John Zorn - O'o

 Over 1,200 bird species are considered globally threatened, because they have small and declining populations or ranges. Of these, 189 are Critically Endangered and face an extremely high risk of extinction in the immediate future. Threatened birds are found throughout the world, but are concentrated in the tropics and especially in forests. Population declines may be quick and catastrophic, but even small increases in mortality can threaten the survival of some species.

(Birdlife International)

Hawaii O'o (Moho nobilis). Extinct. Last sighting 1934

So to start things off, have a listen to this. If you're at work or in a public place then turn it up really loud, because everyone will want to hear it.





This is a blog about birds in music, not grindcore vaginal symbolism, but Painkiller were formed by mercurial musical magician John Zorn, a sonic schizophrenic capable of multiple musical personalities. In 2009 he released an album called O'o with another of his bands The Dreamers. Zorn wrote the music, he doesn't actually play on the album, and let's just say it's a teeny weeny bit different to his work with Painkiller.

O'o (also known as Moho) is an extinct family of birds from Hawaii, wiped out by habitat loss and disease brought by European settlers, the last sighting of one was in 1934. It's a strange album, I'm not entirely sure if I really love it, but some of it is very, very beautiful, leaving you feeling a bit sad, which is, I suppose, how you're supposed to feel.

The 12 tracks on the album all represent an extinct or critically endangered species of bird, but only by chiseling open his forehead and climbing into the brain pulp of John Zorn could you ever possibly understand how the music reflects the bird. Here are three of the tracks - Po'ouli, New Zealand Little Bittern and Piopio. I've also put together a gallery of all the 12 birds on the album - listen to the music, look at the pictures, hang your head in shame.

Miller's Crake (Porzana nigra)

O'ahu akialoa (Hemignathus ellisianus)

Po'ouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma)

New Zealand Little Bittern (Ixobrychus novaezelandiae)

Mysterious Starling (Aplonis mavornata)

Laughing Owl (Sceloglaux albifacies)

Archaeopteryx (Archaeopteryx lithographica)

Rodrigues Solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria)

South Island Piopio (front) & North Island Piopio (Turnagra capensis / tanagra)

Zapata Rail (Cyanolimnas cerverai)

Kakawahie (Paroreomyza flammea)

Magdalena Tinamou (Crypturellus erythropus saltuarius)

Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time

"Birds are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs"

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was an unquestionable musical giant of the 20th century, and he was the ultimate composer whose music was inspired by birds - he wrote enough to fill over 50% of my blogposts, something I might eventually have to do when I run out of ideas. Messiaen to bird-music is like running water to rivers, pollen to bees, Shakespeare to English, Columbo to crime, or Phil Taylor to darts.

As an introduction to Messiaen's bird-music, I'm going to copy everyone else who's ever written about his bird-music, and start with Quatuor pour la fin du temps, the Quartet for the End of Time. 
Originality is massively overrated.

In the Sibelius symphony and the Schubert song I've already written about, they use birds in a non-literal way, there's no attempt to represent birds or their songs with any real accuracy, it's not all that important. But for Messiaen accuracy became everything, birds became his obsession, and in the Quartet for the End of Time you can hear his first stabs at portraying a singing Blackbird and a Nightingale.

The incredible story behind the Quartet's composition has been covered a million times elsewhere - I could easily just add a couple of links - but I need some content to bulk this post up a bit, so I'll copy+paste it out of Wikipedia. To be fair, that's what everyone writing about anything does. Originality is massively overrated.



It was the 15th of January, 1941. The place was Stalag VIII-A prisoner of war camp near the German town of Görlitz on the border with Poland, 20 miles north of what's now the Czech Republic. Of course this is all relative, but to have been captured by the Germans and sent to Stalag VIII-A was almost a blessing, as life seems to have been a lot easier than it was in most German POW camps.

Messiaen, serving in the French army as a medical auxiliary, had been captured at Nancy in May 1940 during the German invasion, and was sent to Stalag VIII-A. Another blessing for Messiaen was Carl-Albert Brüll, a lawyer from Görlitz who worked in the camp as a guard and French interpreter, and it was Brüll who gave Messiaen some paper and a pencil with which he wrote the Quartet. But the greatest blessing of all was that there were three other very good professional musicians in the camp, in particular a Jewish clarinetist Henri Akoka.

On that day in 1941, 5,000 captured soldiers made up an audience that heard Messiaen playing on a battered upright piano with these three other musicians (clarinet, violin and cello) in the first performance of the Quartet. For such a difficult piece of music, conditions were terrible - for a start, Étienne Pasquier's cello only had three strings - but Messiaen later recalled that "Never was I listened to with such attention and understanding."



