Messiaen - Le merle noir

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.

Bartok - Piano Concerto no.3

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.






1st movement - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WJhLz4C70U

3rd movement - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1gCSQzCJMs


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Schaeffer - L'Oiseau (RAI)

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?

Delius - On hearing the first Cuckoo in spring

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.






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