Tom McGee's Blog

Ash­gate pub­lish­ing is releas­ing a series of single-work musi­cal analy­ses, and a 2007 vol­ume showed up at the school library recently. It’s an analy­sis of Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux exo­tiques, and it’s full of really well-done and well thought-out musi­cal examples.

In par­tic­u­lar I like the attached CD, which gives sample’s of Messiaen’s source mate­r­ial — record­ings of actual birds — fol­lowed by his tran­scrip­tions of the same on the piano. The CD ends with a record­ing of the pre­miere of the work at the Domaine Musi­cale on March 10, 1956.

In some cases his trans­po­si­tions of the bird songs aren’t entirely obvi­ous. As he pointed out,

Birds are able to sing in extremely high reg­is­ters that can­not be repro­duced on our instru­ments … for the same rea­sons I’m obliged to elim­i­nate any tiny inter­vals that our instru­ments can­not exe­cute. I replace those inter­vals, which are of the order of one or two micro­tones, by semi­tones, but I respect the pro­por­tions of the dif­fer­ent inter­vals, which is to say that if a few micro­tones cor­re­spond to a semi­tone, a whole tone, or a third will cor­re­spond to a real semi­tone; all are enlarged, but the pro­por­tions remain identical.…on a more human scale.

And as for his some­times inscrutable harmony,

…not a tra­di­tional chord but a com­plex of sounds intended to give the tim­bre of that note.

Here are a cou­ple exam­ples, cribbed from the CD, which I hope gives the fla­vor while remain­ing within the real of fair use.

The Bobolink

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And his transcription:

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And as real­ized in a piano cadenza in the fin­ished work:

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The rather strange-sounding prairie chicken

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As notated for piano:

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and as orchestrated:

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The Bal­ti­more Oriole

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and a less-obvious translation:

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Worked into a larger med­ley with the Cal­i­for­nia thrasher:

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The list of birds used in this one piece runs nearly two pages long!

Peter Hill and Nigel Sime­one have done a really nice job, explor­ing the back­ground and gen­e­sis of the work, dis­cussing the con­cert series and cul­tural milieux that it was a part of, and com­par­ing a half-dozen or so dif­fer­ent record­ings. And the one-to-one link­ing of the birds with their songs really makes it much clearer to the listener.