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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