Great story, but unfortunately it's not true. A few years ago I interviewed the pianist and musicologist Peter Hill for a BBC Radio 3 programme about Messiaen, and Peter is someone who knows more about Messiaen than probably anyone else. Peter told me that if there had been 5,000 POWs in the audience then the performance must have taken place outside, no building in the camp could hold that many people, in which case they would have all died of hypothermia in what was one of the coldest winters of the century. And after Messiaen died in 1992, the cellist finally admitted that not only did the first performance take place inside for an audience of about 300 people (and a lot of them really didn't enjoy it!), but that his cello wasn't missing a string either.



What a shame. I hate it when facts and truth rear their miserable heads and ruin all the fun. Although it's hard to understand why Messiaen conjured up this story about the first performance - I mean, isn't writing a piece of music in a POW camp, having three other professional musicians at hand to play it, and getting any sort of an audience not a good enough story in itself?



The title 'End of Time' comes from the cheery, lighthearted Book of Revelation in the Bible (Messiaen was hardcore Roman Catholic), and the Quartet is in 8 completely contrasting movements. A full performance lasts about 50 minutes. The two videos below are just a tiny glimpse of a massive work. The opening movement is Liturgie de cristal, the Crystal Liturgy, and here's Messiaen's own description of the birds in his music: 

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven.

It's a fantastic explanation of really beautiful music. The clarinet opens with the Blackbird, and the Nightingale soon joins in on violin. The piano and cello, playing crystalline high pitched harmonics, provide a background which creates a translucent carpet of stillness, presumably that's the "shimmer of sound" and the "harmonious silence of Heaven".





The third movement is the Abyss of Birds for solo clarinet. No bird is specifically quoted (it starts singing at 1:50 in the video below), and it's more of an idealised version of birdsong. Again, Messiaen describes it superbly:

The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.

The use of birdsong in the Quartet for the End of Time is pretty basic compared to how Messiaen's music was to develop in the immediate decades after the war. It was in the 1950s when Messiaen completely threw himself into detailed study of birdsong, and much of his music became totally dominated by birds up until his death. As I wrote earlier, lots more Messiaen to come this year.

Schubert - The Crow

Last week I started with the 5th Symphony by Sibelius, music written on a massive scale and which is almost overwhelming in its power, some would even say that it's so full-on that it fails, and leaves them feeling a bit cold. Fair enough, though you are of course wrong. Today something entirely different, yet I'd argue it's no less powerful. The 16 Whooper Swans that Sibelius wrote about was based on a direct experience with nature in the great big outdoors, but the Crow in this song by Schubert is all about the mythology and folklore of birds. It's not about documenting the reality of nature, but it's about a specific human interpretation of the behaviour or character of a bird based on a tiny bit of fact and a huge amount of fanciful nonsense.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) wrote his song cycle Die Winterreise (The Winter Journey) a year before he died, and a rough outline is that through 24 songs using text by the German poet Wilhelm Müller, it tells the story of a heartbroken poet wandering through the winter streets, taking weird delight in various things, ranging from the totally banal to the fantastical and terrifying. It's impossible to not read it as autobiographical, as Schubert seemed to be aware that he was rapidly approaching an unjustly young death - he'd contracted syphilis in 1822, presumably from a prostitute.

The 15th song is Die Krähe (The Crow), and here Schubert's tapping into the popular mythology of the generic black bird of death, this 'Crow' could even be a Raven. Sinister black birds pop up in folklore throughout the world, and they never get good press - they're always viewed as the souls of the damned, or the wandering victims of unsolved murders, and so on. No Romantic poet wrecked on opium ever wrote an ode to a crow. (let's get googling to prove Tom wrong)

Mark Cocker in his brilliant Birds Britannica puts it like this: "In modern Britain and Ireland the crow is the classic symbol of evil and a portent of misfortune ... In television programmes and Hollywood films, crows are a stereotypical motif - often a silhouette image on a bare stump - to convey danger, death, murder, evil, even specifically the Devil."

Have a listen a couple of times, the text and translation is below, and then I've got my own take on this song, because I don't actually think it's as bleak and desperate as it might first appear. I reckon there's a bit of dark humour threaded through this. I particularly like this video because the tenor Ian Bostridge looks as if he's been pinned down like a butterfly specimen, or maybe he's a drunken fruit bat? Either way, his singing and characterisation is incredible.

Now think about this - the moral of the song is that loneliness is no way to spend your life. No, it's better to have just one real friend, one who's there by your side right up until your final breath, even if that one friend is only hanging around with you in order to rip off your eyelids as soon as you hit the deck.

And that's funny, yes? Maybe not fall-on-the-floor-and-foul-yourself hilarious, but Schubert must have had a bit of a laugh to himself when he was setting the poem to music.

Birds are mentioned in two other songs in Winterreise. In number 8, Backwards Glance, a lark and Nightingale are mentioned singing in rivalry. And in number 11, Dreams of Spring, he remembers the time he fell in love in springtime, singing of birdsong, flowers and meadows, and then it all goes wrong and he wakes up to the sound of a Raven screaming on his rooftop. Full text and translations are here.

