Did Composers Wing It? Four Piano Pieces that Imitate Birdsong
Bird Study. Turn off the 19th/20th century. Van Ham Kunstauktionen. Wikimedia Commons
Inspired by the musical qualities of birdsong, R. Murray Shafer, a Canadian composer famous for pioneering soundscapes, wrote that “birds are virtuoso performers,” and that “each territory of the earth will have its own bird symphony.” Indeed, all manner of avian calls have been firmly nested in classical piano music even as far back as the Baroque era, with works such as Daquin’s Le coucou and Rameau’s Le rappel des oiseaux. Here are four more recent pieces giving the well-deserved spotlight onto our feathered friends.
The first piece to consider is Liszt’s Premier Légende, S175/1 (the composer’s orchestrated version of this piece, S354/1, is also definitely worth listening to). Depicting the most famous story surrounding St Francis of Assisi, it is subtitled “La prédication aux oiseaux” (The Sermon to the Birds). This medieval Catholic friar was said to have preached to a multitude of birds on one of his travels, of which none were frightened or flew away. Songs of the birds as they flocked to St Francis are represented as soft descending flutters and trills, with elements of call and response between the hands. These quasi-impressionist textures, as well as the luscious harmonies, were penned in 1863 when Debussy was only a baby, and Liszt’s music was to become a large influence on Impressionists like him and Ravel.
Speaking of Ravel, his interpretation of birdsong was from a distinctly different angle. His 1905 work Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds) from the suite Miroirs portrays a lonely, solitary bird call, which is then accompanied in different forms by a woodland of slow-moving, rich harmonies. This is a sharp contrast from the energetic flapping of Liszt’s flock of birds. Ravel’s piece has a more animated middle section and a virtuosic cadenza, but this fleeting moment is swiftly replaced by the stasis of sorrow from the opening.
No list of birdsong-inspired music would be complete without our favourite composer-ornithologist Olivier Messiaen. Although he famously wrote whole imaginative transmutations of certain bird calls in music (such as his Catalogue d’oiseaux or Petites esquisses d’oiseaux), birdsong was an inherent part of his compositional style throughout his life, as seen in his mammoth Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Contemplations on the Baby Jesus) of 1944. Although birdsong is peppered throughout the score, one of the best examples is from the fifth movement, Regard du Fils sur le Fils, which has a middle section constructed of gentle chirping superimposed upon the Thème de Dieu, the main motif of the entire suite.
Lastly, we have a living composer, Takashi Yoshimatsu, a Japanese composer who refused the atonality and complexity of experimental composition in the twentieth century. He wrote his piano concerto Memo Flora, Op 67, in 1997, showcasing a fascinating style of crisp, tonal harmonies and modern rhythmic units. Although this piece is primarily about flowers (its three movements are titled “Flower,” “Petals” and “Bloom”), it contains highly evocative passages of birdsong, transporting us to an idyllic garden, which overflows with dense chattering and tweeting of birds.