Messiaen’s fascination with birdsong went well beyond simple admiration and imitation. “It’s probable that in the artistic hierarchy,” he said, “birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.” He seemed to identify with them on a spiritual level, to see their songs as the highest sonic expression of God’s creation.

And his research went beyond simple transcription. He noted the differences between species that were seemingly born with an innate song and those that had to learn from their parents, and species that would recreate essentially the same song day to day as opposed to those that were constantly changing aspects of their songs.

Finally, Messiaen took the task of incorporating birdsong into his compositions deeply seriously:

Once the birdsong is written down, the real work begins; that is, it has to be worked into a piece, whether it be for piano, for orchestra, or whatever other instruments. To begin with, one has to have a great number of sketches in order to arrive at an ideal bird, for example, the song thrush – it’s one of the loveliest birds and songsters in all of Europe. It has a special style, which is distinguished in a somewhat magical way by tripartite repetitions: it sings its stanza three times in a row, and every time, the one differs from the others through a marked rhythm and a “timbre melody.” That means that the tone color of each note is different and the rhythms vary with each stanza. The stanza is repeated three times; on the next day there’ll be different stanzas, which will also be repeated three times, but then they’re gone once and for all, one’ll never hear them again. Therefore, one has to put together an ideal song thrush, after having heard several hundreds of them, and to know all the possibilities of stanza creation, in order to condense these to a normal solo occupying the correspondingly short space of time. Following the difficulty of rhythmic and melodic notation, which I try to execute as exactly as possible, comes a further difficulty: the reproduction of timbres. These tone colors are so extraordinary that no musical instrument can reproduce them. One needs combinations of instruments, and still more combinations or complexes of pitches. If I want to reproduce on the piano, let’s say, the song of a garden warbler or a song thrush or a nightingale, I need to find a complex of pitches for every melody note. Each note of the melody is furnished with a chord that is intended to reproduce the timbre of that note. If we have an orchestra, not only is each note provided with a chord, but every chord also has a particular function within the orchestral sound, and even the change from one instrument to another helps toward reproducing the required timbre – as you see, it’s very complicated work.

Through the magic of YouTube, here are two more videos of Monsieur Messiaen. The first shows him again in a classroom setting, explaining the derivations of aspects of some of his music. The second shows him out in the field, listening, transcribing and commenting on what he hears. Enjoy!