Birdsong in music

Edit links
This is a good article. Click here for more information.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The cuckoo's well-known call is used in music by Beethoven, Delius, Handel, Respighi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saëns, and Vivaldi. Engraving by John Gerrard Keulemans, 1873

nightingale and the cuckoo
.

Composers and musicians have made use of birdsong in their music in different ways: they can be inspired by the sounds; they can intentionally imitate birdsong in a composition; they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works, as Ottorino Respighi first did; or, like the cellist Beatrice Harrison in 1924 and more recently the jazz musician David Rothenberg, they can duet with birds.

Authors including Rothenberg have claimed that birds such as the

Eurasian treecreeper.[1]

Influence on music

Further information: Zoomusicology

birdsong has had a large though admittedly unquantifiable influence on the development of music.[2][3] Birdsong has influenced composers in several ways: they can be inspired by birdsong;[4] they can intentionally imitate bird song in a composition;[4] they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works;[5] or they can duet with birds.[6]

Imitations of birdsong

In classical 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

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]

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

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 cage birds to sing.[12]

Among the major composers to imitate birdsong are

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

skylark, and house sparrow.[4]

\relative c' {\set Staff.midiInstrument = #"oboe" \clef treble \time 3/4 \tempo "L'istesso tempo"4=92 \key aes \major \slashedGrace fes8( ees2.\mf->) | \slashedGrace ees8( d[ des c des] \slashedGrace d g[ f)] | \slashedGrace fes( ees2.->) }
Prokofiev's duck theme in Peter and the Wolf

Among twentieth-century composers,

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]

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]

O Urubu e o Gavião
The choro "O Urubu e o Gavião" ("the vulture and the hawk") from Rio de Janeiro state quotes several birdsongs.
Problems playing this file? See media help.

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]

Composer Alexander Liebermann transcribes birdsong onto sheet music and incorporates bird calls into his compositions. Species he has transcribed include the musician wren (uirapuru), the common loon, the thrush nightingale, the white bellbird, the Chinese hwamei, the Japanese bush warbler (uguisu), the common peafowl, the oropendola, the cuckoo, and the Javan pied starling, among others.[22]

In other musical traditions

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.[23][24]

Among

Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise".[27]

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.[28]

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.[29]

Use of recorded birdsong

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]

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.[30]

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.[31][32] The well-known 1968 song "Blackbird" by the Beatles includes an actual Eurasian blackbird singing in the background.[33]

The group

charity single "Let Nature Sing" in 2019 by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and reached number 18 on the UK chart.[34]

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.[35]

Other recent composers for whom recorded birdsong is a major influence include R. Murray Schafer, Michel Gonneville, Rozalie Hirs,[36] and Stephen Preston.[37] The Indian zoo-musicologist A. J. Mithra has composed music using natural bird, animal and frog sounds since 2008.[38]

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.[39]

Birdsong as music

Nightingales are admired for their unusually rich song.[40]

On 19 May 1924,

nightingale wren's song, only 6 matched the intervals used in scales.[c][48]

The pied butcherbird has an elaborate song with musical qualities.[49]

European starling is a well-studied borrower, and it inspired a composition by W. A. Mozart; see Mozart's starling.[50]

Adam Tierney and colleagues argued in a 2011 paper that the similar motor constraints on human and avian song drive these to have similar song structures, including "arch-shaped and descending melodic contours in musical phrases", long notes at the ends of phrases, and typically small differences in pitch between adjacent notes. They excluded birds like the European starling which use many buzzing or clicking noises that are inharmonic, working instead with birds with a strong pitch structure like the field sparrow

Thraupidae).[1]

Hollis Taylor argued in her 2017 book that the vocalizations of the pied butcherbird are music, rebutting musicological objections to this in detail. This was accompanied by birdsong-based "(re)compositions" based on avian transcriptions, paired with field recordings from the Australian outback.[51][52][49]

In ethnomusicology

Michael Silvers writes that multispecies ethnomusicology, especially of birds, can improve understanding of how music is produced and its purpose, and clarify what ethnomusicology is. He found some 150 ethnomusicology articles on birds. He noted that Bruno Nettl, discussing Persian classical music, stated that listening to the Nightingale was a metaphor; it never repeats its song, so listening to it signifies that that human music may not repeat either.[53][54] Laudan Nooshin uses Nettl's account of the nightingale to describe khalāqiat, musical improvisation, which however requires knowledge of radif, the traditional repertory. The Nightingale is important culturally for its song, so musicologists must study its song to understand its improvisation, just as they must study human music to understand human musical improvisation.[55]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The parrot is saying χαίρε, chaire, 'cheers', a familiar greeting in Greek.
  2. ^ In the 1924 sound clip, Harrison is heard playing "Danny Boy" on the cello while the nightingales sing.[6]
  3. ^ The Araya-Salas study did not investigate the song of any other species, nor other aspects of musicality such as those explored by Adam Tierney.[48][1]

