Eight Great Depictions of Birdsong in Music
Springtime is here! What better way to celebrate the ensuing April showers and May flowers than with music inspired by nature’s own ornithological soundtrack? Geoffrey Larson, Music Director of Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, shares eight great depictions of birdsong in music.
1. Antonio Vivaldi: Violin Concerto in E major “Spring” from The Four Seasons
Although the straightforward choice here would be Vivaldi’s Flute Concerto in D major, RV 428 “The Goldfinch”, we’re going with his ubiquitous Spring Concerto, which follows a sonnet that descibes a bucolic springtime scene. We first hear bird calls traded amongst the violins, then a babbling brook, and even a bit of rolling thunder from an approaching rainstorm.
2. Olivier Messaien: Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds)
Messaien was an influential 20th century avant-garde composer, organist, and ornithologist who directed his many students to listen to the sounds of nature when inspiration failed them. All Messaien works after 1953 contain some musical representation of birdsong, and Exotic Birds features a colorful depiction of the unique calls of 18 species from India, China, Malaysia, and the Americas, painstakingly catalogued by Messaien.
3. George Frideric Handel: Organ Concerto No.13 in F major “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale”
Even in Baroque times, an organ’s myriad of sound capabilities were used to evoke odd things, and Handel’s F major concerto is a case in point. It uses different stops to portray a dialogue between the cuckoo and the nightingale that is varying degrees of cute and hilarious.
4. Sergei Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf
Who could forget that virtuosic flute solo, the personification of our bird friend in Prokofiev’s programmatic masterpiece of 1936? The bird proves to be effective at distracting the “big, grey wolf” while Peter lassos its tail, but we’re not going to talk about what happens to the duck.
5. Robert Schumann: Bird as Prophet from Waldszenen (Forest Scenes)
Of the nine evocative pieces of Schumann’s late piano work Waldszenen, Bird as Prophet is potentially the most curious and philosophizing. The notes seem to flit about inquisitively at the outset, before the movement transitions to the noble, proselytizing chords of its middle section.
6. Maurice Ravel: Daphnis and Chloé: Sunrise
In Ravel’s own words, his ballet Daphnis and Chloé began with “no sound but the murmur of rivulets of dew trickling from the rocks. Daphnis lies still before the grotto of the nymphs… Little by little, day breaks… Bird songs are heard…” We hear the calls of seabirds soaring high overhead in the keening piccolo and E flat clarinet.
7. Béla Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3: II. Adagio religioso
As Bartók wrote to his son in 1944, “Spring has now indisputably arrived…The birds have become completely drunk with the spring and are putting on concerts the like of which I’ve never heard.” The last years of his life, spent in the United States, produced some of his most celebrated works but also involved a fascination with North American birds and their calls. Bartók’s final work, his Third Piano Concerto, contains a beautiful example of his languid “night music” style in the middle section of its second movement, a breathtaking portrayal of nature. Woodwind instruments twitter with birdsong above a shimmering bed of strings, eventually followed by bird-like figures in the piano. What feathered friend made its way into Bartók’s concerto? That would be the towhee, supposedly.
8. Ottorino Respighi: The Birds
Respighi’s love of birdsong was most obviously on display in his brief orchestral suite The Birds, where successive depictions of the dove, hen, nightingale, and cuckoo are bookended by a stately prelude and postlude. The only more apparent use of birdsong in the Italian composer’s works can be found at the end of the most peaceful movement of his Pines of Rome, The Pines of the Janiculum: Respighi requested actual recorded bird calls to be piped in, the first major use of a phonograph in orchestral performance.
