Messiaen's bird music

No more embarrassing drunken experiments for now. *blush*

I spent one of the (probable) last summer days today riding around in the countryside on my bicycle, while I was listening to Olivier Messiaen's piano music inspired by bird song - turned down so low that the sounds of the countryside and the real birds were still getting to me too in between the often thinly spread piano notes.

One of the weird aspects of delving into some of the more far out 20th century classical music is the phases you often have to get through where you at first feel like shouting "The emperor has no clothes!" and "That's just random noise!" and "A cat walking across the keyboard could have played that!", and then suddenly you get to a point where you start to recognize the alien beauty of it all.

Messiaen's bird music is a case in point. At first it does sound somewhat random, but before you know it you get into it, and you start to think about the wonders of nature, and about the genetic relationship between birds and humans, and about whether bird song and human music serve some of the same functions.

After the second world war, Messiaen became an older guru for young radical composers (Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez etc) gathering every summer in the town of Darmstadt in southern Germany. While most of the time was spent discussing advanced mathematical methods for composing music, at some point Messiaen started praising bird song and arguing that birds are the greatest musicians of all. And then he started releasing music based on field research into bird song. It all seemed to fall somewhere between a dadaist prank and something artistically fairly sensible, considering that most humans find bird song quite beautiful.

Here are som youtube clips.

Messiaen discussing bird sounds:




More info here:



And some of his bird music: