John Luther Adams - Dream of the Canyon Wren

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 ...




... and here's a dream about one.

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Vivaldi - Summer (from the Four Seasons)

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?

Messiaen - La Fauvette des Jardins (The Garden Warbler)

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!

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