a clue what it was about. Yet it was great to watch, even though my eyebrows were welded together in total confusion.
In Siegfried, the third opera in The Ring, there's a bird - hooray! This is what happens when the bird starts singing:
Siegfried arrives near the lair of the dragon Fafner. Before trying to kill Fafner, Siegfried falls asleep in the forest and is woken up by a singing bird. He has a go at calling back to the bird with his horn but instead wakes up Fafner, they have a big fight and Siegfried kills Fafner. Siegfried drinks Fafner's blood (obviously) and suddenly he can understand the bird's song, and the bird is telling him about a woman sleeping on a rock surrounded by magic fire.
It's all to do with destiny, I think. If I'm honest, I don't really know. The first video below is from near the start of Act 2, Scene 2 - the bird is singing on woodwind instruments. The second video (from a different performance) is Siegfried killing Fafner. The third video is from later in the scene after the dragon killing bit, and the bird's melody is now sung by a soprano offstage.
The music is astounding, everything else is completely insane.
What's that? You want to hear a piece of music in which a male choir are pretending to be woodpeckers? Okay. Pica-Pau (Woodpecker), written in 1925, is the subtitle of the third of Heitor Villa Lobos's set of Chôros that he wrote throughout the 1920s. Chôro seems to be one of those words that doesn't work well in translation out of Brazilian Portuguese - Googling just comes up with a definition of 'weeping' or 'sadness', which doesn't describe the music at all. It's a word that seems to have been used to describe certain groups of Brazilian street musicians, and it looks as though Villa Lobos used the word it to denote his links with the popular music of the time, and also to hammer home his musical nationalism. Each Chôro is written for completely different groups of instruments, ranging from solo guitar to a massive orchestra with choir. There's also unusual combinations of instruments, like in Pica-Pau which is scored for a male chorus with clarinet, bassoon, alto sax, trombone and three horns.
Pica-Pau!
The melodies for Pica-Pau are adapted from two songs that Villa Lobos heard in a recording of the indigenous Parecis Indians, a tribe that still live in Brazil's Mato Grosso. But the middle section heads off into crazy town, where the choir begin to chant 'Pica-Pau' and imitate the sounds of woodpeckers knocking on tree trunks and other jungle sounds. The final big cheer of 'Brasil!' was apparently only put in because Villa Lobos needed to finish things with '-il' and actually any word with the same final syllable would have been fine. Excellent, that's my kind of artistic integrity. I hope you like this, it's a great little piece.
The more I listen to Villa Lobos, the more I think that
his music is criminally neglected in Britain. He was really really really good, and he should be getting a stack more performances than he does at present. I'm saving another knockout piece by Villa Lobos with birds in for later in the year, and
I also wrote THIS a couple of months ago.
Back in February - when I was fired up for this blog, full of enthusiasm and only six weeks into this now hellish nightmare of a project, a project which seems set to shave ten years off my life expectancy having to write this knockabout nonsense week after week - I wrote THIS about the Musurgia Universalis, a treatise by Athanasius Kircher published in 1650, which included musical notation of birdsong. The book led Heinrich Biber to write his completely original Sonata Representativa in 1669, but it seems to have also been important to Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), leading to just a tiny fragment of bird-music written in 1724 as part of Rameau's Suite in E minor - the 4th movement from the Suite 'Le rappel des oiseaux' (The conference of birds).
Rameau was allegedly a pretty decent fiddler, which is interesting seeing as he clearly had no idea how to hold one
Rameau doesn't quote birds literally - like Biber - it's more of a generic use of birdsong to create the effect of birds calling and responding to each other, which was still a pretty radical way of writing music for 1724.
There are two recordings below, the first is on harpsichord as Rameau intended. The second is on a modern piano, which I've only embedded because it's played by the Soviet pianist Emil Gilels, and I reckon Gilels could play a piano about as good as anyone has ever played a piano.
Olivier Messiaen. So, where to start? Well how about HERE and something I wrote in January about one of Messiaen's first pieces to use birdsong, the Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen wrote that in 1940-41, but it was in the 50s when birds started to feature in his music in a very different way, trying to achieve accuracy in transcribing birdsong in a way that nobody had ever done before.
The first piece featuring his new approach to using birdsong is Le Merle Noir, The Blackbird, written in 1952. It's also probably the best piece to find your way in to listening to his full-on bird music - some of which makes for pretty difficult listening - that was to be central to almost everything he wrote up until he died in 1992.