If you never have, then do yourself a favour and treat yourself to a complete listen to all of Winterreise. Trust me, it's worth it.

Sibelius - Symphony no.5

So before we get started, feel free to skip all of these words and letters and numbers and things, and just jump to the embedded video at the end, that's the really good bit. Don't worry, I won't take it personally. Alternatively, just lie to me and say that you did read it all. Now ...

It's a last minute, and quite possibly the wrong, decision to open the blog with this, because I originally intended to tie things up in 52 weeks time with the 5th Symphony by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), but here it is to start the year. Without question, it had to be either the opener or the closer, because it's got to be one of the very best examples of how birds can have a huge impact on music.

Sibelius's 5th Symphony, in particular the closing third movement, is about swans, Whooper Swans. It details how a heartstoppingly intimate encounter with nature can flood us with an overpowering sensation of joy. If you've never heard the symphony then I suggest you knock back a couple of pints of gin and a crate of Babycham, and brace yourself for a massive slap in the face - it's extraordinarily powerful stuff. An ideal performance of this symphony should leave a huge hole in the back of your skull.

Whooper Swans - the national bird of Finland. Seeing as he's the 'Greatest Briton of 2014', when we eventually join up to the single currency I think it's only right that the face of a smoking Nigel Farage should be stamped onto our Euro coins

Back in 1915 when Sibelius wrote the first version of this symphony, there wasn't a hobby called birdwatching. The only people who took a real interest in birds were eccentric aristocrats with speech impediments, and the offspring of nouveau riche post-Industrial Revolution capitalist pigdogs, who travelled world to blast birds out of the sky, stuff them full of sand and donate them to museums. A bit flippant that last sentence, because the specimens they donated are, to this day, the spinal column of avian science. But that really was how ornithology worked up until, well, up until the last 50 years or so, when optical equipment developed to a point where birds could be identified without stuffing them full of sand.

Birdwatching, like most modern hobbies, exploded in the immediate decades after WW2, when plebs and filth like you and me found ourselves with the freetime and financial opportunities to trample all over beautiful open spaces that had long been inaccessible to gutterscum vermin like us.

So the fact that Sibelius was actually birdwatching 100 years ago is pretty amazing. Because that's what Sibelius was doing, he was birding, he was an amateur birding pioneer, and I suspect he didn't even know it. In his diary he would write down the arrival and departure dates of migrating birds, he would count skeins of what he called 'wild geese' (based on where he lived in Finland they were presumably Taiga Bean Geese), he noted pairs of Curlews nesting in the bog around his house, and his seasons were defined not by calendar dates, but by cranes, geese and swans heading either north or south. A century on, and all of that is what we do as birders.

Sibelius also had a bit of a problem associating with the human race (he left Helsinki to live in the middle of nowhere with his wife), and then there was his horribly destructive problem with booze: again, these are typical traits of birders.

If you want to know more about the background to its composition and how this symphony achieves such power, then there are two brilliant things to look at online. Stephen Johnson's episode of Discovering Music on Radio 3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxx6q

And Alex Ross has put the Sibelius chapter from his book The Rest is Noise online

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/07/sibelius-chapte.html

But there is definitely one thing you need to know: 21st April 1915, outside his house on the shoreline of Lake Tuusula, and Sibelius wrote in his diary

"Today I saw 16 swans. God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a silver ribbon."

Shortly after he sketched out the melody which was to become the main theme in the final movement of the symphony, the theme which is now commonly known as the Swan Hymn. It's not supposed to sound like a literal transcription of flying Whooper Swans, more of a sonic depiction of the euphoria which overcame Sibelius watching those swans. But the purity of those swans is eventually corrupted by an underlying sinister chromaticism in the music, in short, Sibelius starts to make it sound out of tune as the symphony approaches its conclusion. So if you like, you can go deeper with all of this: the 16 swans vanishing into the solar haze can be interpreted as Sibelius unable to grab hold of something so simplistically beautiful, something which could possibly lift him out of the throttling depression that pretty much destroyed his life. That kind of joy he felt watching the swans was all too brief - like any other wisps of happiness in his life - then it was back to the grind and the bottle.

You really should listen to the whole symphony, but if you're short of time then you'll have to make do with just the third movement which starts at 21:20. The Swan Hymn enters at 22:32.

Whatever you do, and this applies to all the music I'll post, make sure you listen either through good speakers or headphones - you have to be able to hear the bass.

Enjoy! And if it's your first hearing, let me know what you think.

Even if you only dip into classical music infrequently, you're going to hear a lot of Sibelius this year - he was born 150 years ago and the number 150 is extremely significant in music because it looks quite cool on festival brochures and concert programmes.