John Luther Adams - songbirdsongs

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

Messiaen also had a thing for Wood Thrushes ...

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Ravel - Oiseaux tristes

Sad birds (oiseaux tristes) call "in a very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer"

Sad and very beautiful. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) wrote this for solo piano as part of a set of five pieces called Miroirs in 1905.

So this was a very short post. Time is constantly against me at the moment - my second daughter Nina was born two weeks ago.

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Messiaen - Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum

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.

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