Birdsong in music

"Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu", begins an English 13th century song for multiple voices.

Composers have a variety of bird sounds to work with, from actual birdsong and calls to the appearance and movements of birds, whether real, fictional (like the phoenix) or indeed mechanical. They can choose to use these materials literally, imitating their sounds, as when Sergei Prokofiev uses an oboe for the quacking of a duck in Peter and the Wolf; it may represent the birds symbolically; or it may give a general impression, as when Vivaldi paints a picture of birds moving and singing in The Four Seasons.[4] Two especially popular birds are the nightingale and the cuckoo.[4] The nightingale's song has been used by composers including Handel, who quoted it in the aria "Sweet bird" in L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, in the "Nightingale chorus" in Solomon, and in his Organ Concerto "No. 13", known as "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale". It appears in Rameau's opera Hippolyte, Respighi's The Birds and Beethoven's Third Symphony. Nightingales can also be found in works by Glinka, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Balakirev, Grieg, Granados, Ravel, and Milhaud.[4] The cuckoo's distinctive call is used in the 13th-century English "Sumer is icumen in", probably the earliest instance of a birdcall in musical notation.[7][8] In 1650, Athanasius Kircher represented the calls of several birds in musical notation in his encyclopedic Musurgia Universalis.[9]

Songs of cockerel, chicken, cuckoo, and quail (and the speech of a parrot[lower-alpha 1]) in Athanasius Kircher's 1650 Musurgia Universalis

Heinrich Biber's c. 1669 Sonata Representiva is composed in sections labelled with the names of birds and other animals. It uses string scratching and detuned unisons to imitate the nightingale, cuckoo, cockerel and chicken.[10] Several composers have written works that portray multiple birds. Clément Janequin's 16th century Le Chant Des Oiseaux has the singers mention birds by name, and then depicts the bird's songs with nonsense syllables.[4] Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1724 Rappel des Oiseaux indicates the presence of bird calls only in its title;[11] while John Walsh's c. 1715 Bird Fancyer's Delight is a collection of short phrases labelled with bird names, which was intended to teach cagebirds to sing.[12]

Among the major composers to imitate birdsong are Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony, 2nd movement), Delius (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring), Handel (The Cuckoo and the Nightingale), Respighi (The Birds), Rimsky-Korsakov (Snow Maidens), Dvořák, Saint-Saens (Carnival of the Animals), Vivaldi (Concerto in A, The Cuckoo), and Gustav Mahler (First Symphony, where the cuckoo sings perfect fourths instead of the usual major third or minor third).[13]

Less commonly imitated are the great tit (Anton Bruckner's Fourth Symphony), the goldfinch (Vivaldi), linnet (Couperin, Haydn and Rachmaninov), robin (Peter Warlock), swallow (Dvorak and Tchaikovsky), wagtail (Benjamin Britten), and magpie (in a Mussorgsky song). Dvorak celebrated many other kinds of bird, including the stock dove, skylark, and house sparrow.[4]

— Prokofiev's duck theme in Peter and the Wolf

Among twentieth-century composers, Olivier Messiaen used birdsong extensively. His Catalogue d'oiseaux is a seven-book set of solo piano pieces based on birdsong. His orchestral piece Réveil des Oiseaux is composed almost entirely of birdsong. Many of his other compositions, including Quatuor pour la fin du temps, similarly integrate birdsong.[14] Messiaen noted that it was "especially difficult" to transcribe the timbres of birdsong for his Catalogue d'oiseaux, as birdsong includes a wide variety of harmonics; he found that he had to "resort to unusual combinations of notes", and that the piano "was the only instrument capable of speaking at the great speed and in the very high registers called for by some of the more virtuosic birds, such as the woodlark, the skylark, the garden warbler, the blackcap, the nightingale, the song thrush, the sedge warbler and the reed warbler".[15] He added that only the piano could "imitate the raucous, grinding, percussive calls of the raven... the rattling of the corncrake, the screeches of the water rail, the barking of the herring gull, the dry, imperious sound, like tapping on a stone, of the black-eared wheatear, and the sunny charm of the rock thrush".[15]

Béla Bartók likewise made extensive use of North American birdsong in his Piano Concerto No. 3.[16] Carl Nielsen used representations of bird calls in Song of the Siskin, a rarely imitated bird, The First Lark, and Springtime on Fyn, though much of the effect of birds on his work appears in his orchestral colours and time-patterns.[4] Jean Sibelius claimed that the crane's call was the "leitmotiv of my life": it is imitated by clarinets in "Scene with Cranes" in his incidental music from Kuolema.[4] Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela has a sad melody on the cor anglais.[4] The music critic Rebecca Franks, listing six of the best pieces inspired by birdsong, praises Ralph Vaughan Williams's 1914 The Lark Ascending, which begins with "A silvery solo violin line flutters and darts, reaching up ever higher above the orchestra's hushed, held chord. There's no other opening quite like it for instant atmosphere".[17] Hanna Tuulikki's Away with the Birds (2013) is composed of traditional Gaelic songs and poems which imitate birdsong; its five movements represent waders, seabirds, wildfowl, corvids, and the cuckoo.[18] Other composers who have made extensive use of birdsong in their music include Emily Doolittle[19] and Hollis Taylor.[20]