The Blackbird's song is played on a flute (the standard instrument for most birdsong in classical music) and accompanied by piano, but the accompaniment doesn't only have a harmonic / chordal function, it also provides the sound of the colours associated with the bird and the bird's environment. Messiaen found depicting colour in music pretty easy, being blessed (or cursed?) with synesthesia, a rare neurological phenomenon where your senses sort of collide and blend. So when Messiaen heard sounds, he also saw corresponding colours in his head, and each time it was the same colours associated with the same sounds and music. Now here's something to think about. Would you be able to work out that it's a Blackbird without the title? And that applies to all of his bird music, do the birds quoted actually sound anything like they do in the field or in recordings? And does that even matter? If he went to such pains to try and replicate these birds with such accuracy, should they be identifiable? I've been listening to all of Messiaen's music for a long, long, long, long (long [long]) time, and I'm still not sure what the answer to all of that is.
Much more of his music to come this year, so plenty of chances to think about that further. And if you want a laugh, on 22nd August I'll be competing in Bird Brain of Britain at the British Birdwatching Fair, representing the Ornithological Society of the Middle East, my specialist subject being 'birds in the music of Olivier Messiaen'. Could be catastrophic!
Anyway, I think Messiaen's Blackbird is a great piece of music, although not as nice as the real one singing outside that I'm listening to right now. And I'm pretty sure Messiaen would have agreed with me.
Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith - some of the early twentieth century's most important European composers, and they all left Europe to live in America after their home continent decided to have a good go at wiping everyone out in the 1930s and 40s.
Some of them, like Stravinksy, were treated like superheroes and did pretty well for themselves. Others, like Schoenberg, were not quite as well received and so they passed the time playing tennis.
Schoenberg on the left
Bela Bartok (1881-1945) left Hungary to live in New York, where nobody seemed to understand, or care, that he was probably the greatest composer alive at that time. I'd say one of the greatest composers alive at any time. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he was about to return to Budapest as a government minister, but he died in New York in September 1945.
Bartok wrote a few pieces containing birdsong, but the most explicit references are found in the second movement of his 3rd Piano Concerto. The story goes that in 1942 he was seriously ill and recovering at a hospital in North Carolina, and as he was lying in bed, he listened to Eastern Towhees, Hermit Thrushes and Wood Thrushes singing in the garden outside. It's transcriptions of those three singing birds which make up the middle section of the second movement from the concerto, his final piece which he very nearly completed but died leaving the last seventeen bars blank. Here's an Eastern Towhee
Americans say that the way to remember the song of an Eastern Towhee is by the mnemonic "drink your tea". Have a listen again and try and work out in what universe that sounds like "drink your tea". We have something similar in Britain, the mnemonic "little bit of bread and no cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeese" for a Yellowhammer, and that's just as terrible as well. Actually, the best way to remember the songs of Eastern Towhee and Yellowhammer is to hear the songs with your ears, retain the sound of the songs in your memory in your brain, and then recall those songs the next time you hear the birds singing. You know, like you do with everything else you ever hear.
So listen to the three birds (using your ears), remember the sound of the birds' songs (in the memory in your brain, which is in your head [the thing on top of your shoulders]) and then try and hear them in the concerto played on the piano, oboe, clarinet, flute and piccolo.
So here's all of the second movement, and the birds start singing at 4'30. The other two movements are linked below.
Five seconds on Google can tell you that the very first recording made of a singing bird was a White-rumped (aka Indian) Shama recorded in 1889 in an aviary in Germany, by an eight-year-old boy called Ludwig Koch on an Edison phonograph. That eight-year-old grew up to become the adult version of Ludwig Koch, emigrated to Britain and became the BBC's first natural history media star. There's a great article about him HERE, and also a documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 4 a few years ago - which features that recording of the Shama - has been archived HERE.
Koch continued recording birds throughout his life and sets of his LP albums were the first commercially available recordings. In the 1950s those LPs had a huge impact on Mr Bird-Music himself, Olivier Messiaen (I really do need to hurry up and write a lot more about Messiaen before the end of the year).
Recording birds was very definitely a niche pursuit until very recently, but now any idiot can do it. Even I've recorded birds. The greatest website on the entire world wide internetsphere is Xeno Canto, where both amateurs and pros upload their bird recordings just for the fun of it. As I write, the current stats on the front page are that 226,005 recordings have now been uploaded onto the website, of 9,285 species and recorded by 2,250 different birders - just one user Frank Lambert has uploaded 10,000 files! And yet you still dare to disagree that it's not the single most bestest website ever?
The first time a recording of a bird turned up in music was in 1924 in The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi, where at the end of the 2nd movement, a real Nightingale joins in with the orchestra. But in 1950 a really interesting piece of musique concrète was created by Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) at the French Radio and Television studios, where Schaeffer had been carrying out some of the earliest experiments with electronic music.
Schaeffer in 1948
Musique concrète was a term used by Schaeffer to describe recordings of real sounds which are then manipulated in the studio and edited into pieces of electronic music. Back in the prehistoric times of the 1950s, creating the effects that you'll hear, which now sound quite basic, was a massive ball ache - these sounds actually had to be either invented (like using an echo chamber to produce massive reverb) or were found by accident through constant laborious experimentation. I suspect there was lots of sticky tape, scissors and chopped up magnetic tape knocking about the place. Also, you have to presume that there was an enormous amount of screaming and smacking each other in the face going on, borne of hysterical frustration every time they couldn't find the end of the sellotape.
As far as I know, L'Oiseau RAI is the only piece Schaeffer wrote using bird song. The title is obscure and there's virtually no background information about the piece, but after a bit of digging the only realistic explanation I can find is that 'RAI' refers to the Italian broadcasting company Radiotelevisione italiana, who seem to have used this piece in broadcasts and possibly even commissioned it. Do let me know if you have a better explanation. Also, because so much studio processing has taken place, what's the bird? Any suggestions?
Wahey! The first Cuckoos have arrived back in Britain on the south coast, and don't forget that you can track the migration of a few satellite-tagged birds returning from Africa on the BTO's website.
So, because everything I ever do lacks originality and is just one massive cliché after another, this week's piece is On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring by Frederick Delius (1862-1934). It was written in 1912 and originally one of two pastoral pieces, the other being Summer Night on the River, which has been largely forgotten.
Last week's post was The Curlew by Peter Warlock, who was a particularly big fan of Delius's Cuckoo. After hearing it he wrote this letter to Delius:
The first piece is the most exquisite and entirely lovely piece of music
I have heard for many a long day—it almost makes me cry, for the sheer
beauty of it: I play it often on the piano, and it is continually in my
head, a kind of beautiful undercurrent to my thoughts. For me, the deep,
quiet sense of glowing happiness, and the mysterious feeling of being
at the very heart of Nature, that pervades the piece, is too lovely for
words.
I'm not sure I agree entirely with Warlock, I mean, it's okay. Nice enough piece of music, but a bit too English for me. Strolling through meadows, cricket on the village green, rowing down the Thames, a cold bath at 5am, Anglican church hymns and setting a pack of dogs on a fox. Yep, that's what being English is all about.
So, Peter Warlock (1894-1930) - here's someone you might call a 'character'. Composer, musicologist, critic, friend, champion then enemy of D.H.Lawrence, a man who enjoyed riding around naked on a motorbike, student of the occult and fan of the black magic of Aleister Crowley (he changed his name from Heseltine to Warlock), and, to quote Alan Partridge, part of a circle who were 'sex people'.
It's the latter which shows him up as being a bit on the vile side, especially if he happened to be your father. In the 1980s, years after pestering his elderly mother, former Christie's art expert turned gobby commentator Brian Sewell discovered that the father he never knew was Peter Warlock. Sewell, in his own words, was an illegitimate bastard, whose mother had been given a fiver by Warlock to have him aborted. Because he was one of those 'sex people', it seems as though Warlock handed out fivers quite frequently, and to the women who didn't spend the grubby note on a back street abortion, he just disowned them.
Sewell is justifiably angry and perfectly in his rights to tear Warlock's reputation to shreds. But as obnoxious as some of Warlock's actions may have been, Sewell is wrong to say that his old man was a 'minor composer', as in this interview. Having committed suicide aged 36, Peter Warlock almost certainly didn't reach his peak, but the originality of the music he did write has secured him a top spot in the development of British music in the early 20th century.
The five songs that make up The Curlew were written between 1916 and 1922, using poems by W.B.Yeats from two volumes of his poetry written at the turn of the 20th century - In the Seven Woods and The Wind Among the Reeds. Yeats grew up in County Sligo, where Curlews would have been a constant background sound, although very sadly not in the 21st century. When Warlock wrote the songs he was living in the middle of Wales, and again he would have been hearing Curlews all day long. Throughout the music you'll hear the instruments playing the cries of Curlews and Lapwings (peewits), and there's an unsettling and desolate bleakness to this whole musical texture evoking the wind-battered, barren uplands of Curlew territory.
For Yeats the poems were all about the melancholy of a young man trying to fall in love (God only knows what Warlock was thinking), you know, allegory and so on. Everything in art usually is about stuff like that. But who cares about that? Not me. I wish all these artists would just cheer up, for Christ's sake. It's not as though they have to go to work or anything.
I. He reproves of the Curlew
O Curlew, cry no more in the air, Or only to the waters in the West; Because your crying brings to my mind Passion-dimm'd eyes and long heavy hair That was shaken out over my breast: There is enough evil in the crying of wind.
II. The lover mourns for the loss of love
Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end: She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away.
III. The withering of the boughs
I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds: 'Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will, I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words, For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.' The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill, And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge or streams.
[Refrain] No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I know of the leafy paths the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake; I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.
[Refrain]
I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly. A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by; I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.
[Refrain]
V. He hears the cry of the sedge
I wander by the edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round, And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West, And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep. *
