Aviananthems The nightingale’s voice is nothing like the sweet crooning you might imagine
From Vivaldi to Messiaen, composers have often been inspired by birdsong. But accurately mimicking chirrups and tweets in music is far more difficult than it sounds, finds Tom Stewart
Consider the song of the nightingale. Clangorous, bizarre and almost psychedelic in its complexity, this small brown bird’s voice is truly remarkable but really nothing like the sweet, mellifluous crooning you might imagine if you’d never heard one for yourself. But few people these days have: the UK nightingale population, which now stands at around 5,000 pairs, has declined by half in the past three decades alone. Without a real-life reference point, the cliché of the nightingale’s superlative melodiousness seems destined to persist.
Composer Alexander Liebermann first encountered a nightingale returning home from a night out in Berlin. It would be many years before he began to incorporate birdsong in his music, but the experience stayed with him. I came across Liebermann on Instagram, where he posted a video of a drummer performing a transcription he’d made of a nightingale’s song. Untuned percussion might seem a strange choice but, Liebermann explains, it allowed him to capture the essence of this strange-sounding creature. ‘I showed it to my pre-college students at Juilliard without telling them what the piece was about and they weren’t too impressed,’ he says. ‘That all changed after I played the recording of the bird. They were amazed – suddenly they thought the drummer was the best performer they’d ever heard!’
From Vivaldi’s ‘Goldfinch’ Flute Concerto to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, there is no shortage of music that alludes to birdsong.
The fact is, however, that most birds sing in ways that sound very abstract in the context of western classical music. But the 20th century brought a blurring of sound and music that liberated composers to take a more literal approach.
Enter Olivier Messiaen, the composer now most strongly associated with birdsong. The first of Messiaen’s scores to make extensive use of birdsong was Quatuor pour la fin du temps, written in 1941 when he, unlike the free-flying creatures he was quoting, was interned in a
German prisoner-of-war camp. For the next 50 years, Messiaen transcribed by ear the songs of birds from all over the world, though the European species he was most familiar with – particularly the nightingale and blackbird – make the most frequent appearances in his music. Describing birds as ‘our little servants of immaterial joy’, he made clear both his love for their sounds and his view that they should serve his music, not the other way around.
Messiaen overcame the difficulties posed by birds’ use of intervals smaller than a semitone by zooming in, expanding the size of the intervals in relation to each other. A quartertone would
be replaced by a semitone, for example, and a semitone by a tone to preserve the relationship between the pitches. But while this technique maintains the shape of the line, it obscures its original source material.
In his birdsong pieces, Liebermann takes a different approach, using arrows to indicate that a pitch should be played slightly flatter or sharper. ‘I try to be as true as possible to nature. Sometimes you do have to change things, particularly when the bird sings higher than the range of the instrument.’ Messiaen’s music is hardly straightforward for performers, but Liebermann’s is sometimes even less so. ‘The performers I’ve worked with aren’t fazed, though; they’re just amazed at what nature can do.’
Whereas Messiaen made his transcriptions in the field, jotting down birdsong as he encountered it, Liebermann uses software to slow down recordings of birds and works out the pitches at the piano. He says the approach allows him to create a much more accurate impression of the bird, though listening again and again comes with its own challenges. ‘After you’ve heard it a hundred times you realise the main pitch is different from the one you had previously thought, or you pick up notes that you would never have detected if you played it at actual speed. Then you have to make a decision: which sounds do you notate? ’
Pianist and composer Rolf Hind has performed many of Messiaen’s birdsong pieces and played for the composer in the final years of his life. ‘His music has as a very strong personality, so often its harmony and its textures are him, not the birds,’ he says. By way of an example, he plays me the ‘Curlew’ (‘Courlis cendré’) from Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux. Large wading birds with extremely long bills, curlews don’t sing so much as emit a single note that rises plaintively over the marshes and shorelines where they spend
Perhaps the best-known birdsong of all – or at least the most imitable – is that of the cuckoo (pictured above, calling). The soft but far-carrying two-note song of the male is an iconic sound of spring, albeit one that is fading fast from the British countryside (in the United Kingdom, as elsewhere in the world, the cuckoo’s population is in freefall).
One of the earliest musical cuckoos appears in ‘Sumer is icumen in’, a 13th-century polyphonic song that celebrates the sights and sounds of summer. Cuckoos in music tend to evoke rural idylls, as in the slow Szene am Bach movement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, the first movement Langsam, schleppend of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 or Britten’s dreamy Friday Afternoons.
In nature, the interval between the two pitches of the male’s song range somewhere between a minor third and a perfect fourth. The songs of two or more birds might overlap where more than one male is competing for the same female. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the two cuckoos, placed a tritone apart, that appear in György Ligeti’s Nonsense
of 1988-93.