The zoomusicologist Hollis Taylor has charted the multiple techniques used by composers when appropriating the song of the Australian pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis):[21]

In compositional design, pied butcherbird vocalisations have been the source in the parameters of melody, harmony, rhythm, gesture, contour, dynamic envelope, formal structure, phrase length (and the balance of sound and silence), scales, repetition, acoustic image, programmatic intent, and poetic or psychic inspiration. Their flute-like phrases have been assigned to piano and bass, clarinet and bassoon, xylophone and violin. They have been embedded in a stuffed toy.[21]

The imitation of bird song was popular in stage performances in the United States, particularly during the era when vaudeville and Chautauqua were popular. Gramophone recordings of whistling performances accompanied by instrumental music were also popular. Prominent performers in America included Charles Crawford Gorst, Charles Kellogg, Joe Belmont, and Edward Avis; those in Britain included Alec Shaw and Percy Edwards.[22][23]

Among jazz musicians who have chosen to use sounds like birdsong are Paul Winter (Flyway) and Jeff Silverbush (Grandma Mickey).[24] The improvisatory saxophonist Charlie Parker, known as "Bird", played fast, flowing melodic lines,[25] with titles such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise".[26]

The scholar of folklore Imani Sanga identifies three ways that bird song is classified and perceived in an African context: that birds sing, are musicians, and are materials for composition. He notes that Western musicians likewise use birds in compositions. Sanga mentions that a 1982 study by Feld explained that in Kaluli music, birds are perceived as spirits that want to communicate with the living through their singing. He describes stories he grew up with in Africa, emphasizing that people made stories about birds to justify their presence around them. His perception of birds influenced his life daily, creating memories in which the common birds, ringed-neck doves and African ground hornbills, were important.[27]

The ethnographer Helena Simonett writes that the Yoreme of northwestern Mexico play animal sounds including birdcalls on a "simple cane flute" in ritual performances with singing, music, and dancing; their sacred reality thus enacted involves transforming into the animals in their enchanted world.[28]

The Italian composer Ottorino Respighi, with his Pines of Rome (1923–1924), may have been the first to compose a piece of music that calls for pre-recorded birdsong. A few years later, Respighi wrote Gli Uccelli ("The Birds"), based on Baroque pieces imitating four different birds, one to each movement of the work after its prelude:[5]

• "Prelude" (based on the music of Bernardo Pasquini)[5]
• "La colomba" ("The dove", based on the music of Jacques de Gallot)[5]
• "La gallina" ("The hen", based on the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau)[5]
• "L'usignuolo" ("The nightingale", based on the folksong "Engels Nachtegaeltje" transcribed by recorder virtuoso Jacob van Eyck)[5]
• "Il cucù" ("The cuckoo", based on the music of Pasquini)[5]

In 1972, the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote the orchestral piece Cantus Arcticus (Opus 61, dubbed Concerto for Birds and Orchestra). It makes extensive use of recorded birdsong and bird calls from the Arctic, such as the trumpeting of migrating swans.[29]

In the 1960s and 1970s, several popular music bands started to use sound effects including birdsong in their albums. For example, the English band Pink Floyd included bird sound effects in songs from their 1969 albums More and Ummagumma (for example, "Grantchester Meadows"). Similarly, the English singer Kate Bush used bird calls on her 2005 album, Aerial.[30][31] The well-known 1968 song "Blackbird" by the Beatles includes an actual Eurasian blackbird singing in the background.[32]

The group Sweet People reached the UK Top 5 in 1980 with their track "Et Les Oiseaux Chantaient (And the Birds Were Singing)", which fused birdsong with ambient music. Another track, consisting solely of a collage of different birdsong, was released as a charity single in 2019 by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as "Let Nature Sing" and reached number 18 on the UK chart.[33]

The French composer François-Bernard Mâche has been credited with the creation of zoomusicology, the study of the music of animals. His 1983 essay "Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion" includes a study of "ornitho-musicology", in which he speaks of "animal musics" and a longing to connect with nature.[34]

Other recent composers for whom recorded birdsong is a major influence include R. Murray Schafer, Michel Gonneville, Rozalie Hirs,[35] and Stephen Preston.[36] The Indian zoo-musicologist A. J. Mithra has composed music using natural bird, animal and frog sounds since 2008.[37]

Jonathan Harvey's Bird Concerto with Piano Song, premiered in 2003, makes use of the slowed-down song of American west coast birds including the orchard oriole, the indigo bunting and the golden-crowned sparrow, so as to explore their complexity and ornamentation which are otherwise too rapid for the human ear to analyse.[8]

Stephen Nachmanovitch's Hermitage of Thrushes (released 2020) consists of ten pieces featuring the songs of a wide variety of birds, some of them slowed-down, in counterpoint with violin, viola, electric violin, and viola d'amore. The composer recorded the songs and created the music during the early part of the coronavirus pandemic, all within a square mile of Virginia woodlands.[38]