References

  1. ^
    PMID 21876156
    .
  2. doi:10.1093/jrma/122.1.1
    .
  3. ISBN 0-521-77191-9
    .
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4081-3840-3
    .
  5. ^
    JSTOR 917915
    .
  6. ^ a b c "Beatrice Harrison, cello and nightingale duet 19 May 1924". BBC. 13 May 2014. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  7. ^ Jensen, Richard d'A. (1985). "Birdsong and the Imitation of Birdsong in the Music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance". Current Musicology (40): 50.
  8. ^ a b Clements, Andrew (11 April 2003). "Flights of Fancy". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 January 2022.
  9. ^ Kircher, Athanasius (1650). Musurgia Universalis. Vol. 3. Rome: Ludovico Grignani. folio 30.
  10. ^ Sonata violino solo representativa (Biber): Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
  11. ^ Suite in E minor, RCT 2 (Rameau): Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
  12. ^ The Bird Fancyer's Delight (John Walsh): Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
  13. ^ Sward, Jeffrey. "Cuckoo and Other Bird Sounds Used in Classical Music". Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  14. ISBN 0-8014-1813-5
    .
  15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-300-10907-8
    . Retrieved 6 January 2022.
  16. S2CID 145099439
    .
  17. ^ Franks, Rebecca (22 February 2016). "Six of the best: pieces inspired by birdsong". Classical-Music.com. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  18. ^ Tuulikki, Hanna. "Away with the Birds". Retrieved 24 September 2016.
  19. ^ Wagner, Eric. "The Piccolo and the Pocket Grouse". Orion Magazine. Retrieved 8 November 2016.
  20. ^ "Hollis Taylor and the Pied Butcherbird". ABC Radio National. 4 January 2014. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
  21. ^ a b Taylor, Hollis (21 March 2011). "Composers' Appropriation of Pied Butcherbird Song: Henry Tate's "undersong of Australia" Comes of Age". Journal of Music Research Online. 2: 21.
  22. ^ Faith Salie (30 April 2023). "Calls of the wild: A composer transcribes bird songs". CBS News. Retrieved 22 November 2023.
  23. ^ Boswall, J. (1998). "Answering the calls of nature: human mimicry of avian voice" (PDF). Transactions of Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society. 92: 10–11. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 December 2017. Retrieved 16 January 2018.
  24. ^ Smith, Jacob (2015). Eco-Sonic Media. University of California Press. p. 62.
  25. ^ Jeff Silverbush Archived 12 July 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  26. ^ Hodgson, Paul (2006). "Learning and the Evolution of Melodic Complexity in Virtuoso Jazz Improvisation" (PDF). Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  27. ^ "Charlie Yardbird Parker: Music". CMG Worldwide. Archived from the original on 16 April 2016. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  28. S2CID 142802916
    .
  29. OCLC 889167924
    .
  30. AllMusic
  31. ^ Petridis, Alexis (4 November 2005). "Kate Bush, Aerial". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  32. ISBN 978-1-4522-8302-9
    .
  33. ^ Hardigg, Nick (January 2019). "From our Executive Director: That Blackbird Song: Sometimes a Birdsong Means Much More" (PDF). Warbler. 83 (1/2). Audubon Society of Portland: 2. Retrieved 6 January 2022.
  34. ^ Masterton, James (3 May 2019). "Week Ending May 9th 2019". Chart Watch UK. Retrieved 17 June 2022.
  35. ISBN 978-3-718-65322-5
    .
  36. ^ "Curvices (2013)". Rozalie Hirs. Retrieved 24 September 2016. Special thanks to Magnus Robb for giving permission for the use of his bird song recordings.
  37. ^ "TRANS – Revista Transcultural de Música – Transcultural Music Review". Sibetrans.com. Retrieved 3 June 2014.
  38. ^ Gupta, Atula (22 February 2012). "Interview: A. J. Mithra, Making Music with Animal Calls « India's Endangered". Indiasendangered.com. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  39. ^ "Hermitage of Thrushes". Blue Cliff Records, 2020.
  40. JSTOR 449753
    .
  41. ^ McSherry, David (18 May 2014). "Nightingale & Violin Duet – 90 Years Since 1st Outside Broadcast". University of Lincoln. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  42. ^ a b Dreifus, Claudia (20 September 2005). "A conversation with David Rothenberg; Ode With a Nightingale, and a Thrush, and a Lyrebird". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  43. ^ Reich, Ronni (15 October 2010). "NJIT professor finds nothing cuckoo in serenading our feathered friends". Star Ledger. Retrieved 19 June 2011.
  44. ^ Rothenberg, David (2005). Why Birds Sing. Allen Lane.
  45. ^ Motion, Andrew (10 December 2005). "In full flight". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  46. British Broadcasting Corporation
    (BBC Four). 1 November 2010. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  47. ^ "Invertebrate Sound and Vibration 13th International Meeting" (PDF). University of Missouri. p. xiii. Retrieved 18 June 2011.
  48. ^ a b Underwood, Emily (15 August 2016). "Birdsong Not Music, After All". Science. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  49. ^ a b Taylor, Hollis (2011). "Composers' appropriation of pied butcherbird song: Henry Tate's 'undersong of Australia' comes of age". Journal of Music Research Online: 1–28.
  50. S2CID 38108417
    .
  51. ^ Reid, Chris (2017). "Is birdsong music? Ask the butcherbird". RealTime Arts.
  52. ^ Taylor, Hollis (2017). "Is Birdsong Music?". Indiana University Press. Archived from the original on 13 July 2017. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  53. ^ Nettl, Bruno (1987). The radif of Persian music ‐ studies of structure and cultural context. Champaign: Elephant and Cat.
  54. S2CID 198515340
    .
  55. JSTOR 3060710
    .
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Birdsong_in_music&oldid=1192474032"