Messiaen - Oiseaux Exotiques

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?)

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Wagner - Siegfried

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.

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Villa Lobos - Chôros no.3 (Pica-Pau)

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.

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Rameau - Le rappel des oiseaux

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.

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